The prospect of still being billionaires, but with less billions, was just too much to handle
Exactly why they need to be taxed more.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist to begin with and don’t assume tax money are used by governments for good.
I mean, you don’t become a billionaire by giving money away.
Uh, yeah you do. What do you think charities are for? Helping people?
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Financial obesity is literally capitalism. That’s the disease. Period.
Financial obesity is a large part of capitalism, but it’s by no means exclusive to it. Replacing capitalism with anything that tolerates obscene wealth accumulation would be a categorical failure.
I really like that as a term, never come across it before.
Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.
Oh well, guess we’re fucked.
BUT THAT WOULD BE COMMUNISM!!1!
Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.
Yes, some form of “giving pledge” where the amount was standardized and there was no option to back out. Radical thinking here.
Lol… While gates foundation does do some decent work. Let’s be real it is astroturf operation inherently
Also, Warren already back out.
So this is just a shill op for these “good” parasites.
Read between the lines folks, these people are your enemies
To people like this, the number in their bank account is like a scoreboard. They didn’t get that high up the leaderboard purely by accident.
Anyone who thinks that kind of person is just going to give up their place on the scoreboard is either incredibly naïve or gullible.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some people to there who may have some semblance of empathy, but as seen by the title, that’s about 1 in 25.
They also don’t do good things out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it to win social points so that they don’t get gunned down in the middle of a NYC street.
To people like this, the number in their bank account is like a scoreboard.
It’s not just that.
Besides the humanitarian work that the gates foundation does do “voluntarily”, money is agency, it is power.
There is very little argument and reason to believe that “people” and “countries” would actually be more responsible in spending it.
If there was a big, motivated, carefully planned social movement that had a solid idea and spending plan, things would be different. And such a group could also force them to give up that money to spend it on these things. But such a movement doesn’t exist.
As it stands, the idea that they would voluntarily give up money is dumb. To do what? Feed the corruption and nepo network in their country, that then will benefit only the people that are just like them, but less rich? That makes no sense.
It has to come from public pressure and equal wealth taxes.
They didn’t get that high up the leaderboard purely by accident.
You also don’t stay up there in the leaderboard by accident
This doesn’t make much sense to me.
Sure. Gates is not a “nice” person. The business practices involved in becoming a billionaire require him to be a vile human being. Granted.
That said, he has given up his place on the leaderboard. He has become dramatically less wealthy as a result of his philanthropic work.
What are you claiming is Gates’ motivation here? Not getting murdered? Come on. There are much more practical, reliable, and cheaper means to achieve that.
I assume that tax avoidance is also a factor.
You wouldn’t expect these clowns to pay taxes that’s what w2 slaves are for. In fact, the treasury should be paying them. Just look at the national debt since 1980s then look at how fat these swine got.
Crux of the everything crisis we got on our hands.
But hey the good parasites paid 15k for a fluf piece, put on a suit and say thank you!
Let’s not forget
lobbyingbribery. And since said political influence is ostensibly being bought for the sake of charity, nobody would even blink.Just my theory, mind you. But every one of these charitable foundations is primarily done for tax avoidance. No question. Well that is every one of these foundations except for the one set up by Mr President Tiny Dick. He just can’t resist the temptation of embezzlement. I mean seriously, he bankrupted THREE casinos, and had a judge not just dissolve his foundation, but also bar him from running one of these so-called charitable foundations ever again.
I don’t even want to know how you can fuck up that egregiously. One of those things where you have to wonder if successfully finding understanding of how it happened is going to hopelessly corrupt your own soul for all of eternity.
What taxes?
It always has been (points gun)
Why would you waste $10 to save $5 in tax?
It’s the difference between spending money to have your will enacted, and having your money taken by the people, for use of the commons.
The latter is a very dangerous precedent to set. You don’t want the people feeling like they can have their will enacted.
I can’t say how the tax avoidance strategies of the super-rich work in practice, but in any case, their feigned philanthropy is a key part of it.
It’s not.
This is a common misconception based on meme level reasoning.
I don’t know how this works but I know I don’t like billionaires.
You need to be more specific. I’m not going to waste my time refuting your statement because I can’t even begin to imagine how you came up with that.
That makes two of us I guess.
You said that you don’t know how it works, I can’t really respond to that.
You said that philanthropy is not misused to avoid taxes—that is definitely wrong, but if you want to believe it, please do.
The only good billionaire is a dead billionaire whose stolen wealth has been returned to the people
also Gates have accused of vaccine colonialism by african countries, hes not doing out of his own heart, its most likely his way of laundering money, plus to distance himself from epstein.
This doesn’t make any sense.
He’s been doing this since long before Epstein was arrested.
He also doesn’t need to launder money because he’s already paid tax on all his money. He’s becoming demonstrably, significantly less wealthy in the course of distributing vaccines. If he were laundering money he would be becoming more wealthy.
