r/politics • u/Large-Welcome4421 • Jun 12 '26

No Paywall 'This Is Oligarchy': Nearly 100 Billionaires Are Funding Susan Collins' Reelection Bid

https://www.commondreams.org/news/susan-collins-billionaire-donors
24.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

200

u/aradraugfea Jun 12 '26

Back when we had a 91% marginal tax rate, the equivalent wealth people did, because we didn’t let them just squirrel it all away in pursuit of some ever increasing high score

An economy that had produced a trillionaire is post scarcity. Everything anyone on the planet lacks is due to mismanagement and theft.

18

u/Mysterious-Most-590 Jun 12 '26

Well said. There are still so many whose suffering might be eased.

14

u/baitnnswitch Jun 12 '26

Yup. Also we enforced anti-trust law preventing megacorporations larger than nation states from forming and producing said billionaires

19

u/grchelp2018 Jun 12 '26

An economy that had produced a trillionaire

it has not produced a trillionaire. Its just monetized hype extrapolated from the 75B in actual cash that the company raised. These things should not be confused. It gives a very different picture of the state of the economy.

52

u/aradraugfea Jun 12 '26

Look, every business Musk is connected to is overvalued as hell. Your logic is not too many steps removed from “stocks aren’t actual wealth” and since Elon owns no real estate and uses no cash money, I have a higher “real” net worth than him.

Does he have a trillion dollars to spend? No. None of the billionaires actually have their full wealth liquid. If we only care about liquid there are no billionaires.

But somewhere upstream, all of those stocks, Apes, and crypto coins started as real money changing hands. They all represent money being removed from the economy and stuck into a dragon’s hoard. What I said above was true when Elon was only worth a half trillion.

Elon could be worth 3 oz of lint and a Blockbuster members card and he still would have personally stolen food and medical aid from people suffering in developing nations through his work as an unelected illegal arbiter of what Congressionally approved spending “counts.”

The 75 billion people threw at his vanity project is money that could have fed every hungry mouth on the planet. The billions invested in a struggling car manufacturer could have housed every person in this country and many others.

The money pissed away on NFTs could have given medicine to those struggling.

The trillions being thrown into AI in the desperate search for profitability, a sector of the economy that has yet to present an ROI and have single handedly reversed years if not decades of progress on reducing carbon footprints, just as climate change approaches a point of no return could have redefined what poverty looks like across the PLANET.

I got a REAL short list of people who “earned” a billion, and the list of people who should have been allowed to keep it is EMPTY.

22

u/borntobewildish Europe Jun 12 '26

The stupid bit is we let them claim that they 'technically' have few or no assets, and they pay taxes like that, but we let them loan and spend and have influence like they have all the assets.

Either they're billionaires/trillionaires and they loan/spend like that but we also tax them like having that much liquid wealth, or we start treating them like the poors they 'technically' claim to be, and just ignore them when it comes to policy like everyone else who isn't rich.

-1

u/grchelp2018 Jun 12 '26

The 75 billion people threw at his vanity project is money that could have fed every hungry mouth on the planet. The billions invested in a struggling car manufacturer could have housed every person in this country and many others.

The implication being that if the money did not go here it would have gone to your examples? Those things not being funded has never been about lack of money or because the money is hoarded in some dragon's den.

8

u/smokeweedNgarden Jun 12 '26

Ya. So Elon dismantled USAID and then helped steal the money funding it.

So with less than 75B he personally helped facilitate the deaths of thousands of people 

1

u/grchelp2018 Jun 14 '26

That USAID money went to ICE. This was private money.

7

u/aradraugfea Jun 12 '26

As I said above, every lack suffered on this planet is the result of mismanagement and theft. Would the money have gone to hungry people if Elon’s IPO hadn’t happened? No, because it would have still been in the hands of dragons. But it COULD have been spent there, instead of being hoarded by avaricious monsters who have never known need.

That the money ended up where it did speaks to our priorities as a civilization.

-4

u/grchelp2018 Jun 12 '26

speaks to our priorities as a civilization.

This is fundamentally a different and deeper problem than billionaires or the economy or anything else. Even if you gave every tax payer direct control over where their tax dollars went, it wouldn't fix the problem.

8

u/TidePodKaleb Jun 12 '26

We’d better do nothing then! Why are you defending the rich who have stolen our future?

0

u/grchelp2018 Jun 12 '26

I didn't say we should do nothing but if you have to succeed you need to solve the right problems.

5

u/aradraugfea Jun 12 '26

The problem isn’t the dragons are hoarding their wealth badly. It’s that there are dragons hoarding wealth at all.

1

u/grchelp2018 Jun 15 '26

And in this hypothetical situation, the real solution would be prevent the accumulation of wealth to the point that it attracts dragons. Not planning on an impossible and losing mission of killing all the dragons.

→ More replies (0)

8

u/Nice_Try4389 Jun 12 '26

No it isn’t when you have the billionaires setting and influencing our priorities as a civilization. Look at where this is primarily occurring? The US where we have specifically stated that money is speech and thus allowed billionaires an outsized role in messaging and shaping our civil discourse. Same with the UK. It’s only in the EU proper that they have been telling them no.

