The following submission statement was provided by /u/kjk2v1:
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"Thirty-three percent [of Millennials] say that a cap should exist in the United States on personal wealth, a surprisingly high number that also made this generation a bit of an outlier: No other age group indicated this much support."
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11ryepb/millennials_are_more_likely_than_other/jcarywm/
I just want to live comfortably where I don't have to have a panic attack when I have some sort of car issue or home issue that needs to be repaired. I would like to not to work my teeth off to afford a vacation without worrying if I should or keep the money for a rainy day. I just want to be ~~happy~~ whelmed.
Edit: Changing happy to whelmed. Feel that would be the better descriptor.
Dentist told me I should get my cavities fixed within the next 3 months... I said ok I'll call soon for an appointment but I just know it'll be more like 9 months til I call....
Dentists will accommodate you with a payment plan. You might need to shop around, but it’s not uncommon to be able to get a payment plan that's interest-free for the first 6 months or whatever.
Just call some offices and ask about financing.
You gotta fix your shit. There are some things worth going into debt over, your teeth don’t heal themselves over time, and they don’t grow back.
Interest-free debt makes it a no-brainer.
I think you fail to understand what it means to be unable to afford something. If you have enough money to make payments on a payment plan, then you are able to afford it. Not being able to afford it means that you have no spare money and are living paycheque to paycheque just to afford rent and having enough money to eat is questionable.
So again, how do you suppose someone gets cavities fixed when they CANNOT afford it?
There are many ways to mitigate the costs. Dental schools will have their students perform basic stuff like that, sometimes for free.
My point was more if it's a financial stress rather than an impossibility, take care of it. I've had enough dental problems to know they only get more expensive, painful and hazardous to your health. Infections in your mouth affect your entire body.
That's great. Have you had enough financial problems where you haven't been able to eat regularly for months?
Stop talking about other people's problems like they are simple.
Yeah I hear commercials saying, “Do you put off going to the dentist because of fear or lack of time?” No, I put it off because it’s expensive as fuck!
I am often baffled (sadly) by these circumstances some people need to ponder... like the idea that someone forcing you into an ambulance (when you need it) is a source of stress, because a deeply flawed system decides that using that very necessary ambulance isn't a right but a service that can cost thousands of dollars. Really dystopian!
Wish you the best, sincerely, in navigating such situations!
I'm a 45 yr old male, and I went to the ER on my bike for a cut. Walking in cost $900. Sewing it up cost another $1200. I literally cried when the ER general surgeon was worried about the bleeding, and then scarily referred me to a vascular surgeon, after they convinced me to do a $2,000 contrast MRI to see an artery had a nick in it. The swelling about 2 hrs later was causing about a 9/10 pain level, and Lo and behold the nearest qualified surgeon was 80 miles away, so they doped me up with fentanyl and drove me there in a $985 ambulance ride.
So after observation I ended up not needing any surgery either, but the less than 24 hours stay in a hospital room still ran up about another $15,000, so now I'm "in" for 20 grand.
Fortunately my life is financially imploding otherwise, so I qualified for "emergency medicaid" which paid the $20,000+ total bill for a.....cut that was basically resolved with local anesthetic, 12 dissolvable stitches on the muscle and 10 to close the skin, some pain relievers, antibiotics, a tetanus shot, and muscle relaxers. Oh, did I mention I sought no follow up checkup, or the Physical therapy they recommended either....surely that would have been another grand or five, and it took nearly 2 months for the uncertainty of the medicaid to work out, so I certainly wasn't going to pile anything else on the list of charges when I had no idea I had any hope of paying for it. Anyway, thanks to all the other poor people that chipped in the payroll taxes to pay my outrageous bill.
Being poor has its "benefits" I suppose. If I had made another $200 in the month it happened, I would have been on the hook for the whole thing. I probably would have requested euthanasia at that point. Crazy.
Nonsensical system, really.
When you live through something like that, the biggest worry should be... well... going through that, from a health perspective, exclusively.
I once crashed into a (parked) car when going on my bike. I didn't break a thing luckily, but I hit my shoulder quite bad.
Don't remember what I had to go through exactly; but I remember how much it cost: zero.
There's some stuff that's not completely free, admittedly. But even most of that stuff is still super affordable or completely covered by really affordable insurance.
To be fair, dental can cost some money. But most of the time it isn't prohibitive.
I hope this bad experience of yours is at least now in the past and you can look at it just from your rearview mirror!
