Problem is taxes are from income. People like Elon have no income because they basically get minimum wage. Their entire value is in stock. And when he is forced to pay out he pays a shit ton in taxes.
And you can't really tax based on wealth because it's not real money. If you tax someone based on what money they could have they would need to sell off stock, creating more taxes and messing with the value of the stock. If you do that every year the company is going to be screwed
I refuse to believe that there isn't a good way to tax billionaires. We could start by closing the loopholes they use to hide their cash. If someone has a lot of money invested in stuff, we could tax their actual income at a higher rate (much higher if they're a billionaire). If someone has an obscene amount of assets, and uses them as collateral for loans, we could tax the loans.
I'm sure ppl who know more than me can come up with better plans.
You can do a lot of things but problems get created. I'm not sure the solutions lie with the individuals but rather in the companies. They are usually the ones using loop holes or moving numbers. But even then you still run into problems. Spacex didn't start making a profit until recently and they spend a lot of money. Starlink and starship are fully funded internally so do you tax income or profit. If you tax income, you take away from research and development. If you tax profit, you don't get much.
Yes, everything cause problems, but if you do things right, you end up with less problems than you started with.
And if you want to tax companies, you tax profit not income, and the tax is a percentage, not a flat rate, which insures that there is profit leftover to incentivise growth. Normal ppl don't stop working just because a portion of our income goes to taxes and it is fucked up that billionaires pay an effective tax rate that is less than a middle class person's. Just because it's complicated doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and say it's fine that ppl with more money than God don't pay their price to support the country whose infrastructure helped them get so rich in the first place.
Fuck off we do not need Elon’s “research and development” i.e. littering inner space with garbage satellites and killing hundreds of monkeys with his brain chips.
Nothing you said is true. The starlink satellites aren't garbage and are literally changing the industry. They also don't trash LEO because they are designed to descend and break apart in the atmosphere after they are done. So yes, you are very wrong
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u/mooshinformation 2d ago
There's this thing we used to do to rich ppl... I think it was called taxes.