this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Lefty Memes
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
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0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
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as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
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That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
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The only dangerous minority is the rich.
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We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
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Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
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(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
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Wealth is not money. There's nothing to tax.
This is a very true statement.
Stocks won't get taxed unless they get actioned on. That is where the majority of their preceeded wealth is.
The US government is sovereign, it can very much either take ownership of the stock, or estimate its value and construct a loan that the company owners needs to pay back because they owe this tax. Or probably 100s of more clever solutions as well.
It can definitely decide to tax wealth if it wanted to, it could also break up large companies to at least spread the wealth of these institutions wider. It mostly just doesn't "want" to.
This argument is so unnecessary defeatist pretending the most militarised and police ridden country in the world has no power to enforce laws it could write.
Opposite to that notion I think if the US had any interest in fairness in taxation, especially on a more global scale, it could easily get all the common tax havens/financial secrecy jurisdictions, to fold to essentially whatever demands if has. But again it seems like the US government strangely doesn't really want that either.
Which is still the central issue the US government is more captured by the billionaire class than a lot of people like to think they are, and it's never just the dem or just the reps, it's large portions of both parties that are essentially captured in this way, or just fall into it because preserving the status quo is easy.
It's also real money, otherwise Musk couldn't have bought Twitter for $44 billion. He sure didn't have that amount on his bank account but he still bought it all the same, thus giving him a substantial soft power through information.
True, but that would mean to tax billionaires by taking money from their lenders?
I don't know, it just feels very convenient that wealth is considered money whenever is useful to the rich, and turns back into "wealth" a second later.
What I find unacceptable is the double standard. I'll keep the Musk example: a few banks and a few private companies made loans (which need to be reimbursed with real money) for Musk buying Twitter. A part of the exchange money came from the value of his own shares of Twitter (deducted from the 44b). Before that he has sold lots of Tesla shares which apparently gave him $20b in cash
Why do we accept that this not-money money can be turned into real money whenever convenient, but cannot be taxed the rest of the time?
There's a problem with how we accept to think of financial money. If it can't be taxed, then out shouldn't be defined as being an equivalent of real-economy money. Or maybe it should be evaluated in a more realistic way?
Not saying I have easy answers, but there's clearly a problem IMO.
Details of how they go about paying it is not really any of my business as long as it gets paid.
Elon would have triggered a taxable event using his wealth to buy Twitter.
Yes it is.
I think you meant to say “wealth is not income”. That’s the whole point of it being a “wealth tax”. That said, there’s pretty sound law arguing that wealth taxes are unconstitutional. There are far better ways to effect similar change, such as capital gains tax reform, and closing transfer tax exemption loopholes.