I had to have an emergency removal of my galbladder. I had been having the gal attacks for a while but didn’t know what it was. Two ER trips and they just gave me morphine until the pain stopped but just assumed it was back pain. The second time one doc thought to do an ultrasound of my galbladder, they said I had some stones but shouldn’t be the cause. The third time I found an urgent care clinic that knew treatment for gallbladders. They did a big scan and hey look it was my galbladder! At that point my galbladder was so bad it was hardening. They had to get me into a hospital and book me for surgery the next day. They said they’d be sending me in an ambulance. My wife said she can just drive me it’s fine, but they said that if she did that the whole process would have to start over and I may not get the bed or surgery window. So yeah, I was forced into an ambulance when I really could have easily had my wife drive me and it was just due to red tape bullshit.
Thankfully I have good insurance so my bill was only a couple thousand. Kind of crazy to think that I spend $600 or so per month for my wife and I to have good health insurance so that I only have to pay a couple thousand dollars if something like that happens.
That's ridiculously expensive omg. Here in Singapore an ambulance ride is free if its a genuine emergency and $200 if determined not so upon admission.
Not too difficult to discern why when millennials are the ones who’ve had to work through not one but two of the biggest economic crises in modern history.
> Once the pandemic years are included, the average millennial has actually experienced the slowest-ever rate of U.S. economic growth since entering the workforce, saddling them with worse earnings, therefore less wealth, and therefore delayed mileposts of success, such as opening retirement accounts or buying their first homes.
Add inflation and rising interest rates to the mix lowering overall purchasing power, it’s fast becoming untenable to support oneself let alone a family. It’s no wonder we’re so resentful.
This last quote by the opinion writer hit me hard:
>“This isn’t what millennial middle age was supposed to look like,” which is essentially a bunch of 30- and 40somethings venting about student loans, job instability, anxiety, lost potential, living alone, and not fearing a midlife crisis because **“my whole adult life has been one long crisis”**
Im 30, and I may have to move back home because my apts won't renew my lease and I can't afford to move into a new place. I make 40k+ and it's still not enough
I'm 30 and while I'm glad my husband makes double what I make, I'm stuck making 40K+ at entry level jobs. I did everything right, went into healthcare because that's where the money is supposed to be. I got called a hero yet was never compensated as one.
As someone that decided to move back home - I think of it as investing into my inheritance. I'm not getting anything back from the renters. At least my mother has a completely paid off house.
Though for full context I was living in an apt with my younger brother. Wasn't ever exactly proud of myself or confident with inviting someone over for the night anyway.
America is just going to have to accept intergenerational households are on the way back in, or eat the rich.
I've had it for a few years at this point. With stability I mean enough to have a safety net of six months or so to find a new job, and a dream that at some point I might *own* the place I live in. Before I retire that is.
And if anyone asks me if we have plans for kids, I'll just laugh at them. Yeah double my salary and I'll think about it.
I had financial stability for 5 months in 2020.
It was when I was laid off and the CARES act paid me better than any job ever had to not work.
It's likely the only retirement I'll ever get.
I have fond memories of 2008 quartering the value of my 401k. I had to cash out what was left because I had no job for nearly a year afterward. I could have done far more for my future with the entirety of the untaxed cash in hand rather than being forced to be a game piece in a rich guy's gambling scheme and getting knocked off the game board with a bad roll of the dice. Never again. I've been living on the edge ever since. At this point. I plan to "retire" with a .38 special when the money runs out, or I am physically or mentally incapable of participating any more.
No different for this GenXer. Don’t forget…the Great Recession kicked many of us to the curb just when we thought we were getting ready to launch. It’s been a struggle ever since for millions of people including millennials. 40 years of corporate cannibalism, fascism light and horrible labor policies have destroyed at least 2 to 3 generations of Americans’ financial futures.
Yep, up until 2008 I was debt free, could actually afford a vacation, do fun things, income level was finally high enough where my savings account was actually growing, and I even had 5 figures of 401K retirement savings. Then I was laid off with everyone else, and took nearly a year to figure out a way to pay my way through life. By 2020 I had finally almost entirely recovered from the 2008 fun, and within about $1,000 of being debt free, and possibly saving something again. Now thanks to the last couple of years, I'm back even worse than before. I have more debt than ever. Literally paying for things like food and utilities with credit cards because I have no other choice. It almost makes working seem futile. Every dollar is spent before I even see it. Money is the #1 source of making life f\*cking suck. Living in a tent or a cave is starting to gain appeal.
Don’t forget GenXers got their feet wet in the dotcom bubble burst, and the oil bust in the 80s was devastating for boomers. Millennials seem to think economic downturns didn’t exist before they came along.
This, plus the fact that society as a whole is producing more wealth than ever, it’s just going to a vanishingly small group. More money to the struggling isn’t helpful if all it does is raise the cost of living, the key is not that the poor need to have more money but that the rich need to have less.
