'We are essentially in a new Gilded Age’: As workers get laid off, CEOs and shareholders gobble up hundreds of billions in profits
'We are essentially in a new Gilded Age’: As workers get laid off, CEOs and shareholders gobble up hundreds of billions in profits
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Tax.
Tax them like there is no tomorrow.
Billionaires should simply not exist. Put a cap on total net worth and if you pass that, income tax goes to 100. If your networth goes up anyway because of stocks or whatever, tax that too. Tax stocks, homes, boats, etc.
Enormous wealth should be like the speed of light. The closer you get there, the heavier it becomes to stay there, you need to spend more and more energy to get less and less higher.
This should not be a crazy idea.
Billionaires have such a heavy say in our government that it will never go that way unless it's forced.
I have been saying something slightly similar, but rather that laws should no longer protect them.
"We've decided on one year of really high inflation."
Bullshit
Stop the calls for killing the rich. Don't blame people for playing the game, just change the rules. Tax the rich for all they have until everyone lives in a tops 1-5 ratio of networth. All of the sudden, poverty gone, we can do universal healthcare easily, government will have boat loads for anything to make our lives better
Apparently you really love murder
I'd rather not become the monsters just to get rid of the monsters.
This violence-against-the-owning class rhetoric is going too far. Killing other humans is never justified. Tax them into oblivion and make them work for a living like the rest of us. There's a massive difference between having disdain for billionaires and wanting to kill them.
gilded age
Reforming capitalism will only delay end stage, not prevent it.
Imagine getting something like the early 20th century labor movement going these days. Seems impossible right? We we did do it once and guess what, we are back again. What was the point of spilling all that blood sweat and tears if we just go right back to where we started? We wasted those lives lost and ruined because we thought capitalism could be salvaged. It is not salvageable.
Reforming capitalism will only delay the end stage, not prevent it
Oh boy oh boy do I need a
<citation required>
for this bold, completely unsustained and dumb responseWe we did do it once and guess what, we are back again. What was the point of spilling all that blood sweat and tears if we just go right back to where we started?
30 years of relative prosperity?
Also, I don't understand how you think we'd be able to abolish capitalism without much more blood, sweat, and tears than would be spent building a labor movement. I also think that a strong labor movement would be a necessary prerequisite to abolishing capitalism. I don't see how you build a movement to abolish capitalism with millions of isolated, fractured consumers. By magic? Will AI or crypto solve this? 😄
Profits shouldn't exist. They should be required to put that money back into the company and take a salary for themselves. Idk how this works with shareholders but they can get fucked for all I care at this point.
We used to have progressive income taxes that did this.
Reagan, Thatcher and their ilk pulled them because "trickle down, a rising tide lifts all boats, thousand points of light, blah blah blah"
A rising tide lifts all boats has always struck me as a strange metaphor for them to use. To me that conjures up thoughts of welfare, UBI, irreducible minimums, safety nets, etc. It seems like a great metaphor for the opposite of what they're using it for.
Companies need shareholders to get off the ground, and you don't have to be rich to be a shareholder. That's the whole idea... otherwise only the mega rich have the capital to start businesses.
Paying C-suites this much is just idiotic though. I own a few stocks, and seeing some of the companies pay executives and upper management so much to feud and slowly destroy companies makes me sick. It is not what anyone sane wants unless they're parasitic daytraders or drinking the corporate kool-aid.
Greedy capitalism is the problem, but it's also a culture problem, I think.
The way you fix this is with higher, and enforced, corporate taxes. If the corporation doesn't keep the money anyways, they flow it back in.
Not essentially, we are. Soon we will have great depression 2.0
That is an impressive typo
Very simply. Raise their taxes.
Less simply. Remove the cap on social security tax. Tax long term capital gains beyond a certain amount as regular income. Put the top rate income tax closer to 90%. Fix the god damn estate tax situation. Why on god's green earth do the children of Sam Walton occupy so much space on the Forbes 400.
France will review your company's ledger if you want to fire people en masse. If you can afford to keep them you can't fire them
I mean, I guess, but why complicate this stuff. We already have the systems and administration to do taxes. We could break up monopolies and enforce the laws we already have.
