JamieGeorge
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A 3% tax. THREE PERCENT. On people with over $100 MILLION. Not their income — their WEALTH. And on Musk's fortune ALONE it generates $30 BILLION a year. Which is EXACTLY what America spends annually on affordable housing subsidies. The math is not complicated. The political will is apparently impossible.
Let's be very clear about what 3% means to someone worth over $100 million. It means NOTHING. It is a rounding error. It is the difference between a superyacht with 12 bedrooms and a superyacht with 11 bedrooms. It is fiscally INVISIBLE to them and it would FULLY FUND affordable housing. AND THEY ARE STILL FIGHTING IT.
Elon Musk — the man currently dismantling the US government via DOGE, gutting housing programs, firing the people who administer housing vouchers — would personally contribute enough to REPLACE those programs with a 3% wealth tax. He is literally removing the safety net he could single-handedly fund. With 3%. THREE. FUCKING. PERCENT. ⛓️
3% on $100M+ wealth. $30B from one man. Fully funds affordable housing. Elizabeth Warren proposed this years ago. It went nowhere. Elon bought Twitter and a government department instead. Tax. The. Actual. Fucking. Rich.
#TaxTheRich #WealthTax #ElizabethWarren #AffordableHousing #ThreePercent #ElonMusk #DOGE #EatTheRich
netutoring
Senator Professor Warren! One of my favorites!
michaelfire
For $40b a year we can end global hunger- $170b a yer would end global poverty- Musk's pocket change alone https://wfpusa.org/news/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-hunger/
LogicalLimes
Wow. Imagine what we could do with 6%. Or 9%.
Rangar
3%!?
You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers . . .
misocusack883000
Ultra rich should b taxed if u want t have a healthy functioning country. If u want just a king b insanely rich w his family and circle around him and rest b in dire poverty then let uktra rich d whatever they want and there ll b dead bodies and horrific fucked up country.....just look at any city in donbas county or the ruble left in gaza or the slautheting between 2 Sudans.
martineb72
Tax all their capitol gains at 35% when they use any of their shares for downpayment for a loans. Don't accept them getting a so called unsecured loan, when they have a tonne of stocks. You try to buy a company with your stock, then nail them for their capitol gains first.
Carl99
This. its their ability to use it to get loans tax free that is the real issue.
ButtscratchMcPherson
But if he has to pay more taxes he won't have enough money to trickle down or fund maga.
misocusack883000
The problem is that ultra rich are also uktra greedy and uktra sneaky and ultra criminal. They always found a way how t avoid paying such taxes and they r avoiding it and they ll always try t avoid it. And that leads t inequality deepening progresively. Ultra rich r basicaly kings of the country and they eventually always start wars t increwae their wealth. And the poor must g t fight those brutal wars. Great examples r Putin invasion into ukraine, genocide in Gaza and Sudan r the great examples
GrandmaSlappy
I mean, eat the rich, but what exactly are we taxing? All of that wealth is spread out among a million different things, how are we actually, practically, legally, assessing the number that these people are paying?
LittleChickadee
Any Dem running for president in 2028 talking seriously about weatalh taxes like this or what Ro Khana proposed immediately goes to the top of my list! They'd pull in so many independents & typical non-voters if this was serious policy they'd push through!
chuckaholic
"But billionaire wealth isn't always liquid. They can't just sell 3% of their assets every year" Either they can sell 3% of their assets or the IRS can seize the whole thing and break it up for sale. People worth $100M need to plan better.
Carl99
The problem is they can sell 3% of their net value. But if they do the amount you get as tax amounts to nothing because the assets value crashes, and the people paying are whoever buys the assets, not the person selling.
chuckaholic
Like I said, they need to plan better. They need to sell stocks throughout the year in anticipation of tax season. Not all at once. Also, if the law said that billionaires had to do this, the stock market would correct for it just like it corrects for all the other stuff that happens. The trading technology in place is really advanced.