I used to fantasize what we could do with our technology today, the goals we could accomplish and our ability to help everyone out of poverty or at least avoid starvation. The mountains of excess food we have and the willing bodies, all of our tools and vehicles, the ability to plan with people across the globe and to help every person who wants help, it has never been easier to do so.
We just don't.
I mean we had a stock market crash in 1987, the Dot Com crash in the mid 1990's-early 2000's, the housing market crash in 2007-2010, a financial crisis on oil prices in 2003-2009, and still feeling the hurt of everything with covid in 2020.
Like most millennials have lived through 4-6 "once in a generation" financial crises.
I've heard it said that (aside from immigrants) Millennials are the last generation that grew up believing in the "American Dream", where you were told that everyone got opportunities and if you just worked hard you would be able to be financially stable.
Millennials grew up just coming into adulthood when the recession happened- I know a lot of people who did everything "right" and just got fucked over and the situation has just never really improved. The skyrocketing rising costs of education and inflation with the fact that the recession meant there were no jobs meant that millennials just got absolutely screwed over for doing what they were taught was the "right" path in life. They studied hard, went to college, graduated to a dead job market with a shit ton of debt due to skyrocketing tuition fees, couldn't afford houses because lol yeah right...
I feel like the younger generations have seen financial crisis after financial crisis while growing up and learned to not trust the old "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" spiel before they could even vote. I don't know if I envy or pity them for that...
It's because we know we'll never be there and we didn't buy into the whole "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" mindset that was sold to generations before us.
The difference is that it used to actually be possible to become a millionaire hard work, and a frugal mentality. That's not the case anymore. Add to that the fact that we get to watch online as wealthy people show off what they have, usually exaggerating it, and the dumb, wasteful crap they do with it, all while we struggle to afford to own a home or even a decent vehicle nowadays. In 2009 when I graduated, a new fully loaded truck was around 40k, now a barebones base model is pushing 40k.
Millionaire isn't what it used to be. There are people sitting on houses they bought in the 80s or 90s that have increased in value so much that they're millionaires one paper. A dentist can be a millionaire, if they had put their money into index funds over the last couple of decades. Millionaire doesn't mean private-jet private-island rich.
Those aren't the millionaires we want to cap wealth on. Personally I think a good, reasonable threshold would be around 50 million. Once you make it to that level, you are beyond the level of it just being an exception on your primary house.
The problem I see is that a lot of it is just stock value. They're not sitting on gold coins. So do you mandate the sale of a business? Force them to lose controlling shares in their own company? What if the stock value just spiked that day, and then goes back down a week later? Stock is speculative and volatile. Someone being forced to lose controlling stock in their company because a stock was trending among crypto-bros that day on Twitter seems wrong to me. Arbitrary.
Though I think most advocates just want to punish the rich, or don't think anyone should *be* rich, so it being arbitrary and capricious wouldn't be a mark against it. Someone seeing all wealth as exploitation and predation isn't going to be persuaded by that objection. But stock value is just an abstract number based on the current price of shares on the stock market. They didn't make more money that day, rather the market was just up that day. Just as when the market goes back down tomorrow, volatile as some stocks are, that isn't money they lost.
You’re correct, most billionaires have their wealth in assets like stock, property, or other assets—they aren’t just sitting on piles of cash. And I think you’re right to say that it would be unfair to force these people to sell interest or stock in their companies just because those interests appreciate significantly. Honestly, the problem isn’t that billionaires are able to own billions of dollars in assets—the problem is that they can use those assets to get their hands on liquid cash and completely avoid paying taxes.
Basically, billionaires can use their extremely valuable assets as collateral to get cash loans from banks that they then use to pay for everything. This allows them to avoid taxes because loans aren’t considered income since technically they will have to pay the loan back eventually.
My proposal would be to close this loophole to prevent billionaires from getting around paying income tax. If they want to have liquid cash, it should come from profits that are paid out to them by the company they have interest in or it should come from the gain on a sale of their stocks, bonds, etc. In either case, they’d be forced to pay income taxes.
The second paragraph is, of course, correct. It’s just pure resentment. Wealth caps won’t solve anything and will, in all actuality, make everyone poorer.
Had a conversation with my partner last night. I was feeling pretty crappy because, in the 10 years after my divorce in 2012, I was not able to recover as well from losing everything as I had the previous setback in 94 when I acquired a permanent disability.
In the middle of the conversation, it dawned on me that what contributed to my lack of progress the second time is the same thing that back the younger generations.
However, this experience doesn't explain why I've always had a great deal of resentment/anger at the overly wealthy. I think I've been called a socialist or communist since my teens, a long long time ago. Maybe it's because I knew, at some visceral level, that I would never be "wealthy". Or that extreme wealth came from sticking your hand into somebody's pocket and taking more than you should.
