A one-time 5% wealth tax would bring Silicon Valley’s billionaires’ wealth back to where it was just 31 days ago, on September 7.
When it was “just” 178% higher than on January 1, 2023.
They’d rather let 3 million people lose their health insurance than let that happen.
Graph here: https://cabillionairetracker.org/
Rather than paying their fair share of taxes, Sergey Brin, Pether Thiel, and Patrick Collison prefer to spend tens of millions to manipulate the vote.
Stupefying levels of greed and lack of civil-mindedness.
$45 million in a week: California’s wealthy aren’t holding back to try to stop ‘billionaire tax’
All credits to Gabriel Zucman
How about we make it an even 50%.
They freak out about this because their wealth is in holdings and isn’t liquid. They leverage debt and play these games to avoid paying their share the freeloading welfare queens that they are
This is probably more painful than “it’s just 5%.” And I love that for them
It also sets a precedent - why not an annual 5% tax? why not 50%?
That’s why they’re afraid of it. It’s not just the liquidity, because 5% they can easily liquidate without affecting any of their hedged-leveraged debt coverage.
yeah, I think it’s more about power than money
Money is more about power than money once you’re over ten mil
totally
Yeah we should tax billionaires until they become “only” millonaires
They freak out about this because their wealth is in holdings and isn’t liquid.
This is a legitimate problem. Forcing a primary shareholder to sell their shares devalues the shares of workers holding them in retirement accounts. Forcing them to liquidate their shares is not at all feasible.
Which is why this tax should never be payable in dollars. It should be paid directly in shares. It doesn’t have to be converted to cash first; the shares themselves go straight to the IRS.
The confiscated shares can be liquidated slowly over time. Every time 1000 shares are traded on the free market, the IRS gets to offer one of its taxed shares. The influence on the market price of the shares is minimized. If the shares become worthless, they just sit on the IRS books, collecting dust forever.
I’d only tax securities - investment holdings. Stocks, bonds, other fungible, intangible, financial assets. I want them spending their money on tangible products and personal services (as opposed to financial services) that are ultimately produced by workers. I want them pushing their money back into rotation, not setting up dollar farms to collect it from everything that moves.
But, if we want to go after general wealth, we can also do the same thing for deeded property or titled property. They don’t have to sell the land or the car/boat/plane; we just put a tax lien on it now, and collect later.
I like it, but I would prefer if the government kept the share of the companies, transitioning the companies into government run entities over time, thereby having the production be owned by the people.
Great message, but that graph is horrible…
The Y axis starts at zero at least…
But yeah, not having consistent dots on the X axis fucks it up.
They should have started with Dec 2025 when they had more frequent data and left the rest off.
That’s why it looks so off. Whoever made it was just trying to do too much, but as far as graphs that get posted on social media, sadly this is a pretty good one.
It’s a very low bar
I’m confused. It’s not perfect, but it does have consistent dots for the X axis, every year.
And yeah, they could have started with Dec 2025 and left the rest off… but part of the point of the graph is showing how billionaires have almost tripled their wealth since 2022, at the expense of everyone else.
but it does have consistent dots for the X axis, every year.
I’m not sure what you mean by “consistent”…
It’s one a year up to dec 2025, then after that do you notice how the lines goes up and down super fast?
That’s because there’s a shit ton more dots there, even if they’re not large enough to see, any change in slope means there’s a new data point.
Doing one a year and then one a week is not consistent.
but part of the point of the graph is showing how billionaires have almost tripled their wealth since 2022, at the expense of everyone else.
Right…
The person who made it likely just crammed two different graphs (or underlaying datasets) together, and most likely had a chatbot do it for them.
That’s actually why I blocked the “data is beautiful” community here, it was just people who know nothing of statistics jamming two graphs together like that accomplishes anything except making the information harder to read, which making the information easier to read is the literal purpose of graphs.
Most people never take even a single stats class, and just don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.
Edit:
I’m also confused, why did you downvote me and ask me to explain?
It makes it look like you just want to argue instead of learn. I’m happy to help, but I really don’t care what you learn, if you just want to argue find someone else.
I would rather have 1000 millionaires than 1 billionaire
It’s like a disease - dragon fever.
Is that what Charlie Sheen had?
Nah that was tiger blood
Shareholder primacy is fundementally broken. We must tie ownership back to the direct stakeholder of each firm. Shareholders dont care about goods, services, or utilies; they only care about line go up.
What the heck is a stakeholder??
Direct ownership of the means of production and not thru proxy like with controlling shares. In other words if you are not the direct owner you cant own the company.
People who are cool with not having the maximum amount of money possible don’t end up billionaires
In our next lives we should all strive to make sure THAT NO ONE HUMAN HOLDS THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.
I posted this comment on another topic but it’s relevant here too:
The sick part is that what is being asked is actually so inconsequential to the billionaires that not only will their line still go up, if we change nothing else but this, even wealth inequality itself will still keep going up, it will just go up at a slightly less supersonic speed. They don’t even care about the amount of money we’re asking for, they care about the precedent that if we can take this from them, what’s stopping us from taking everything from them.
That’s what they’re actually scared of. That’s why they resist this so hard. That’s why they don’t bend. They think that once the people slip out of their stranglehold they will get a taste of billionaire blood and they will like it.
And they might be right.
It’s not the money, it’s control of their companies. To pay the tax they have to sell stock which reduces control. They, rightly I think, also believe it’s a one time tax until the next time the tax gets passed. Maybe this a good thing but it should also be addressed by those pushing the wealth tax…
Would much rather make their worst nightmares come true. Anything less feels like leaving money on the table, ya know?
I noticed that in 2024, when Bernie was pushing the wealth tax, billionaires funneled a lot of money toward Trump. “Worst nightmares” is a double edged sword…
They’re gonna destroy our world, and we’re just going to tut-tut each other while they do it.
The tax rate on billionaires might be so important that it requires everyone’s attention every year until the problem is solved.
I like an echo chamber dogpile as much as the next guy. But doesn’t prop40 also use language that can be taken advantage of? Like to expand this tax to other areas?
Even a 2% ANNUAL wealth tax would not take anything away from them, it would just make their wealth grow SLIGHTLY SLOWER.
They remember (or have schools that teach) the 90+% wealth tax back when accountants hadn’t hidden it all. You know, in the 1950s and before ‘boomer golden age’, which, along with strong unions, made the middle class happen. and what shall never again happen if the parasite class can help it.
That wasn’t a wealth tax though? That was an income tax and only on the top bracket. Very, very different things.
There’s a pretty straightforward solution to that, as well: tax unrealized capital gains as income the moment they’re used as collateral. If you can spend it, it’s income, you fucking cheaters.
Sure, simpler times back when accountants hadn’t hidden it all
And before the laws hadn’t been changed to make it so easy to hide it all
Its way cheaper for them to buy the politicians, and these people will never miss an opportunity to optimize the number in their bank account. The system won’t change without some serious turbulence.
Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
I do not agree with the 2. sentence.
Why?
You don’t become a billionaire with a intact moral code. Those sort of people must feel the consequences of their wrong doings or it escalates always further.
Removing their wealth isn’t the end goal, I see it as a necessary first step that can inform further corrections should they be necessary.
Not wealth, public service, cleaning up their messes themselves and jail time.
They’re additive, not mutually exclusive.
5% off the top!