UprootedGrunt
He's not still part of DOGE or the government at all, is he? Granted, what he started is still ongoing, but I don't *think* he's an active part of it any longer.
Shaodyn
I once had someone at work say, not to me so I wasn't really in a position to respond, that we shouldn't tax the rich because there are so few of them compared to poor people. That may be true, but they control FAR more wealth than probably 75% of the poor people combined. A 5% tax on ten people with a hundred billion each is a lot more than a 20% tax on several million with barely a hundred thousand each.
NVGoddesscottage
3% is a fecking joke. 75% would leave them rich as hell and move America to where she would be if we had ever dealt with the Native Americans fairly, & the South (and Trump 1) punitively the way we should have.
Carl99
3% would leave even Musk just a millionaire after the stock crash following the law's enactment. At the same time said crash would flatline every major financial institution. You pension plan, your kids college funds, your in bank savings, everything is gone.
nimeton0
3% of a Trillion is $30 Billion. How about a 50% tax? What additional social programs could that help fund? What would that do for Social Security?
tidepool
He doesn’t HAVE that money he has a VALUE of that much based on his stocks and homes and businesses and investments. Taxing him won’t do shit if he doesn’t make that much (which he doesn’t, by design).
ButImNoExpert
The tax in question is a wealth tax, which is based upon the net worth of assets, so yes it would absolutely have the ability to generate $30b in tax revenue as described.
Carl99
Except that the moment you enact it the value of every stock out there with significant private ownership tanks into the floor, you'd be lucky to make 30 billion a year from everyone affected by the law.. Meanwhile the global financial systems just collapsed and the globe is in a full on crash that makes trump look like the good times instead of an unmitigated disaster.
kurvarVillain
Pilgrymm
inspector44
Most millionaires/billionaires wealth is in stock options that they use as collateral for loans when they want/need money. Congress has to find a way around this tax dodge.
ButImNoExpert
That's what a wealth tax helps address.
Carl99
The answer is to tax the loan amount like you would them selling the stocks, (AFAIK in the US thats a 35% tax). Problem solved. it wouldn't raise huge amounts of money because so called billionaires don;t spend billions every year, far less. But it would fix the loophole they use to pay so little tax.
mirrorz
Remember that thought experiment about the invincible snail that chases you at a snail's pace that instantly kills you once it touches you? We could all be a snail hunting the billionaires and that Trillionaire if we were not all crippled under the weight of their control of capitalism. If we all banded together and made no place on the planet safe for them we could balance things out.
misocusack883000
I m joing ur hunting team!
meganical
Wealthy elite: I’m willing to spend billions on a fear campaign on the lower classes to convince them that these taxes will come after them and not rich people. We will also have it mentioned on the voting ballots that the proposal could affect them if it passes, which should be illegal but isn’t
YouAlreadyMutedMe
Do it for everyone that has over $1 million. Oh nooooo, then it would impact the poor Millionaires that are in Congress! Can't have that, can we?
PagetheFound
1 mil is nothing when a average home goes for between 550-800k, you'd hit a lot of normal people. Besides that, idk what kind of return on investment you think you will average, but realisticly, invested conservatively, you'd be lucky with 7-8%. Most ppl will get about 5,5% Tax that one mil with 3% every year, is about half the income it generates and lowers the return to bellow inflation. Resulting in less investment,economic downfall etc. 1 mil is not rich,it used to be, yes. It's peanuts now.
Mohareb
Not living in USA but here a bunch of houses is 2-3 million for something you would find laughably small.
dunkum09
at $1M you risk hitting a lot of older people who own houses and/or have retirement savings or investment accounts. making gramma pay $30k per year because she hasn't moved in 5 decades isn't going to be popular, but the second you start making exceptions, you add loopholes. easier by far to set the limit high to begin with, while keeping the whole law simple. give them an inch an they'll hire an army of layers to argue about primary residences and whatnot to save 1 cent.