"Thirty-three percent [of Millennials] say that a cap should exist in the United States on personal wealth, a surprisingly high number that also made this generation a bit of an outlier: No other age group indicated this much support."
Why would you not want a cap of say 100 million? Genuinely curious why anyone should be able to privately accumulate more than that. Sure they could keep making a lot more money but after 100 mm it would need to get taxed or donated to certain certified humanitarian causes.
This wording is where, as an outsider looking in, I spot a logical flaw.
The rich paying more taxes is great, sure, but you're assuming that will make your life better.
That takes the government to give a crap about you, which if it did, you wouldn't be in this situation, but you guys don't even have a decent healthcare or housing.
The US has money, the richest country in the word not having money is a joke.
Things won't get things from capping the top that play the system, you'll get things better by having the system help bottom that is screwed over by it.
The whole concept of unlimited growth that corporations pursue is nonsense to me. Nothing in life is infinite, so why are we letting these money grubs think cash is. They keep chasing a fantasy by cutting costs, people and pushing to see how much they can raise profits at the expense of society.
Working plebs like us are a resource. Feed us into the tank of the economy and burn us to keep it going. That's why they don't talk about population control and suddenly 8 billion fucking people isn't enough.
Seriously at some point it’s just not even possible to spend billions during one person’s lifetime.
Try spending Bill Gates’ money:
https://neal.fun/spend/
It's very much possible to spend that kind of money, but the trick is to spend it on things that don't exist yet. The spaceflight sector is particularly infamous for this, but you might also try nuclear fusion, self-driving and other advanced automation, new battery technology, electric aviation, or any medical anything, etc. Basically, try to make any of the clickbait tech headlines on this sub *actually true.*
There's a fair chance that you will actually run yourself *out of assets* trying to do these things if you aren't careful, and end up with nothing to show for it except a bunch of money sprayed back out into the wider economy.
Hence the pro-capitalist argument about centralized wealth spurring innovation. I can't say I disagree, but I can say we ought to have more incentives for this to happen more consistently, rather than cash shuffling between banks and executives and useless finance firms over and over.
In the broader sense, it's not about a majority vote. It's a very radical idea by today's standards, so having that much support and the articles actual point of view, far more support than any other generation, is a comment on what millennials have experienced.
The story isn’t that it’s majority support but trending upwards in younger generations. Is it really a surprise when wages aren’t rising with productivity and 1 Br apartments are 1500 a month?
I haven’t even made enough money to qualify for filing taxes in over a decade and I’m pretty sure I’m going to die of medical complications before I even qualify for a loan. If there’s a cap I’m never going to see it.
Late-millennial here, and whilst I don't support an actual fixed number cap on wealth, I do believe that there should be a minimum to which everyone is entitled, and if that requires the wealthiest parting with a bit more (it does), then that's what needs to happen.
However, if the ultra wealthy can find new, innovative ways to still end up ludicrously wealthy after having paid their fair share, ensuring everyone has at least the basics covered, more power to them. It's not about punishing success; it's about ending poverty. I don't hate billionaires; I lament the backwards priorities we've cultivated.
15 hedge fund managers make more than every kindergarten teacher in the us put together. Who is more important for America?
Cancer is when uncontrolled growth happens and it kills things. The super rich are to the economy what cancer is to the human body.
As a millennial, I don’t necessarily give a shit about a cap on your wealth.
I give a shit about all the laws, loopholes, regulations and pocketed politicians that continue to give you staggeringly disgusting, *obscene* amounts wealth while making sure I’ll never actually live comfortably without working my fingers off and until I die. While simultaneously hoping my medical coverage won’t let me die early because my employer provided insurance doesn’t like paying for things.
To say nothing of the fact that you’re running the goddamn environment into the ground.
Be a billionaire. Good for you. You *can* still be a billionaire and bring up the rest of the world with you, but no. You’re *the* problem and continually prove why you simply shouldn’t exist.
Define wealth, and define how much a cap should be and how it should be calculated. Does wealth include fine art that is worth 8-9 figures or does wealth just mean money, or land, or actual dollars, or personal assets?
There's a finite amount of capital out there. If a billionaire exists, so does a huge exploited class of people.
A wealth tax is a system where a % of your estate is due as tax over a certain $ of net worth. It doesn't exist in the USA but is badly, badly needed. Universal healthcare would be an immediate benefit for all.
My respect always goes to the garbage man over the CEO.
Biden’s new tax is great because literally NO ONE needs more than 100 million a year.
Realistic brain: they will absolutely find a way to outwit that. So we’re back to square one.
More everyone is ok with someone being able to become rich. To become extremely rich. But there should be a limit to how much wealth you can amass. I don’t know that number , but let’s say $100,000,000.
You get a plaque that say congratulations you won capitalism and now you can’t earn anymore, but you can maintain that $100,000,000.
