Good. Fuck these people. They are not unicorns. They are not a protected class.
In America there are now over 25 million millionaires and guess what? They, too, are being squeezed the fuck out by the nearly 1000 billionaires that have always been running the show.
Fuck them that they, for the most part, thought they had a seat at the End Game table when they voted with their wallets. Their small businesses/farms are being swallowed up just like most homes that hit the market that are being bought by financing groups. They are going to lease and rent to us every single thing we used to own. If we sit on our hands and let them.
Free Luigi
Meh. 2% on millionaires.
Now do 90% on billionaires.
This isn’t a tax on wealth, it’s a tax on income.
There probably isn’t a single billionaire out there with a billion dollar income in any given year unless they’re doing some massive sell off like when Musk sold shares to buy twitter.
What actually happens, is the more wealth you have, the less income you’re actually likely to have at least in proportion to the wealth, because you start doing things like taking loans out against your shares in a company, and potentially never pay it back until you die at which point the estate will pay it off, but I think there’s even some weird estate transfer things that make that favorable to them as well.
There is a (relatively) simple solution to this; Make the act of taking out a loan against the value of your assets (which the wealthy tend to do, for liquid cashflow) a Capital Gains taxable event.
How would that be better than a simple wealth tax?
I think the wealth tax would be hard to get satisfactorily right. Either too little to feel like ‘justice’ or too much and you have people losing controlling interest in a company despite never really wanting it to get valued that much and never wanting to sell it.
Also, I think if you are head of a private company, you have a lot more ‘invisible wealth’ than the head of a public company, so there’s opportunity for a tax dodge through making your company private.
I like the idea of treating leveraging assets to actually have something spendable as income.
In Switzerland there is wealth tax that scales with your wealth and already starts at 100k, but then it’s something like 0.001%. I’ve never heard anyone complain about it. I do agree though that the idea of treating leveraging assets as income is quite interesting and makes sense.
This has actually been my preference vs a straight up wealth tax.
I wouldn’t really call it simple though as these types of things can easily be done off books. You’d have to be able to do audits like how did you pay for this with that cash kinda thing still.
You also need to deal with repayment and prevent double taxation, which is doable to sort out but not easy.
Upvoting for recognizing the double taxation but saying that is addressable.
Sure, you can get a credit later for repayment, suggesting that you paid the tax on other income. In the mean time, it’s effectively a 0% loan to the government between borrowing against the wealth and getting a credit for loan payment.
I meant relatively simple in the sense that it shouldn’t require a full re-write of existing laws - just an addition to, knowing full well that enforcement would be the biggest challenge.
Hefty fines (over and above the value of the assets used as collateral) on the lenders if caught not reporting could help ensure compliance.
Another way to tackle it might also be to treat the end of every financial year as a Capital Gains Event for assets over a certain threshold? That way, it just becomes part of people’s annual tax returns and taking out loans wouldn’t necessarily help avoid it.
eg. If FY26 saw Elon Musk’s wealth increase by $10bn, he would owe ~$2bn in Capital Gains to the IRS.
Also, to head off possible arguments: Given that the US taxes its citizens even if they live/work abroad - there would also be negligible risk of capital flight.
Yeah. We need wealth tax.
Nothing is ever enough for people is it? Ya’ll could have had Cuomo again and gotten 0% taxes on the rich. Hell, Cuomo would’ve given tax breaks to his wealthy buddies like he did the first time. 2% isn’t the end goal, it’s the start. Ya’ll need to change your perspective, nothing in politics is going to be instant or perfect. I’ll take 2%, it’s a start.
If it were 2% wealth tax, I’d agree with you. Like this it’s worth nothing. It’s incredibly easy for rich people to have an income of essentially 0.
It is easy for them to have 0 income, and we should fix that. The means by which they can access ‘value’ of their wealth to pay for stuff without actually incurring a taxable event need to get closed. Primarily this seems to be about borrowing against wealth, which should be a taxable event, with an option to eventually get credit for loan repayment to assuage the ‘but but double taxation!’ crowd.
I’m happy with this, but we still need to be doing more.
Gotta boil the frog properly, exactly
Indeed we need to do what the right wingers have been doing to us since the 70s. Slowly turn up the taxes and lock up more and more white collar criminals/pedophiles. Hopefully this starts happening after Trump and Republicans face backlash from all the shit they’ve done over this year.
