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Tax.
Tax them like there is no tomorrow.
Billionaires should simply not exist. Put a cap on total net worth and if you pass that, income tax goes to 100. If your networth goes up anyway because of stocks or whatever, tax that too. Tax stocks, homes, boats, etc.
Enormous wealth should be like the speed of light. The closer you get there, the heavier it becomes to stay there, you need to spend more and more energy to get less and less higher.
This should not be a crazy idea.
Billionaires have such a heavy say in our government that it will never go that way unless it's forced.
gilded age
Reforming capitalism will only delay end stage, not prevent it.
Imagine getting something like the early 20th century labor movement going these days. Seems impossible right? We we did do it once and guess what, we are back again. What was the point of spilling all that blood sweat and tears if we just go right back to where we started? We wasted those lives lost and ruined because we thought capitalism could be salvaged. It is not salvageable.
Partially thanks to media like you, squints eyes fortune.com...
We have been in a new gilded age since the end of the 90s...
Very simply. Raise their taxes.
Less simply. Remove the cap on social security tax. Tax long term capital gains beyond a certain amount as regular income. Put the top rate income tax closer to 90%. Fix the god damn estate tax situation. Why on god's green earth do the children of Sam Walton occupy so much space on the Forbes 400.
Or we could abolish the employer-employee contract and mandate that all firms be worker coops, so that no one could appropriate the positive and negative fruits of other people's labor
France will review your company's ledger if you want to fire people en masse. If you can afford to keep them you can't fire them
I mean, I guess, but why complicate this stuff. We already have the systems and administration to do taxes. We could break up monopolies and enforce the laws we already have.
I'd keep it real real simple for folks. We should stop letting corporations and their owner class privatize the gains and stick the rest of society with the losses. Take the 2008 fiasco, if we are bailing out a bunch of companies we should be bailing out a bunch of home owners.
Still doesn't feel good to get fired and get an unemployment check with all sort of conditions attached, just because some company decided to clean up operations after hiring way too much.
Non sequitur to my point, but to what you wrote... I would support that any bailouts come with the condition that 50%+ of the share capital is given to a Sovereign Fund. There should be no corporate welfare... Only investment opportunities.
Why complicate the onion by adding more layers? Why do we want a sovereign fund? Your solution just seems like another way to funnel more money to US corporations. We already let them switch to defined contribution 401k retirement funds. More money to companies public or private is just more money empowering little corporate fiefdoms.
We should simply tax these corporations and their owner class at a much higher rate. Take that money and fund social programs. For example, it is completely idiotic to have healthcare tied to employment and subsidizing it through the gov't.
If we removed corporate welfare from our system it would be really bad until something else took its place. We subsidize our entire food production system, removing that would drive up the cost of food. The Jones Act subsidizes our shipping industry. The price of drugs would also probably sky rocket the second you remove the public funding that goes into the early stage research.
And what happens to our military industrial complex when you remove corporate welfare?
The problem is we have Bezos playing rocket man and newspaper baron to the tune of three billion dollars a year. We have Musk fucking with our elections to the tune of some hundred million dollars a month. They have this money because we don't tax them. Tax that money away and they won't be fucking with shit.
We have to scare the rich. Organize, agitate, break shit, etc. They have been too successful at dividing us along arbitrary lines. No war but class war. Fight back.
Hence the rising fascism. The corporate class knows the only way to get the common people to continue to support them is through scaremongering about imagined threats.
I wish it was a Gilded Age. At least Rockefeller and Vanderbilt had some fucking taste.
All of this will happen before, and all of it will happen again. Except uglier and dumber.
There's like 600k people dying of cancer at any given time, and seperately theres only like 800 billionaires who are probably somewhat directly responsible for their cancer and lack of access to medical care. If I had a bucket list bc I was dying of cancer, I know what would be on it.
Can we continue with the trend and start having unions "talk" to the CEOs? 👀
Why don't they notice they're killing us all?
They definitely notice, why do you think they’re pushing the birth rate and great replacement theory BS so damn hard? They want everyone young, broke and uneducated so they can keep the grift going.
They're sociopaths. They don't care about us.
You think it's that they don't notice, and not that that notice, but don't care?
They'd care because if the masses are too poor to afford their products, that's actually a threat to their power.
They would, then, but that is not now. Right now they are concerned with us not having enough children, because capitalism requires population growth, and, as places become richer, they have fewer children. The most industrialized places are in decline, outside of immigration. So this is where you see the consternation of the rich and powerful.
....So pay us so we can afford kids?
Doesn't work, places have tried that. The collection of conditions are not conducive to it, for most people. That's why it is getting very "handmaid's tale" in rhetoric from a lot of the rich and powerful.
I'm ready to eat the rich and sacrifice myself for the next generation, but I'm not a leader, I'm good at building scaffolds though. I wish we had a François Hanriot or a John Brown
Anyone who owns a house is a millionaire.
So we've got a tiny number of billionaires in charge.
An ever dwindling number of millionaires desperately holding onto their small privilege
An ever growing number of working poor who need two paychecks to live
Sounds like Tsarist Russia, with no single royal family to execute.
Anyone? There are lots of houses worth less than $1,000,000. Sure, by the time a mortgage is paid off and you fully own the house yourself a person should also have some savings, but I certainly wouldn't expect that to be universal.
My house is now worth a bit over $350,000. And although that is less then $1,000,000 I bought it at $185,000 (and had to use every penny saved to get a down payment) just a decade ago. Even in my small rural town I currently could not afford to buy the house I live in, I doubt this will improve in time.
I might not be a millionaire, but I would guess I am now in a smaller class of people that owns where they sleep. And if the market keeps doing whats its doing I might be a millionaire in time (this is not overall a good thing).
Anyone who owns a house is a millionaire.
So we’ve got a tiny number of billionaires in charge.
An ever dwindling number of millionaires desperately holding onto their small privilege
I mean this simply cannot be true.
If everyone who owns a house is a millionaire, then in order for the "number of millionaires" to be "ever dwindling" we would need not only a housing shortage, but an eroding quantity of housing or a drastic drop in home ownership rates. Neither is happening. The home ownership rate in 2024 is 65.8% according to this site: https://www.simplyinsurance.com/how-many-homeowners-in-the-us/ which puts us at a much improved rate of ownership from when the housing crash happened in 2008, when we were running somewhere in the low 60s.
So not everyone who owns a house is a millionaire, or millionaires numbers aren't dwindling. It simply cannot be the case that what you're saying here is all true.