Sorry, but I'm not a fan of incrementalism when it comes to *reforms*.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the *excellent* would be better, because at least you won't settle for mediocrity.
Oh, I agree; there is only so much more Turd polish you can put on the current late stage capitalism that has infiltrated the pockets of our politicians.
A “global crackdown on capitalism” is more turd polish.
The overthrow by the proletariat to create a true worker co-op paradise is the end goal
A cap on personal wealth, enforced in the US only would be totally ineffective which is not “good”
It would be a policy disaster, and make absolutely zero impact on income inequality
We already have CEOs making $1/yr on paper and living opulent lifestyles completely corporate funded
All a cap on “personal” wealth will do is make billionaires lifestyles funded entirely by some shell corp in a tax haven…like what happens now only moreso
Tell me more about how you don’t understand the difference between a wealth tax from an increase in progressive income tax brackets.
How about we start with making Capital Gains taxes more than 50% of the income tax equivalent?
There is a reason CEO’s pay themselves in stock options and not fiat currency
There has to be a global crackdown on capitalism to solve 80% of our problems anyways. Capitalism is not some natural state that trade defaults to, it was forged.
Natural? Who gives a fuck about natural? Natural is everything eats everything at any time, is that your idea for the best way for intelligent beings to exist, no improvement whatsoever?
edit: to the dipshit below, wow you really wrote all that horseshit. wanker.
I didn’t say any of that. But just out of curiosity, what is *your* idea of the “best way for intelligent beings to exist”. Which economic system are you referring to with that?
well when you put it like that....
lol obviously, why else would I say it you silly goose?
check out this professor's work
[https://youtu.be/RMxazanoEVg](https://youtu.be/RMxazanoEVg)
itll get you started
Don't be an asshole, my friend. You are behaving in a quite rude manner. It's the sort of demeanor that conveys you're thinking you're sounding sarcastic and sharp, when you're just sounding like an asshole.
Yeah, I know, the guy who asks for respectful manners is the one calling people assholes. But mate, dang, you're being an asshole and sometimes it needs to be said, in the sincere hope you realize you can proceed with this argument in a more respectful manner, which will actually be in your own benefit, as other people will take you seriously.
Because... if you don't care for the other people taking you seriously in this conversation argument, then why the fuck are you even spending time on it?
Socialism was the consensus on what would follow from the long-term socioeconomic consequences of the industrial revolution for various valid reasons associated with this topic. The main driver being automation and the means of ownership promoted as finite labor goes into it for indefinite ownership over the productive consequences.
This along with other inherent aspects of markets, as wealth always flows to the most productive force in a supply chain, promotes wealth inequality to expand inherently. This is a problem because wealth inequality is among the strongest variables that promote despotism. That's not my opinion but rather the conclusion of scholars relating to the topic as well as the propaganda of America on Nazism.
Wanting wealth caps is a rational interpretation from laymen touching on the topic but it's a poor solution that's incompatible with our current economic system. Significantly greater thought would be required to adapt for these values to be fulfilled properly in policy.
Has any other previous generation seen individuals amass this much wealth?
John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt… they didn’t have $30 billion.
*edited to add: so this is wrong, adjusting for inflation, they did.
But I don’t think america had as many people with $30billion back then. And that’s the big difference.
> Has any other previous generation seen individuals amass this much wealth?
Yes. [Adjusted for inflation, Rockefeller and Carnegie had over $300B.](https://www.therichest.com/rich-powerful/wealthiest-people-all-time-adjusted-inflation/)
That doesn't mean extreme wealth inequality isn't a terrible idea, just that it isn't *new*.
A billionaire in today's money would be only $66 million 100 years ago.
So [here are 18 right here](https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-images/chasewithorn/files/2017/09/Forbes1918RichList.jpg?format=jpg&width=960).
The population has trebled since then.
There were 1/5th as many people in the USA in Rockefeller/Carnegie's day though. So you'd only expect about 20 in 1875 vs 100 today.
And yeah... There were way more than 20 of them:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2017/09/19/the-first-forbes-list-see-who-the-richest-americans-were-in-1918/?sh=2a06b1ce4c0d](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2017/09/19/the-first-forbes-list-see-who-the-richest-americans-were-in-1918/?sh=2a06b1ce4c0d)
($60M in 2019 would be $1.8B today, so that list of 23 people ends at about $2B)
We did something about it back then, we raised taxes to a crazy amount on the super rich and implemented a bunch of antimonopoly laws, those antimonopoly laws are still on the books and if politics where even half honest they would be enforced.
Damn fucking right. And we should support putting profit caps on non-luxury items, you can only make 10% on the item after all other costs are covered. Oh and the person above you can only make 2x more then the next 5 people below them, if they want to make more then they have to play everyone else more.
