United Airlines CEO Calls for National Wealth Tax

cactacea

Good. There's plenty of precedent for us peons - property taxes are a wealth tax. Generational wealth at the scale we see today is fundamentally incompatible with democratic principles. Billionaires are a policy failure.

projectileboy

The combination of wealth concentration, inflation, unaffordable education and health care, and the annihilation of entry-level knowledge work due to AI has created a crisis that really needs to be better appreciated by the few people that control most of the world’s capital. The society we live in can only exist if most of us buy into the social contract. If it appears to the overwhelming majority that the social contract no longer applies, then this story won’t end well for anyone, superwealthy included.

JumpCrisscross

What if we called it a property tax? We already have those. We just tax regular folks’ homes and exempt shares, bonds and offshore trusts. The value of a statistical life is about $14mm [1]. Let’s round that to the nearest $5mm and then have a progressive scale: $15mm 1%, $150mm 2%, $1.5bn 3%, $15bn 4%, $150bn 5%, $1.5tn 6%. [1] https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...

jmathai

I think it's difficult to tax people on money they've earned and "paid" taxes on. The billionaire tax in CA is a good example. It makes sense that the ultra wealthy would rather move than to pay that tax - for lots of reasons ranging from greed to wanting to decide how their wealth gets used. It reminds me of student loan forgiveness. It's too hard to retroactively forgive them. It may sound good in theory but it's not fair - i.e. for people who worked 2 jobs while going through college. The laws for wealth accumulation moving forward need to be reformed and I think we have to accept that we let people run away with massive wealth and it turned out to be not the best thing for society. Some lessons are learned the hard way.

comrade1234

We have a wealth tax in parts of Switzerland. It works for normal people like me where you can value my house and bank accounts easily. But it starts to have problems when you're ultra-wealthy and you have to value my artwork - paintings, sculptures, jewelry... Overall I think it's fine. I think where I live it's .75%. But there's a giant hotel where the fifa executives live and the owner keeps getting in trouble for importing art and undervaluing it.