On an unrelated note, Bill Gates is in the epstein list.
And the reason Melinda divorced him.
Serious or joke?
We can only speculate, but his infidelity with staffers was known, and him being on the Epstein list may have been the final straw.
A decent person would have gone to the press with it, but she’s wealthy so she didn’t.
Because it would reflect poor on her, too. It’s like when people don’t report being victims of sexual assault, because they know people will look at them differently forever, doesn’t even have to be that extreme, just imagine being a normal family in a normal neighborhood where everybody knows everyone for decades, and then you find out your husband has a fling with a younger woman. It’s just embarrassing, you know?
You and me and all of us lie all the time about way less embarrassing things, because we don’t want to be seen a certain way, as victims, as having been duped or gullible or even the butt of a joke.
Imagine on that level, where you are married to one of the richest men in the world, and your rollerdex contains thousands of names to some of the most powerful people on the planet, and you “go to the press with it”.
It would change your life forever, the scandal would stain every aspect of your life F O R E V E R.
And he didn’t donate shit without an economic incentive, it’s all a tax writeoff, it’s all a scam. Even that shit he did pumping money into AIDS research as “charity” went into companies where he held stake himself. It’s so fucking vile.
guillotine.jpg
tbh I’m surprised that there are 9 who did
as a reward we should leave them for last
The fact that there are 256 billionaires is an absolute failure of our society.
256 billionaires that we know of!
Soon to be a few trillionaires and a thousand billionaires
If there were 3 billion would that be a failure?
Meh. I actually don’t think its a good idea. You just draw power away from the best of a segment empowering the biggest assholes. Taxes should be progressive and include all sources of income not just wages and the tax brackets should go all the way up to the highest income level. So there should be a level for over 100 billion and another for over 10 billion and over 1 billion and so on. Five figure income should be zero.
Taxes should be progressive
Yeah ofc. Why do you think the billionaires came up with this BS plan instead?
I agree with you and your proposal with the exception of 5 figure income having no income tax. At a billion level it might not be so important the difference between one or two billion. But on the 5 digits salaries, the difference of someone making 30k or someone making 80k is definitely meaningful. And as someone being in a comfy point in between there I do think everyone in my bracket should be paying taxes. Not high, but definitely something. Then lower incomes then yes, definitely 0% tax. But the amount of people on 5 digits salaries that are on the higher end is definitely worth having some tax, even when a small amount it already helps support the system with so many.
At the upper end you might be able to swing the more modest of housing and put away for retirement and that is great but it is not like changes circumstances that much. I would argue that opposite that the 2billion is one billion of funny money over what the one bilion guy has and should be taxed along the lines of lottery winnings.
Five figure income should be zero? $10,000/year is not a livable income.
as papastevesy said im advocating for zero tax on five figures which would go up to 99,999.99
They’re saying the tax rate should be 0 for 5-figure incomes.
It’s not a serious income. Why penalise the ppl at the bottom?
oh I misunderstood. I thought “five figure income should be 0” meant “people shouldn’t be able to make even five figures.”
and the tax brackets should go all the way up to the highest income level
What does that even mean? They’re lower limits. Everything that exceeds the lower limit for the top bracket (which has no upper limit) is taxed the top rate.
It means the highest tax bracket should not be in thousands when the top makes hundreds of billions.
The highest rate is on annual taxable income in the hundreds of thousands and up. The hundreds of billions are also getting taxed that top marginal rate.
Your statement is muddled. Maybe the word same is missing like
Everyone in the top bracket shouldn’t be paying the same marginal tax rate. Beyond the start of the current top bracket, the marginal tax rate should continue increasing (for millionaires & billionaires).
Some of your ideas are confused. Income taxes are already progressive. Taxable income already includes income other than wages. The standard deduction exempts the low 5 figure annual incomes from taxes.
The way you suggest realizing things that are already true draws into question whether you’ve ever filed taxes. Likewise for the people agreeing with you: have they ever filed taxes?
They broke their arms patting themselves on their backs and can’t write checks anymore. 😢
You don’t understand, they’re making money so much faster than they can reasonably give away.
making money
I think you mean stealing money.
Not true.
They’re also using imaginary methods to make money grow out of other money.
Isn’t that basically just stolen money from stolen money?
If you say things with enough confidence, maybe toss in the phrase “AI” somewhere…yeah you kinda can just create money from nothing.
In entirely unrelated news grocery prices go up.
Which then needs someone in the real economy to make goods and services to back up the value of that money.
They are basically printing UOM instead of IOU vouchers.