I'd keep it real real simple for folks. We should stop letting corporations and their owner class privatize the gains and stick the rest of society with the losses. Take the 2008 fiasco, if we are bailing out a bunch of companies we should be bailing out a bunch of home owners.
Or we could abolish the employer-employee contract and mandate that all firms be worker coops, so that no one could appropriate the positive and negative fruits of other people's labor
Hence the rising fascism. The corporate class knows the only way to get the common people to continue to support them is through scaremongering about imagined threats.
We have been in a new gilded age since the end of the 90s...
There's like 600k people dying of cancer at any given time, and seperately theres only like 800 billionaires who are probably somewhat directly responsible for their cancer and lack of access to medical care. If I had a bucket list bc I was dying of cancer, I know what would be on it.
Terms of enrampagement
Did you see Regis this morning?
We have to scare the rich. Organize, agitate, break shit, etc. They have been too successful at dividing us along arbitrary lines. No war but class war. Fight back.
Partially thanks to media like you, squints eyes fortune.com...
Can we continue with the trend and start having unions "talk" to the CEOs? 👀
We’re also in the Business Plot 2
Yeah, well, what are YOU going to do about it?!
I'm ready to eat the rich and sacrifice myself for the next generation, but I'm not a leader, I'm good at building scaffolds though. I wish we had a François Hanriot or a John Brown
Well too bad, that's leader talk. We need you to keep fighting until nature sacrifices you.
I wish it was a Gilded Age. At least Rockefeller and Vanderbilt had some fucking taste.
All of this will happen before, and all of it will happen again. Except uglier and dumber.
Anyone who owns a house is a millionaire.
So we've got a tiny number of billionaires in charge.
An ever dwindling number of millionaires desperately holding onto their small privilege
An ever growing number of working poor who need two paychecks to live
Sounds like Tsarist Russia, with no single royal family to execute.
Anyone? There are lots of houses worth less than $1,000,000. Sure, by the time a mortgage is paid off and you fully own the house yourself a person should also have some savings, but I certainly wouldn't expect that to be universal.
My house is now worth a bit over $350,000. And although that is less then $1,000,000 I bought it at $185,000 (and had to use every penny saved to get a down payment) just a decade ago. Even in my small rural town I currently could not afford to buy the house I live in, I doubt this will improve in time.
I might not be a millionaire, but I would guess I am now in a smaller class of people that owns where they sleep. And if the market keeps doing whats its doing I might be a millionaire in time (this is not overall a good thing).
Anyone who owns a house is a millionaire.
So we’ve got a tiny number of billionaires in charge.
An ever dwindling number of millionaires desperately holding onto their small privilege
I mean this simply cannot be true.
If everyone who owns a house is a millionaire, then in order for the "number of millionaires" to be "ever dwindling" we would need not only a housing shortage, but an eroding quantity of housing or a drastic drop in home ownership rates. Neither is happening. The home ownership rate in 2024 is 65.8% according to this site: https://www.simplyinsurance.com/how-many-homeowners-in-the-us/ which puts us at a much improved rate of ownership from when the housing crash happened in 2008, when we were running somewhere in the low 60s.
So not everyone who owns a house is a millionaire, or millionaires numbers aren't dwindling. It simply cannot be the case that what you're saying here is all true.
Why don't they notice they're killing us all?
They definitely notice, why do you think they’re pushing the birth rate and great replacement theory BS so damn hard? They want everyone young, broke and uneducated so they can keep the grift going.
They're sociopaths. They don't care about us.
Weird, employment is up right near full employment, real wages are up, and quality of life has never been higher by any metric.
Is this just about tech layoffs due to overtraining the workforce and excess supply? Neat.
Inequality is up.
This is exactly what workers mean when they say the stock market isn’t the economy.
Yeah but their entire retirement is based on it!
Such an insidious way of keeping workers complicit in our capitalist hellscape.
Their entire retirement is held hostage by it. Fixed it for ya.
Lol, you think we'll be able to retire 😂