No they aren’t. The number that’s increasing is a price tag, not cash. That’s why no one’s wallet or bank account gets bigger when that same number goes down.
Who do you think the profit of increasing the price tag goes to? The workers in the factory to help them deal with inflation, or the rich shareholders?
borrow against those assets to access their wealth tax-free.
…until they pay the loan back, you mean.
Hell, loans better be tax free, it’s not income if you have to pay it back.
P.S. Some food for thought: if workers’ labor is being ‘skimmed’ by employers, making workers into a source of profit as a result, then why would a company ever downsize as a measure against financial difficulty? Why would any business ever fire anyone who’s doing their job, if worker = profit for the business?
That’s Top Gear America, which is very much not Top Gear. Plus they didn’t run the Hilux head-to-head. I bet none of those guys have even driven a Hilux.
Anyways, point has been made, and proven. They did run head to head. Hilux was the runner up, 2nd last to break. Watched the episode years ago. Now I know you’re thinking of what amounted to a hilux ad on the original top gear. It’s not really true to life. No 85 Chev half tons in England either.
You gotta remember hiluxes are just a quarter ton truck. Yeah they’re tough enough, so were old Datsuns. It’s never really mechanics and hard core off roaders that fanboy hiluxes, and those old chevys were fucking tough.
I’m not opposed to being rich, or really even being filthy rich, I think the fair chance of being able to live lavishly is a great motivator for folks to shoot for their best ideas.
What I am opposed to is being so obscenely rich that it would take several generations of chronic mismanagement for your descendants to manage to blow through the funds within a time limit of “by the end of the 22nd century.”
Most generational wealth has reduced to being a small supplement for the recipient to supplement still having to work for their living with by the time the original person who built it up’s grandkids have had their turn with it, maybe the great grandkids if the family makes it a point of staying grounded and using the wealth wisely.
That’s not even from blowing through it like madmen, it’s from how many people it’s getting divided among by then and how likely any one of those individuals are to just decide they don’t need to work anymore on getting access to it.
Agreed, but just saying “you can only have this much money” will get fought tooth and nail, IMO the way to do it is through basing the rates in tax brackets on the percentage of wealth controlled by people in those brackets.
It’s not a “hard” cap, but it does pit the rich against each other to have more than the other rich assholes while not having so much that they’re all paying an above 100% tax rate.
Might not be as delicious as frying them for ourselves, but watching the rich eat each other will be far more entertaining, and is shown to be far more effective. Take it from the once Shah of the Sasanian Empire Kavad, if any one noble is getting too powerful, the best tools to use in bringing them down is other nobles jealous of their ascendency.
But then we still live under the same corrupt system and nothing fundamentally changes except us offsetting our issues onto future generations. Continuing to find ways to prop up Capitalism and make it liveable doesn’t actually fix a ton, it just shifts the burden from us onto our children. That’s why we’re in the shit as much as we are globally right now, and our kids will be drowning in it if we don’t act.
I literally just made the owning class start a battle royale against each other and you want to argue nothing fundamentally changes? What are you worried it’s gonna be a .io game and we’re gonna end with a big fat superowner who ate everyone else?
At some point people do not actually become happier from additional wealth. If you create a system where people are allowed more than that you are just giving them power over vast quantities of resources for no particular reason. It becomes an incentive only for those whose lust for more cannot be satiated and is anti democratic by it’s very nature.
That’s actually not entirely true, although what is true is arguably even worse.
See money does keep buying you happiness…just in diminishing returns.
So basically, the ultra wealthy are drug addicts forever chasing the satisfaction they once knew when they got their first big hit having achieved an independent standard of living, but every dose is less and less effective even as they keep upping it, eventually they die strung out and paranoid of everyone around them.
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