patrick.net

10% wealth tax annually on wealth between $100M and $200M
20% wealth tax annually on wealth between $200M and $300M
....
100% wealth tax annually on wealth over $1B

Would you be fine with one person literally owning everything?

I ask you one question: how hard would it be for a billionaire to expatriate?

It would start at $100M

It's a voluntary transaction.

I ask you one question: how hard would it be for a billionaire to expatriate?

what about all the jobs amazon has created?

I see the existence of the massive companies and huge concentrations of wealth more as a symptom of a broken system, rather than a tax issue.

When monopoly occurs, we need to look at why. Competition is what prevents this situation, and results in a greater distribution of the profits as well as eliminating a "too big to fail" scenario of a single, large, entity. Monopolies can occur naturally, but in many cases it is due to corruption of the regulatory and legal systems. One or more players realize they can unfairly disadvantage competitors by buying laws and regulations that provide barriers to entry, or result in disproportionate hurdles among the players. These laws are bought through politicians who will favor campaign donations over public interest.

Wage and operating cost arbitrage is another way they will tip the scales. Evading environmental and labor laws by doing work in other countries where such laws are lax or do not apply at all allows a player to subvert t...

awaiting moderation

ONLY TRUMP CAN STOP THE BILLIONAIRES!

Would it be OK with you if one person owned everything, and everyone else owned nothing and had to pay whatever rent they demanded?

APOCALYPSEFUCKisShostakovitch says

awaiting moderation

I'd like to read AF's rants in real time, as soon as they are published

the idea that someone could own everything can’t happen in true capitalism. The only way you make money in true capitalism is by producing something of value that someone else buys. It’s a trade, not a theft, and the size of the total economy grows when you do it.

It’s all pretty relative

How would they have accomplished this with no funded research teams

solution of tax it all to give it to the government who will squander it is just dumb.

Patrick, it’s totally possible if you live in America, were born at the right time, have the benefit of the global reserve currency, the Fed juicing the economy, stocks and real estate, at the expense of future generations and the 80% of the population who didn’t acquire any assets before they were all grossly inflated.

If you happen have been born in most areas of the world, Asia, Africa, Central America etc. forget it, not possible, and if those populations could vote to strip Americans with a couple of million dollars of their wealth, they would do it in a heartbeat.

PaisleyPattern says

Patrick, it’s totally possible if you live in America, were born at the right time, have the benefit of the global reserve currency, the Fed juicing the economy, stocks and real estate, at the expense of future generations and the 80% of the population who didn’t acquire any assets before they were all grossly inflated.

If you happen have been born in most areas of the world, Asia, Africa, Central America etc. forget it, not possible, and if those populations could vote to strip Americans with a couple of million dollars of their wealth, they would do it in a heartbeat.

Not really. This is where the duck was more right than wrong. It's not a zero sum game, but wealth is still limited, even though you can create more you can't create it as fast as billionaires can siphon it. So yes it's possible but only at the expense of others. You can be a free market proponent an...

The peasants are always dumbfounded when the uber-wealthy cannot pay their bills. I have a feeling a great many ponzi schemes are gonna blow up in 2021 and I think some big ones are.

So like I said above, don't give it to the government. Give it directly to all the non-billionaires.

The peasants are always dumbfounded when the uber-wealthy cannot pay their bills. I have a feeling a great many ponzi schemes are gonna blow up in 2021 and I think some big ones are.

Are you mad at the ad agencies that charge Pharma the money to advertise? Why isn't it a public good to get the word out about life saving medications, given to Pharma (and the people) for free?

I’ve written before about how a pharma company took clonidine, a workhorse older drug that costs $4.84 a month, transformed it into Lucemyra, a basically identical drug that costs $1,974.78 a month, then created a rebate plan so that patients wouldn’t have to pay any extra out-of-pocket. Then they told patients to ask their doctors for Lucemyra because it was newer and cooler. Patients sometimes went along with this, being indifferent between spending $4 of someone else’s money or $2000 of someone else’s money. Everything in the US health system is like this, and the Amish avoid all of it. They have a normal free market in medical care where people pay for a product with their own money (or their community’s money) and have incentives to check how much it costs before they buy it. I do want to over-emphasize this one, and honestly I am surprised Amish health care costs are only ten times cheaper than ours are.

Big Pharma == Pure Evil

I think they would give him "honorariums" for "objectively examining" the new drug.

It strikes me, that this is the conclusion the original framers of the constitution came up with, and hence is the reason they outlawed income taxes. We did just fine without them prior to WW1, and I say we go back to that model.

The most straight forward way to do this is to just eliminate the income tax entirely. You get to spend your own money how you want without the myriad of government control schemes to influence your behavior.

Our news is designed to divide us against each other, wildly exaggerating racism, sexism, or whatever it takes to not talk about the harm billionaires do. If we are divided, or at least distracted, then we are not talking about the criminal billionaires and their defeat of democracy.

It would be fun to catch the billionaires pulling the strings of the media, telling the nominal "editors" that divisive stories get top billing every night. Their slimy trail can't be that well hidden because it's all day every day in all the mainstream media.

To see the president of a media conglomerate barking orders at his reporters and journalists, telling them what to cover, what not to cover, that's not what anything was in plain journalism I know. I run an organization with a few dozen reporters. They come to me with facts. They’re not — I'm not — they’re not yessing me. In fact, they are challenging me. And what — what Jeff Zucker is doing on these phone calls is telling what the story is, telling them what not to cover. This is — this is propaganda and I think when citizens have to exercise their rights and duties, the consent need to be inform. This is manufacturing consent and we’ve never actually seen it, fly on the wall. You can actually hear the president of the company instruct his vice president, instruct his reporters what the narrative ought to be. This is the farthest thing from journalism that I know. And I think that CNN owes an apology to the people. I mean, this is — this is disgraceful and this is the first time we’ve actually seen it. You can actually hear it.

Anti-Trump CNN Chief Jeff Zucker's wife is gal pals with Jeffrey Epstein's lady pimp Ghislaine Maxwell. Pictures tell the story here more than words. Numerous photos have surfaced of Caryn Zucker spending time in public with Maxwell as well as Huma Abedin, the wife of child sex-offender Anthony Weiner.

According to documents, Amazon reportedly runs a surveillance program to track activism among its workers. NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Lauren Gurley of Motherboard magazine, who broke the story.

More than a century ago, the titans of industry hired private agents to crack down on labor strikes and union organizers at steel mills and factories in the U.S. Those agents were called Pinkerton detectives. Now the giant of a new industry is using the same approach. A story from Vice magazine's Motherboard reports that leaked documents show that Amazon hired Pinkerton operatives in Europe to surveil workers. The story also reports that Amazon monitors workers who try to form unions or take part in protest movements. We need to note that Amazon is an NPR funder.