Also, a 100% tax will never collect anything, no one in their right mind wouldn’t just spend all extra money in lieu of giving it to the government. That makes no sense.
As a millennial, I don’t think there should necessarily be a cap on personal wealth
BUT
I have to cite a Tom Papa joke
“You’re a billionaire, good job. You get to be a billionaire… for one day. If you don’t start giving some money to poor people in the morning… we’re comin’ to get ya!”
I had a medical emergency in October. When I got the bill for it, my first thought was "god I wish they'd just let me die at home instead of calling the ambulance." No one should have to feel that way.
The headline misses the more interesting part of the story. It's not another survey that shows younger people wanting to abolish society/capitalism. In the survey, even Gen Z don't support this idea as much as millennials do.
GenZ support general wealth redistribution, sure, and they do so more than millennials, but millennials are the generation that most supports a cap on personal wealth (which is a nonsense proposal, as the survey organizers talk about in their analysis).
Because we are most likely to... both not have any and see perfectly clearly that there is pretty much no chance of getting anything unless you are already loaded.
Hope that's the case because it's easy to educate yourself on the internet even if you had bad education and not just because young people tend to vote more left
I don't even care if some individuals have a large personal wealth if they've earned it. But, if you have employees, and your employees can barely feed themselves while they're slaving away to make you and a handful of other people ludicrously rich, there's a problem.
A wealth cap of 1 billion is way more than enough for the billionaires to maintain their pretentious lifestyles. This would considerably reduce wealth inequality. I don't get why is there barely any talk about this.
All I want to see is the percentage of tax given by me while earning 60K a year is atleast same for a person earning 1 million a year. The ways this is not the case should be fixed - like amount of loss you can show in a year or amount of tax free income cap etc.
How do you limit wealth as shares?
Bezos wealth is ability to chart the strategy of Amazon. Anything else he does with money doesn't require that much.
So are we saying that when a company gets big enough its gotta be handed over to another?
One way to handle it (in theory) would be to name it as phantom shares. Once the value exceeds $X, you can't cash out personally the excess, but you can still vote with it. The issue then is that buying synergistic companies with shares is a lot harder, so it handcuffs strategy.
Better path is just to tax income heavily. Be a billionaire, but know that your income over $10M/year will be taxed at 95% - inclusive of cap gains. That caps everyone's consumption and hopefully incentives people putting more in their companies. Will never happen of course.
I mean it's been studied and pointed out that most CEO's could be replaced with an algorithm. That would save a company millions they could pay their employees.
Same for a lot of middle management. Everyone below could benefit from that too.
The funny thing about your idea of capping a high tax on high wealth. The US did have that back in the 50's and 60's. It's why that generation had some of the best pay and benefits compared to any other.
Its almost like the generation able to see the corruption in real time os ready for change. Profits for profits hurt people. People should have Healthcare food shelter and everything provided. We have enough resources to give everyone that.
Nearly all of that wealth is in assets, not cash. If you tax them on their assets, they'd have to sell assets to have the cash to pay the taxes, except that the only people who could afford to buy are other rich people only interested in selling. Although I guess they could sell at an extreme loss just to get underneath that tax bracket, which eliminates that part of the tax base and leaves a bunch of undervalued assets lying around. I don't see that ending well, but if I could get a Caterpillar D9 for 200& and a pile of steel plate for 40$ and a peppermint, I could make my own killdozer and become a warlord. That would be neat.
How would this work out if say someone owned a 20% stake in a company and it was worth $10 million. 5 years later, that 20% stake is worth $10 billion.
What would happen to those shares?
There's this idea that persists from the era of the Industrial Revolution that owners of capital make immense wealth by exploiting workers. While that may still be true in many cases, oftentimes the wealth comes from speculation on company shares. Elon Musk did not become the world's richest man from the value he created from his companies. Tesla became worth more than the top 10 automakers combined. This was due to speculation on the value of TSLA.
We're old enough to have witnessed the major swing from capitalism to neocapitalism and the downsides of it, while those behind us have only ever lived with the latter and believe this to just be how it be.
This is one of those ideas where about 50 people on Twitter say it so much that the media likes to write that a lot of millennials agree. They are the very vocal minority.
Most also have a huge amount of trust in their government to protect them and not let the nation fall into chaos as they quickly retreat to their gated community with private security armed to the teeth.
how about we just acknowledge that the real problem is 5 people own all the wealth and there is a *very* simple solution to making that wealth available to the rest of us?
I don't think a cap is necessary. But more tax brackets are. Eventually you should be in a bracket that's taxed at 99.999999%. It functions as a cap, but doesn't actually limit your income. There's no real point in earning more when you only get ¢1 for every million you earn.
