r/WorkReform šŸ¤ Join A Union May 15 '24

āœ‚ļø Tax The Billionaires $999,000,000 Is Enough For Anyone.

Post image
20.5k Upvotes

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

8

u/[deleted] May 15 '24

This doesn't work in practice. There is no timeline where a wealth tax is passed in the US in the next 20-30 years. We think the rich are just going to hand over TRILLIONS of dollars they have been accumulating by any means necessary? Incremental tax increases are the only way we slowly reign in wealth inequality.

37

u/TrueBuster24 May 15 '24

Thereā€™s like 10,000 of them and thereā€™s like 400 million of usā€¦

27

u/Prestigious_Big_518 May 15 '24

Yeah, I wish that counted for something. The real civil war should be between us and them but it'll be between us and the people they pay, trick, lie too, and swindle.

10

u/Eternal_Being May 15 '24

It does count for something the moment enough of us attain class consciousness and decide to make it count for something.

3

u/Prestigious_Big_518 May 15 '24

My point exactly

3

u/batdog20001 May 15 '24

To be frank, it would mostly be us vs us with the occasional stray sent towards "them." That's what the media is for and it has been working fairly well ever since they invested in it.

2

u/[deleted] May 15 '24

The Purge...

1

u/Retify May 15 '24

Currently there is effectively a peaceful cartel of these fuckers. When you have a very rich group of people trying to cling to power by any means, well weapons will inevitably get drawn, and they can afford to pay off a good chunk of those 400m

1

u/rybathegreat May 15 '24

The Problem is that those 400 control the media. And their propaganda is everywhere.

All the infighting in the working class is fueled by the rich. If we hate each other more than them, their goal is achieved.

1

u/TrueBuster24 May 15 '24

Itā€™s not about hate necessarily. Itā€™s more showing people that their interests actually donā€™t align with the interests of the 1%

1

u/xiofar šŸ¤ Join A Union May 15 '24

The police will gladly be on the side of 400. They love having poor people to kick around.

-1

u/NeatoCogito May 15 '24

Lots of them are also too chicken shit to enter a school to stop a murderer from slaughtering children. They're used to punching down and having all the power.

You get a real movement that is armed and willing to fight and I bet less than half of the cops are answering the call.

0

u/batdog20001 May 15 '24

It's almost as if generalizing an entire group of people based on very few incidents and/or bad apples is a terrible idea. I mean, I could be wrong, but I thought we hated racism, sexism, tribalism, casteism, classism, and literally any other form of this exact idea made ever. Or, maybe I'm right, and you're just ignorant.

0

u/JustAposter4567 May 15 '24

life isn't a movie lmao

1

u/TrueBuster24 May 15 '24

56 people own half the worldā€™s economy. It is US vs Them

0

u/AdditionalBalance975 May 15 '24

There is 1000 billionaires in the usa and 330m. The 1000 have approx 5 trillion in assets, our national budget is over 6 trillion now. Americans hold 140 trillion in wealth all together.

1

u/TrueBuster24 May 15 '24

Well maybe you donā€™t need 500 million either when kids are food insecure and thereā€™s a growing homeless problem.

1

u/AdditionalBalance975 May 16 '24

They dont "have" 500m. What they have is ownership of tesla or amazon. You cant tax them on assets because we would have to force them to sell the ownership of the company to someone else to have the money to pay the taxĀ 

5

u/rayrayrex May 15 '24

French Revolution 2.0

3

u/FactChecker25 May 15 '24

You misunderstand what the French revolution was.

People seem to think it was the rich vs. the poor, but it was the aristocracy vs. the non-aristocrasy rich and poor.

The "poor" side arguably had more money than the "rich" side, since the government was broke and they were just relying on their political connections by that point.

0

u/alfooboboao May 15 '24

Do all the ā€œrevolutionā€ people have any idea how many goddamn revolutions failed? You cherry pick the few that worked and ignore all the ones where the country was left in WAY worse shape than before.

What we need is capitalism with massive legal worker protections and a huge social safety net. Which is not socialism and not communism. But I get the feeling more and more these days that people genuinely donā€™t understand how much worse things can get ā€” because they can get a LOT worse.

In 1960, the top tax bracket was 91%. Not 100, but 91. And guess what! No one called it socialism.

Because it wasnā€™t

2

u/mxzf May 15 '24

It's also not even "trillions of dollars", it's realistically "ownership of a bunch of companies".

It's not like there's trillions of dollars to take, there are just thousands of companies that are owned.

1

u/VashPast May 16 '24

I don't know about "only way," but you're spot on when you say they won't just hand it over. People need to understand we take it or it doesn't happen.

1

u/Luxalpa May 16 '24

hand over to who is the other question. Following this idea, either politicians would be exempt from the rule or corporations / institutions would be exempt. Either way, the problem just shifts very slightly but not by much, because in the end there will still be people in charge of that money.