Dan Price is one of my favorite follows on Twitter.
(Heâs the long-haired dude who took a million-dollar pay cut so every single one of his employees could make $70,000+per year, including janitors.)
He tweeted something interesting and depressing the other day:
âSince the pandemic started, ten U.S. men doubled their collective wealth from $750 billion to $1.5 trillion.
They pay a lower tax rate than the middle class.
We just sent 5 million kids into poverty by taking away the child tax credit to âsaveâ $60 billion.
Billionaire tax now.â
While I am 100% in agreement with Danâs worthy sentiments, I think thereâs a better way to create widest-spread well-being in our society.
We need to do the opposite of what Dan is recommending.
We need to stop taxing billionaires.
Taxing billionaires doesnât work
Rest assured, my beloved Surviving Tomorrow readers, that I have not been kicked in the head by a horse and have suddenly converted to the delusional metaverse known as far-right libertarianism.
I donât want to stop taxing billionaires because Iâm suddenly pro-billionaire, pro-corporatism, or in favor of the suffering of billions of people and the destruction of the only known planet suitable for human habitation.
I just know it wonât work.
It is now impossible to meaningfully tax billionaires:
Billionaires are professional tax evaders. (Hereâs exactly how they do it.)
Billionaires own the GOP and DNCâââand their corrupt politicians simply do not create loophole-free taxation laws.
Even if our sociopathic politicians passed a meager 10% tax on billionaire wealth to appease the masses and avoid riots, theyâd immediately waste that tax money on pet programs that enrich their corporate donors, and not on the Americans who actually need it most.
Even if sheeplike Americans suddenly woke up and started voting for a new centrist pro-democracy third party en masse, billionaires now have enough wealth to create their own micro-sovereignties if threatened with real, democratic taxation.
But never mind all that. Not only is meaningfully taxing billionaires impossible; itâs also not psychologically preferable.
Because it sends the wrong message.
The problem with redistribution
There are several major psychological problems with taxing billionaires to redistribute the wealth to people in need. The psychology of taxation is something we donât talk about often enough, and I believe itâs time we bring it to center stage:
1. Taxing billionaires makes them feel like something has been taken away from them.
Yesterday, my baby son Concord was playing happily in my lap. Michelle handed me a bottle of breastmilk. Concord didnât ask for it, but I gave it to him anyway. A minute later I pulled it away, and he screamed bloody murder. Why? Because I took it away.
Billionaires are like screaming babies.
If we never gave it to them in the first place, they wouldnât scream when we take it away.
2. Taxing billionaires gives them the false impression that it was their money in the first place.
Elon Muskâââthe Marie Antoinette of our generationâââis the textbook example of someone who genuinely thinks his money is his.
This is a techno-grifter whoâs received nearly $10 billion in corporate socialism at tax-payer expense, using our currency, our educated workforce, our infrastructure, our judiciary and property rights, our military and policing, and our economy, and he thinks heâs the only person who gets to decide how he gets to spend our dollars? On what false grounds?
At the end of the day, he doesnât have the final say on how American money gets distributedâââthe American people do.
3. Taxing billionaires gives them the false impression they actually âearnedâ all that money.
It is mathematically impossible to âearnâ a billion dollars in a democratic society. (America is a nearly-rules-free-market metaverse that believes a single homo sapien can create a billion dollars in âvalue,â but people who live in reality understand this is societal hogwash.)
If you worked a job that paid $50 per hour, youâd have to work full-time for 10,000 years to properly earn $1,000,000,000.00.
Itâs just not possible in a democracy of rational citizens.
4. Taxing billionaires gives them the false impression that they are entitled to trillions of dollars of worker-created wealth.
Workers create 100% of every companyâs value. Billionaires âearnâ their money by extracting value from the planet, their suppliers, their employees, their customers, and taxpayers.
The moral truth is that all American wealth belongs to the American people, and democracy should ultimately decide how it is distributed, re-distributed, or ideallyâŠ
PRE-distributed
âEvery billionaire is a policy failure.ââââDan Riffle
We need to forget about fruitlessly trying to tax billionaires and re-enforcing their elitist mindset in the processâââwe need a fairer pre-distribution that reflects our commons values.
What could this look like, practically?
Imagine if 50+% of all company stock had to be fairly distributed to the workers of each company.
Imagine if every adult American was entitled to a truly living-wage job guarantee so they could decline low-paying private-sector jobs, thus creating a market condition that would force companies to compete against democracy to pay workers closer to their fair share.
Imagine if every single worker in America was automatically enrolled in a union that fought against corporations to secure them higher wages, more ownership, better and safer working conditions, and a real stake in the value theyâre creating.
If we did these three things, workers would re-gain the purchasing power that has been stolen from them since 1971.
If we did these things, elites would no longer have the economic power to undermine democracy.
If we did these things, the people would have a real stake in the nation theyâre building.
If we did these things, weâd end up with a world without billionaires.
Escape velocity
But, of course, these three things will never happen in America.
If you throw a ball into the air, it doesnât fly into outer space.
Why not?
Because you didnât throw it hard enough.
According to trusty Wikipedia, escape velocity is âthe minimum speed needed for a free, non-propelled object to escape from the gravitational influence of a primary body.â In other words, itâs how fast youâd need to go in order to bust out of Earthâs gravitational pull and head for the second star to the right and straight on âtil morning.
(In case youâre wondering, the escape velocity of earth is ve = â2 Ă 9.8 Ă 6.4 Ă 106⊠requiring a speed of 40,270 km per hour.)
I believe Earthâs 2,755 billionaires have reached economic escape velocity and we cannot reign them in:
We canât get fair pre-distribution because billionaires own the DNC and GOP.
We canât get real democracy because people wonât stop voting for the DNC and GOP, and both sides are working hard to ensure no pro-democracy third party can ever get elected.
Violent revolution, while never the ethical choice, isnât even a feasible option in the U.S. because citizens are up against the strongest military in human history. Billionaires own the DNC and GOP, and therefore the military and police state; there is no revolution they cannot quell. None. Plus, corporatists who understand weapons arenât necessary to control the people; you can just drain their wealth slowly through price inflation and wage stagnation, like a frog slowly boiling in water. Iâve been to North Koreaââânever underestimate a powerful militaryâs ability to keep people under its boot, weaponizing physical force and economics.
Not enough people will stop buying from the planet-wrecking, people-enslaving, democracy-smashing, tax-evading multinational corporations to drain them of their power. Plus, as corporations rapidly inflate the cost of housing and move the global economy to a serfdom subscription model, people wonât be able to afford to shop anywhere else, locking them into economic dependence on the very entities that are ruining their future.
And letâs be brutally honest: Many readers own stock in these predator companies through their pension fund investments in the S&P 500, and are therefore quietly complicit with the downfall of American democracy.
My dear friends, perhaps we just need to start accepting our place in history:
Weâre on the road back to serfdom, and billionaires are the new feudal overlords.
And if thereâs one thing we know about feudal overlords, itâs that they donât usually let the serfs decide tax policy.
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