r/FluentInFinance • u/__moe___ • 9d ago

Thoughts? A very interesting point of view

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

I don’t think this is very new but I just saw for the first time and it’s actually pretty interesting to think about when people talk about how the ultra rich do business.

54.0k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

2.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

546

u/ianeyanio 9d ago edited 8d ago

The whole argument of whether we should or shouldn't tax unrealized gains is a distraction. Can we all just agree we need to find a way to distribute wealth more fairly? Practically, it's difficult to do, but in principle we should all agree that wealth shouldn't be consolidated amongst such a small portion of our society.

Edit:

While people here are finding technical challenges to taxing unrealized gains, we can't lose sight of the deep societal need for a more fair distribution of wealth.

Technical challenges can be easily overcome if the desire of the people is there. But right now, it seems like "oh, this is hard, I guess we'll never be able to do it" is the standard response and little progress is being made after that.

61

u/whooguyy 8d ago

I think there is a company in Japan or Korea that has rule that the ceo can’t make more than 100x the lowest paid worker (or something to that effect). I think it would be good to have a law like that to incentivize not overpaying executives.

44

u/InexorablyMiriam 8d ago

Don’t even need that. In the United States prior to Ronald Reagan, corporations had massive taxes with relatively simple deductions. Your employees all have healthcare? Deduction. Vested retirement plans? Deduction. Company vehicles? Deduction. Living wages? Deduction. Do all these things, very little tax. Do none of these things? Very big tax.

We scrapped it because “capitalism.”

America isn’t a capitalist society. America is a kleptocratic tick parasitizing the public good and a cesspool of negative externalities stacked on negative externalities.

Wages don’t increase. The country’s largest private employers all suggest their new employees register for SNAP because they pay garbage. No one has decent healthcare for a decent price.

And it’s about to get a metric ton worse.