those who dedicate their lives to gaining and holding onto massive wealth and power, are the ones least fit to wield massive wealth and power.
Which is why the tax system needs to be reformed.
The political right actually has one good point that we on the left don’t always appreciate: taxes on middle class people should be lower.
Specifically, very liberal tax exemptions on things like 401Ks, including the ability to transfer wealth across generations.
Combine that with higher taxes on the wealthy, and it will be possible to shift power to the middle class.
Consider the total market cap of the S&P 500, rounded up it’s about 50 trillion. Divide that among 130 million households and each household should own about $400K in stock on average.
Full equality is neither achievable nor desired by most people, so a good scheme would be to let every household hold up to $1M in wealth, tax exempt.
And then progressively tax everything above that.
including the ability to transfer wealth across generations.
How is this ability limited currently in the US?
For one, you can’t transfer a 401K to your kids.
You have to first cash it out, pay income tax and then you can transfer what remains.
Lol
Problem is, people usually by far overestimate their position in society.
If you say “tax the rich” a whole lot of people feel like it’s about them even though they barely count as middle class.
Here in Germany I’ve had countless debates about inheritance tax. If your parents die, you only have to pay taxes (10%) on anything over 400k, and that’s per child. That means, most people will never pay a cent of inheritance tax, yet they are horrified by the idea of it, because they firmly believe, their parents shitty house in a village somewhere will bankrupt them and their two siblings.
People fundamentally don’t understand their own wealth and how tiny their wealth is compared to the billionaires class.
Yes, I fully agree.
So we need to find the right messaging.
I don’t know about Germany, but here in the Netherlands most people identify as middle class.
So “stop taxing the middle class” and “let the billionaires pay more” is a message that should resonate.
I’m optimistic and I believe we will get there. The level of equality we have today would be unfathomable for somebody living before 1945.
Thing is, I agree with your sentiment, but I’m 95% sure, this will be killed by political interests.
Everyone wants to be middle class, be in reality, a married couple of tenured teachers already is upper class. I’m upper class, since I’m a single software developer.
There was a reform recently, where couples having combined incomes over something like 180k would get less benefits for their children. Hardly anybody would have been affected by this, but the genuine outrage of middle class people was gigantic, because these morons don’t want to accept, that they’re not rich.
I’m really afraid for our democracy because so many people are willfully stupid. It’s not that they’re incapable of knowing or understanding, they don’t want to understand. For whatever reason…
No you are not upper class if you are a married couple of teachers, that is exactly the point you made before about people overestimating their place in society. If you have to work to earn money you are not upper class, the upper classes already have so much wealth that they can live off the passive proceeds of that wealth.
Yes your dual income might but you in the top 15% of incomes, but wealth is the defining characteristic of the truly rich not income.
According to the official definition, upper class means being in the top 10% of earners. And for a couple without kids that’s somewhere about 6k, and a teacher makes easily 3k.
That’s the thing is, the average employee is pretty poor, so even such moderate incomes are well within the highest percentiles.
You simply have a different understanding of upper class, that is in my opinion too narrow, since this means a finance bro making half a million a year is not upper class.
The top 10% of income is not upper class. The error that people make, including you, is to focus on income.
People like Elon Musk have incomes smaller than $100K.
Upper class are the people who do not need to work and who live off of capital.
We need to shift our focus on wealth equality.
Look, the economy needs capital. If we want to be less dependent on the capital of rich people, then middle class people need to take over that role.
The people making $100-300K per year are key, because they can provide an alternative source of capital if their tax burden is lowered.
The people making $50K will not be able to provide large amounts of capital.
The bubble will burst in a few years (it really should burst sooner, but too many people are trying to prop up their bad investments).
To put it another way, is this guy really any worse than Musk or any of the other too-wealthy wastes of oxygen rattling around?
Thank you! It’s a bubble like the dot com bubble but a slight smaller scale.
Probably not but do we really need more of them?
The regime needs these young rich Buck stories to keep normies in line. There is always some young bro or chick “breaking” something while a generation of slaves produces the value.
He is creating a massive tech bubble that will cost investors billions.
Wrt things like this, and climate change, the rise of fascism globally, the outsourcing of jobs, etc., people should be much more afraid than they are currently.
I think people used to be thus during the cold war era, yet WWIII never materialized and people are just burnt out from being told that they need to be afraid all the time - e.g. those school drills where kids knelt down and placed heads behind the backs of their necks, like that would somehow stop an atomic bomb?
Now, “nothing bad can ever happen”, even as we see heat spikes of 100 degrees in the Arctic and the 4 globally hottest days ever recorded were all last week, on top of 14 straight months of record-setting temps too. The octogenarian leaders whose fingers can’t even type on a mobile phone somehow “lead” our nation even in areas like technology. Note: I am not getting on their case for being chronologically old or even not knowing things (ignorance is easily cured), I am condemning them for choosing to remain in their ignorance (obstinacy), even while retaining their positions of power & authority (corruption) rather than cede to those who actually know stuff.
I have no problems with someone choosing not to learn about difficult matters - e.g. vaccinations - but in that case, don’t vote. Your choices to be lazy & willfully uninformed should not dictate mine to remain alive.
Yeah I went off on a tangent here, b/c Altman is simply one more example of all that has come before - e.g. Huffman and Musk did it before him, and Bezos before that, and so on, and it will fucking never end. Protect yourself as best you can… somehow. e.g. coming to the Fediverse (which soon, with Sublinks and Piefed, will offer alternatives beyond just Lemmy) seems a great first step to me:-).
Get me the heart attack gun
Yes we should
Can we stop crowning random socially-stunted weirdos with enormous earth shattering powers, please?
I mean, it’s the weirdos that propel society.
Hard disagree. Autistic enthusiasts are the best people to shape their fields. I just wish we had different ones in this case
It ain’t like they are doing it for free?
Dude has been paying for these articles for a while now. These “tech entrepreneurs” are getting weirder and weirder. Musk zuck and this guy, it does make you wonder where the fuck is we going here.
I hereby propose the we take a random techbro or wanna techbro or other techno shit and sacrifice to them to our new Machine God.
The yearly sacrifice is a honor as the chosen one will have their conscious merge with the Machine God.*
This will allow us to propel our understanding of technology to new levels. For the Machine God will be pleased.
*=Results not guaranteed. There a risk of not merging conscious with the Machine God.
Finally, a religion that makes sense.
The Adeptus Mechanicus welcomes all.