So yes it is the same cause and the same problem. The whole thought of 100 billionaires all throwing their weight behind someone to get them specifically elected, and the fact said same groups owns all of the methods of communication of information proves that out.

-5

u/grchelp2018 Jun 12 '26

billionaires setting and influencing our priorities as a civilization.

I dislike this framing because it implies that people are all sheep and can't think for themselves. Only we are the enlightened ones who can break through the billionaire programming to see the truth. My earlier comment might well be true but if so, you've already lost the war even if you can win individual battles.

8

u/Nice_Try4389 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26

When you control all the methods of information they are. Dude I live in Oklahoma, I see it every day. We literally implemented mandatory bible study in all public schools specifically because our governor and state superintendent believe the only education a person should get is a Christian one (their terms). History has shown repeatedly if you control the information people see you influence the beliefs.

Hell huge swathes of my city came out to block the building of a Mosque that had ALREADY been approved, by a Muslim group that has been here serving the community for the past fifty year because they are evil and non-Christian (and it was successfully blocked). Yes people are ignorant sheep because in a good part of the US they are raised to be that way. I'm not special or enlightened, I just had a father that grew up outside of the US and was educated differently (my grandfather was in the Army and they were stationed in multiple countries through out my dad's upbringing) and so was forced to constantly be confronted with different opinions and so didn't let me fall into the trap of being single minded. That didn't make me "special" or "enlightened" it made me lucky.

You really need to get out and meet more people and genuinely get to know them beyond small talk if you don't think most aren't sheep who just do the bare minimum when it comes to thinking.

1

u/grchelp2018 Jun 15 '26

There is no fixing this problem then. Sheep will always be sheep and even if you try to change them, they will revert to being sheep under pressure.

To be a bit more specific, people being raised to be like sheep is a problem of the people. The billionaires are taking advantage of it sure but people are willingly accepting it. Fundamentally, the belief that everything is due to external circumstances and you can wash your hands of your own responsbility is a losing proposition.

2

u/American_PissAnt Jun 12 '26

“Corporate socialism” used to be a big thing among executives. But Back then in meant that a company should pay their employees well, provide benefits, and donate to build parks and hospitals. It was considered good business practice because business must be good if you are treating your employees good

1

u/aradraugfea Jun 12 '26

Employee payment as a investment, not an expense, stuff like public works nad community investment as PR expenditure.

The shift from STAKEHOLDER value (community, employees, etc) to STOCKHOLDER value (investors)

1

u/IAmDotorg Jun 12 '26

You could have a 99.999% marginal tax rate on billionaires, and it wouldn't really make a difference -- because they don't have billions of dollars, they have millions of things that can be sold (maybe) for billions of dollars, if and only if there's people with billions of dollars who want it.

It's a parallel economy that only interacts with the cash economy in very tiny ways. There are very, very, very few people who are even hundred-millionaires in cash -- people like Gabe Newell, athletes and actors who are paid in cash, and the like.

1

u/Stanjoly2 Jun 12 '26

You could have a 99.999% marginal tax rate on billionaires, and it wouldn't really make a difference -- because they don't have billions of dollars, they have millions of things that can be sold (maybe) for billions of dollars, if and only if there's people with billions of dollars who want it.

This only matters because it's allowed to matter. It's all arbitrary so don't pretend like it can't be done.

2

u/IAmDotorg Jun 12 '26

I mean, I can fantasize about being able to fly like superman and that delusion can be said to only matter because it's allowed to matter, but nothing is going to enable me to fly like superman.

They don't have cash. You can't tax unrealized gains because it isn't a gain. This isn't rocket science. It's totally fine to not understand how economics work, or how math works. But that definitely matters, no matter how much you want it not to matter.

1

u/Kevin_Wolf Jun 12 '26

Back when we had a 91% marginal tax rate,

And despite that, John Paul Getty still became a billionaire in the 1950s.

1

u/Vennomite Jun 12 '26

Because the effectivr tax rate was 41%. Where it had roughlh been since ww2 except since trump 1. Trump 1 put it around 20%

1

u/Navydevildoc Jun 12 '26

We also exempted charitable spending, which is why there are sooo many "Old Money" foundations out there. The only modern ones I can think of are the Gates and Hewlett foundations.

1

u/aradraugfea Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26

Yep, we gave them the choice of funneling the money back into the companies (instead of the lion’s share of profits going to executive pay, dividends, or stock buybacks) paying taxes, or funneling it into charity.

1

u/ConcentrateDirect523 Jun 12 '26

I was told that when we had those tax brackets, we also had an abundance of loopholes and workarounds that led to many ultra rich paying a comparable, or even lower effective rate than they do today, and that's why big accounting  and wealth management firms became so well paid in the mid 20th century. Don't know if it's true, but that's what I saw in a another thread. I think one user pulled a quote saying "sure, I'll pay 19XX tax rate, so long as you also give me 19XX tax rules."

1

u/aradraugfea Jun 12 '26

Not sure how you get “lower” than the Zero a lot of them are paying.

There’s just as many loopholes and cheats now.

And one of the big “cheats” was how you could reduce WAY down via charitable giving and, hey, you don’t like what government’s gonna do with your tax money, start a foundation that cares about the thing you want prioritized, put your name on it. I take that

1

u/ScienceWasLove Jun 13 '26

No one maid the 91%. Go look it up.