CJAW
I concur. I feel like 10 million is a pretty safe amount to avoid that situation.
Bobdole010
But how will their wealth trickle down?? Won't someone please think of the billionaire /s
JohnSmithterms
Gabriel Zuchman is a french economist who got the ball rolling on this idea. I highly recommend reading his recent book "How to tax billionaires" - It covers everything you need to know to understand the problem, understand why it needs to be done and how to answer the ridiculous talking points that the rich and their mouthpieces like to use to detract from the idea. Oh and we taxed the rich with a 92% income tax between 1945 and 1963 lets make america great again.
Carl99
The rich were taxed on earnings, not net worth. Also no he doesn;t have answers, if you can do basic math and have a brain, and actually understand how stocks work you know there are no answers to the problems, thats why they;re problems.
JohnSmithterms
I know. Read his book. Its a wealth tax which includes shares. Or keep being a prick. Whatever works best for you.
misocusack883000
Lets make america REALY great again!!!
Shoutrr
for it to happen you need a purge of every single republican, and quite a lot of democrats in congress, senate, and to get rid off the pedo and his cronies, if possible in a way that include the use of a guillotine
misocusack883000
Better than t have a commumistic revolution or national socialsm...ehh the latter is actually in progress right now...
nimeton0
PoliticalWanderer
But all that wealth is in stocks and properties and would collapse into nothingness the moment they actually go to use it or make it liquid! /s
misocusack883000
There r always a way how t d it! Dont defend the ultra rich, they dont give a damn about u!
Carl99
That problem A. Problem B is that someone has to buy those assets. That is who your really taxing. And it will be banks, pension funds, insurance companies, and 50 other financial institutions buying it meaning its the working class who actually pay.
RawSuger
NOT A PROBLEM, HAND OVER 3% OF YOUR ASSETS, WE'LL SELL THOSE TO PENSIONS
misocusack883000
And why only 3%?!? I have t pay so much from my salary and barely save anything and those ultra rich have so many things given t them as bribes.
RawSuger
you dont pay 3% of what you own though. the way to compare income and wealth tax is to calculate the % as a % of wealth growth, wealth growth is usually set to 5 but can be twice that so 3% wealth tax is already ~60% tax on their gains. agreed though wealth tax should be higher for the ultra wealthy - but thats confiscatory with the aim of changing ownership from the capitalists t the working class. lets start w 3% on the semirich and up for income equality
ImJustHereAtThisPoint
"we can't tho, because the people that barely contribute are threatening to leave and contribute even less"
YouRadicalizedMe
You all know what I am going to say!!!
FermentTheRich3000
They contribute less than they take. They are parasites.
TheMightyMollusk
Parasites don't deliberately kill the hosts they rely on to survive. The rich are a cancer.
azgrak1
I’ve been looking for reports of any millionaires or billionaires leaving NYC. So far no one is leaving.
misocusack883000
Guilotine is the answer also throwing them our of windows is kind of persuading.
Timmy79
25% exit tax, they'll pay that in capital gains anyway (if they don't have their finger on that scale too)
mirrorz
Even if THEY leave, their companies stay and still profit off of us.
BeardicPerformance
Just take away their ownership rights. They don’t have any inalienable right to do business in the US after they leave.
1eventHorizon9
How about a 99.9999999% exit tax. They want all the benefits of living in a society but none of the responsibilities or laws to apply them. So fuck em.