This is kind of the actual problem though. It’s hard to actually have effective charities. Even some of the most ethical, and well run charities, end up with surplus funds (Dolly Parton’s charity for example). The government is setup to spend that much money helping people though. But paying taxes is somehow bad and wrong. I don’t know if I had a real point other than maybe we should actually tax these rich folks so they can achieve their dream of giving away at least half their wealth.
There was a post a while ago where a German person posted that they were confused by the US nonprofit systems, they basically said I pay my taxes and the government makes sure it’s spent feeding the needy and foreign aid and all that. Why should I go through the trouble of researching all these charities trying to find a good one to donate to.
Not that Germany doesn’t have non profits, but they really should be for special interest type cases where you explicitly want to send money to a cause, not general global well being.
It is a bit more complicated than that.
First of all the social security system in Germany should not be tax funded. It is a mandatory insurance which should finance its activities through the insurance rate collected on income. However with demographic shifts and the like it is notoriously unstable, in particular the pension fund. So what happens is the social securities being cross financed from tax money.
Like with climate change, we are talking about the issue since more than 30 years, the problematic effects are becoming ever more apparent, but no government is willing to address the fundamental issues, instead kicking the can down the road, until the system will collapse.
Then another issue is that the government activities are far from sufficient and it is en vogue to attack social security further. Especially in the last years we saw an unprecedented rise in people relying on food banks as unemployment checks and the equivalent for refugees, who are prohibited from working, are insufficient. But rather than adjust the payments to reflect the rising costs of living, we see a distraction debate about people “refusing to work” which make up only a tiny minority of people receiving benefits, but the goal is to abolish unemployment insurance.
Then another issue is that nonprofits are often used by rich families to circumvent inheritance tax. This year there will be an unexpected windfall of 4 billion Euros to the inheritance tax, as a rich family failed to set up their construct in time. Furthermore “nonprofits” by industrialists are often used for lobbying for more capitalism. In particularly infamous is the “Stiftung Familienunternehmen” (family run businesses trust). You would think this represents your local bakery run in the fourth generation. Instead it is run by “family businesses” such as Henkel (washing ingredients, chemicals) whose owners are billionaires.
Finally, Germany has the whole range of non profits which follow purposes that genuinely follow causes that benefit humanity and the environment and they also receive billions in donations in Germany every year. Overall the donations to nonprofits in Germany amounted to 12.5 billion € last year, or about 150 € on average. This includes a wide range of purposes. For instance sports clubs are usually nonprofits and donations to them are usually tax deductible. So it might be the father of one of the kids in the football club donating a new set of jerseys.
Then they’re not really trying. I get what @[email protected] is saying, but I find it hard to believe. If their bar for “respectable charities” leads to them not being able to find charities, then just lower the bar. Or just give money to people.
Yep, pay for everyone’s university for a year, pay everyone’s healthcare debt, do something.
A pizza party would be cool also.
nah I get those at work instead of a raise
I forget where I heard this story, but apparently Bill and Melinda were at a dinner party during the Obama Presidency. Bill said that he had “way more power than Obama” and Melinda kicked him under the table. TBF I think he was completely right: politicians in the US derive their power from their ability to raise money from rich donors, while rich donors derive their power directly from their money. And they continue to derive power from their money even when they deposit it into a “foundation” which doles it out tax-free to favored recipients.
In Gates’ case, a lot of his “charity” involves donating patent-protected drugs to third world countries to forestall their saying “fuck your patents” and producing life-saving drugs for themselves. Preserving intellectual property rights is the primary goal here, with actually helping people secondary. Anyone who thinks these ruthless multi-billionaires suddenly become benign, caring people in their advanced years is a rube.
politicians in the US derive their power from their ability to raise money from rich donors, while rich donors derive their power directly from their money
Technically they derive their power from the electoral mandate, but to achieve it requires a lot of money from said rich donors - so they don’t derive their power from it, it’s more a prerequisite to play at all. The second half is true. The rich are just rich, nobody voted them into wealth, that’s why they’re more powerful than the politicians.
why did they only use an 8-bit number to count billionaires , surely there are more of em
/dumbface
What are you, one-based or something? If it were an 8-bit integer there would have been 255.
it’s 255 for maximum index, but still 256 for maximum count though lol but agreed, 255 would be more obvious
Well still 255 for maximum count if you’re using an 8-bit number to COUNT billionaires like your initial comment said - but if you’re using an 8-bit number to index your collection of billionaires, then yes, you could get up to 256.
For counting we should always at least have the possibility of a 0 value, hence we count actual billionaires from 1-255. With indexing, 0 is already the first billionaire, so we get billionaires from 0-255, or a total of 256
Yes, 8 bit indexing. We should have Null billionaires.
Wowza scoob. Imagine that. Rich people lying.
Just wow.
Sound like rich people ought to be dying
Ruh roh!
Link to report instead of awful Fortune link: Giving Pledge
Who would have thought