Millionaires are not going to move away from NYC when the stock exchange is right there, the big buildings are right there, and the port is right there. NYC is important because of where it is and what it has. A 2% tax on high incomes is not going to change that.
The Millionaire Tax will impose an additional 2% income tax on the top 1% in NYC, who are earning over $1 million per year.
As a European I am shocked! Shocked that you call this guy a socialist!
No mention of how it turned out in Massachusetts.
Wait, you mean that when rich people say that taxing the rich is a bad idea, they aren’t being completely sincere and don’t have our best interests at heart? I’m shocked to the core
Yep. Millionaires threaten to move away if they’re taxed, but they won’t. The convenience of having their high value properties in highly sought after areas, where all the services they use are present, is too enticing, and even a hefty tax won’t be a deterrent.
Just imagine how much upheaval it would cause you to move a few states over. For a millionaire… it’s the same except they’re used to so much beyond basic survival - their parties, their exclusive clubs, exclusive gatherings, private boxes in theatres, the list goes on.
Do you really see such a person moving to Bumfuck Nowhere, Nebraska, just because that town doesn’t tax millionaires? Do you really see them giving up 80-90% of the “rich life” just to save their wealth? Hell nah. As long as you’re not explicitly threatening to tax them out of existence, they’ll stay. Because unlike the average people they can afford that extra expense.
But of course they don’t want to, they just yap around threatening the move without committing to it.
Also isn’t it so petty to admit you (would) move because you don’t want to shell out your bit for your community? Like isn’t that incredibly cheap? Don’t you like living in New York? Don’t you like your city?
It’s like the rich guy passing on the collection plate at church type move.
Well, the rich didn’t get rich by giving away their money.
To them it’s a status symbol - like how Apple products used to be status symbols for the plebeian (aka us).
Having multimillion dollar supercars, villas, mansions, seven bedroom apartments, etc., works well, but you’re only truly rich if you can show off how you didn’t actually lose any value to get those benefits. How you didn’t need to spend a single penny of your wealth to live the rich life.
Yeah I guess I should stop ascribing any kind of communalist value systems to them. The like of you and I aren’t in the group they consider their community.
A lot of millionaire wealth is tied to where they live. A New York lawyer or doctor can’t just move to Miami and expect to have the same level. Business owners could potentially move, but they still would need to keep traveling back and forth. Ultimately, their social life and lifestyle is where they already liveand being the one who moved because “is expensive” it would be seen as cheap.
FYI when we’re talking about taxing the rich and wealth we’re not talking about doctors and lawyers even if they still make a fuck ton because they are still getting paid for their labour and they need to work in order to maintain their lifestyle even if they would be considered rich.
What we’re talking about are people who make their living through their capital I.e. due to the exploitation of other people.
A quick search suggests most New York lawyers (avg $176k/yr) and surgeons (avg $300k to $750k) aren’t going to be be affected.
Yeah. We usually consider lawyers, doctors, tech people, academics at fancy universities etc. to be rich. But in the grand scheme of things, they’re upper middle class at best. The real rich are all people with generational wealth coming from businesses.
Who considered these people to be rich? Rich people don’t have to work. Those are working professionals. Manny of them have high debts for the beginning decade of their careers, too
People born before the 2010s, roughly. Doctors and lawyers were at one point considered two of the highest earning professions and it’s only been recently that college debt has really been considered a real issue rather than an excuse Millennials made up because they would rather complain about being poor than lift themselves up by their bootstraps.
For the Baby Boomers, these professions allowed them to buy lots of assets that have since appreciated in value and become generational wealth, and they think the world still works that way.
The verdict: The new report found the number of ultra-wealthy residents in Massachusetts — those with at least $50 million or more — has actually grown since 2022, from 1,954 to 2,642 in 2024. The millionaires’ tax also greatly surpassed its projections in the first year, generating S2.46 billion for the state in 2023 alone. State officials expect it to haul in the same amount of revenue annually. “This is further evidence that multi-millionaires are not fleeing the state in response to the new tax,” said Shanique Rodriguez, executive director of the Massachusetts Voter Table.
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