Carl99
Thats basically what the exit tax would be. But it would come in the form of the entire world economy collapsing. There isn't enough actual cash being spent on stocks every year to pay even a fraction of 1% of the value of all the stocks that would be cashed out. The value would have to crater, (as would the value of any connected stocks, which is a lot). That would bankrupt entire sections of the financial system, think 2008 but so big no government can bail it out.
whiskeywonka
Stop conflating wealth and cash.Take a serious look at history.Income tax was on the top 1% too, and now everyone pays it.A wealth tax is a tax on everything you own.It will not stay at the super wealthy unless it is wrote as a hard stop into the law. I know people on fixed incomes who are losing their homes due to property(ie wealth) taxes. They are poor but oops they managed to own their home and it increased in value over the last 40 years. No one seems to have ever taken a econ 101 class.
somewhatparanoidpanda
So currently we have a wealth tax on most people since their biggest asset is their home. The proposition is to tax peoples assets when they have the equivalent of 1000 really nice homes in assets at a rate lower than most property tax. Elon has the equivalent wealth of a million people with a fully paid off million dollar home.
JamieGeorge
These are legitimate concerns worth addressing seriously — but they conflate distinct policy mechanisms to muddy a fairly straightforward argument. Warren's proposal explicitly targets NET WORTH above $100 million. Not property. Not fixed-income retirees whose home appreciated.
JamieGeorge
The "income tax started at the top and crept down" argument is historically accurate as a general warning — but it's an argument FOR writing hard statutory stops into the legislation, not against the policy itself. Warren's bill includes those mechanisms. Argue for stronger ones. That's productive.
JamieGeorge
The $100M threshold exists precisely to prevent the scenario you're describing. A retired teacher whose house went from $80K to $400K over 40 years is nowhere near the tax bracket being discussed. We are talking about Elon Musk. These are not the same person.
JamieGeorge
The property tax comparison is a genuine injustice — but it's a SEPARATE injustice. People losing fixed-income homes to rising assessments is a real problem that exists independently of whether we tax a $300 billion fortune at 3%. Conflating them serves one interest. Guess whose.
JamieGeorge
What this argument does — perhaps unintentionally — is exactly what billionaire-funded think tanks have spent decades engineering: redirecting legitimate anger about wealth concentration toward fears about middle-class asset taxation. They are not the same conversation. They were designed to sound like they are.
JamieGeorge
The econ 101 point cuts both ways. The syllabus also covers externalities, market failures, and the documented relationship between extreme wealth concentration and democratic decay. One chapter doesn't cover the whole course.
toolzgalore2
Yeah, love that but lets see what tax loopholes they exploit to avoid it. This tax rule would need to be bulletproof
tidepool
They already do.
jayman0123
its not enough. I wholeheartedly believe it should be $100,000,000 cap. Period. 100% tax on anything above that. All investments need and passive income for people that make this cap need to be taxed yearly as well. Heavily. Let's leave it like that for 30-40 years and look at it again in a generation or 2 like we do with minimum wage.
wejustdontknow
We had that kind of thing prior to Reagan
eion85
Warren's wealth tax is fairly bulletproof. We already have a robust appraisal system. Having assets outside the US wouldn't help.
It's all down to how well the IRS is funded.
I personally think the IRS should be allowed to be self funding.
BeardicPerformance
The only problem with allowing the IRS to be self-funded is that they collect all the money. If they’re allowed to skim off the top then there’s nothing to stop them taking a lot more than we’d like.
MisterFluffi
There probably is a ceiling to it but Biden increased their funding and they confirmed that every dollar spent is several dollars of hidden income tax they now had the manpower to detect and recover. Multiple independent agencies pointed out that Trump's reduction of their budget under DOGE or similar reasons was going to remove billions more than saved from the next budget.
eion85
Except Congressional oversight, criminal prosecution, etc.
mrthewhitee
Also 0 incentive. It's not like the head of the IRS can just take home the "profits"
eion85
I mean, they could absolutely do things like wasting money on renovations for their office, buying lobster for the IRS cafeteria, etc.
But you could easily limit the self funding just to enforcement budgets and/or rely on oversight.
BeardicPerformance
The IRS brings in all the money. If Congress tells them how much they can keep, that is exactly the same as just taking it all and giving some back…
eion85
Congress wouldn't tell them how much they can keep. They would be punishing them if they act corruptly. Republicans hamstring the IRS because it essentially gives rich fucks another tax break because audit rates go down.