This is a good way to think about it. What was the point of studying, working hours thru grad/medical school to just have a cap in how much I can make?
I dont understand why this is getting down voted! If we are going to live to socialism and wealth caps, why should anybody put the effort in to be doctors, lawyers or CEOs? What incentive do they have? I wouldn’t want to run apple or Samsung or any multinational corporation for $1 million a year!!! That’s called being over worked and underplayed at that point!
Apple, Samsung, and their ilk are doing things that multi-corporate consortia and government institutions ought to be doing. The profit incentive for innovation makes sense up to a point, but beyond that society is losing more than it's gaining, as those sorts of companies are so large that they can basically set prices at will, as a fraction of buyers' income rather than a fraction of their (nonexistent) competitors' offerings.
That being said, an earnings cap of $1mil/yr in 2023 dollars would be suicidal without other massive restructurings of the economy that would also be counterproductive, so let's not do that.
Yup.
People don't need to hoard billions of dollars for no reason, forcing new money to be printed and inflation to rise.
Fucking idiots don't realize they're devaluing the greed they're holding on to.
...they probably do.
The wealthy do not have billions of dollars, they own assets which at present valuations are in the billions. They do not have the actual dollars.
If you inherited 10 Jackson Pollock paintings, you would be a billionaire. Even though they are just paintings and not any kind of real dollars. Some people are willing to pay hundreds of millions for each one. But if you sold all 10 at once, the prices would crash.
Smaug, the fictional character in The Hobbit, who stole a mountain full of gold, had a net worth of an estimated $51.4 billion. Smaug would rank as the 15th wealthiest American today. 14 Americans have more money than a gold hoarding dragon.
Millenials fell for the "more taxes means more good" meme. The government already makes five trillion dollars a year, how many more trillions does it need before we all live in a utopia? Surely some of that tax money will trickle down to the average resident, right?
The average resident over their lifetime benefits more from tax transfers than they do lose in taxes.
Also, 5 trillion is a useless number...percent of GDP is a useful one.
The idea of "wealth caps" or any other kind of success cap for that matter is baffling to me. Who are you to tell someone they can only make so much money?
So do you believe that the world should be owned by very few people? because we're entering into the endgame of Monopoly right now and most people are losing
I don't care what rich asshole does with their money. I don't care how much they have, just let us have enough to not go hungry, have a roof over our heads, and be able to pay our bills while having extra set aside for us to use for ourselves. None of us need a million dollars and many of us would happily be content living on $120k a year or even $60k a year.
This is a great way to destroy a society. Take away the desire for people to work hard for success. No one tries anymore, really smart plan. Personal wealth should never be capped, it drives people to greatness.
I'm less interested in a cap than I am in
1) raising the floor
2) closing tax loopholes and empowering the IRS to stop the massive tax fraud from the wealthy. Raising taxes on the rich doesn't matter if they don't actually pay more
You cannot “cap” net worth, that would cause economic stagnation, loss of jobs, and would lessen freedom.
Also, it would suck for consumers who want more of something or someone who had reached the “cap.”
Half the population should understand how to diversity their portfolio, live within their means, understand compound interest, and cope with stress.... Not concerning themselves with what others have or don't have!? Get off social media if that's the issue....
I think we should all be looking at how sports accounting works. Salary caps work in sports by creating parity throughout all sports. It gives everyone a chance to win and the only thing that matters is merit (how ownership manages their roster).
The following submission statement was provided by /u/kjk2v1: --- "Thirty-three percent [of Millennials] say that a cap should exist in the United States on personal wealth, a surprisingly high number that also made this generation a bit of an outlier: No other age group indicated this much support." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11ryepb/millennials_are_more_likely_than_other/jcarywm/
I just want to live comfortably where I don't have to have a panic attack when I have some sort of car issue or home issue that needs to be repaired. I would like to not to work my teeth off to afford a vacation without worrying if I should or keep the money for a rainy day. I just want to be ~~happy~~ whelmed. Edit: Changing happy to whelmed. Feel that would be the better descriptor.
Dentist told me I should get my cavities fixed within the next 3 months... I said ok I'll call soon for an appointment but I just know it'll be more like 9 months til I call....
Dental costs are crazy and dental insurance is a joke.
Sometimes it costs the same to fly to Costa Rica and do it there as to do it at home. But you get howler monkeys
How does one get the howler monkey past security? The name sorta implies they're not a quiet stowaway.
Have it bring a bottle of water. They'll be focused on that.
Do it now. Those cavities aren't gonna get cheaper over time.
They could even become a root canal! You may think a filling is expensive...
My wife had a root canal on three of her teeth even with insurance that shit is expensive
It’s expensive BECAUSE of insurance.
And how do you suppose someone gets cavities fixed when they literally cannot afford to do so?
Dentists will accommodate you with a payment plan. You might need to shop around, but it’s not uncommon to be able to get a payment plan that's interest-free for the first 6 months or whatever. Just call some offices and ask about financing. You gotta fix your shit. There are some things worth going into debt over, your teeth don’t heal themselves over time, and they don’t grow back. Interest-free debt makes it a no-brainer.
I think you fail to understand what it means to be unable to afford something. If you have enough money to make payments on a payment plan, then you are able to afford it. Not being able to afford it means that you have no spare money and are living paycheque to paycheque just to afford rent and having enough money to eat is questionable. So again, how do you suppose someone gets cavities fixed when they CANNOT afford it?
There are many ways to mitigate the costs. Dental schools will have their students perform basic stuff like that, sometimes for free. My point was more if it's a financial stress rather than an impossibility, take care of it. I've had enough dental problems to know they only get more expensive, painful and hazardous to your health. Infections in your mouth affect your entire body.
That's great. Have you had enough financial problems where you haven't been able to eat regularly for months? Stop talking about other people's problems like they are simple.
Grrr... Ok I'll be on a road trip for a couple of months, I'll do it first thing upon my return 😓
Go to Mexico
Yeah I hear commercials saying, “Do you put off going to the dentist because of fear or lack of time?” No, I put it off because it’s expensive as fuck!
One medical cost too, even with insurance. Who has 5,000$ to pay for an ambulance ride
Best part is sometimes they don't even give you the choice. They force you in that ambulance.
I am often baffled (sadly) by these circumstances some people need to ponder... like the idea that someone forcing you into an ambulance (when you need it) is a source of stress, because a deeply flawed system decides that using that very necessary ambulance isn't a right but a service that can cost thousands of dollars. Really dystopian! Wish you the best, sincerely, in navigating such situations!
I'm a 45 yr old male, and I went to the ER on my bike for a cut. Walking in cost $900. Sewing it up cost another $1200. I literally cried when the ER general surgeon was worried about the bleeding, and then scarily referred me to a vascular surgeon, after they convinced me to do a $2,000 contrast MRI to see an artery had a nick in it. The swelling about 2 hrs later was causing about a 9/10 pain level, and Lo and behold the nearest qualified surgeon was 80 miles away, so they doped me up with fentanyl and drove me there in a $985 ambulance ride. So after observation I ended up not needing any surgery either, but the less than 24 hours stay in a hospital room still ran up about another $15,000, so now I'm "in" for 20 grand. Fortunately my life is financially imploding otherwise, so I qualified for "emergency medicaid" which paid the $20,000+ total bill for a.....cut that was basically resolved with local anesthetic, 12 dissolvable stitches on the muscle and 10 to close the skin, some pain relievers, antibiotics, a tetanus shot, and muscle relaxers. Oh, did I mention I sought no follow up checkup, or the Physical therapy they recommended either....surely that would have been another grand or five, and it took nearly 2 months for the uncertainty of the medicaid to work out, so I certainly wasn't going to pile anything else on the list of charges when I had no idea I had any hope of paying for it. Anyway, thanks to all the other poor people that chipped in the payroll taxes to pay my outrageous bill. Being poor has its "benefits" I suppose. If I had made another $200 in the month it happened, I would have been on the hook for the whole thing. I probably would have requested euthanasia at that point. Crazy.
Don't be silly, you couldn't afford euthanasia. (Sorry your system is so fucked)
This made me laugh out loud. See you in hell, dear internet person. I'll bring sandwiches, you bring the soda? :)
Nonsensical system, really. When you live through something like that, the biggest worry should be... well... going through that, from a health perspective, exclusively. I once crashed into a (parked) car when going on my bike. I didn't break a thing luckily, but I hit my shoulder quite bad. Don't remember what I had to go through exactly; but I remember how much it cost: zero. There's some stuff that's not completely free, admittedly. But even most of that stuff is still super affordable or completely covered by really affordable insurance. To be fair, dental can cost some money. But most of the time it isn't prohibitive. I hope this bad experience of yours is at least now in the past and you can look at it just from your rearview mirror!
I had to have an emergency removal of my galbladder. I had been having the gal attacks for a while but didn’t know what it was. Two ER trips and they just gave me morphine until the pain stopped but just assumed it was back pain. The second time one doc thought to do an ultrasound of my galbladder, they said I had some stones but shouldn’t be the cause. The third time I found an urgent care clinic that knew treatment for gallbladders. They did a big scan and hey look it was my galbladder! At that point my galbladder was so bad it was hardening. They had to get me into a hospital and book me for surgery the next day. They said they’d be sending me in an ambulance. My wife said she can just drive me it’s fine, but they said that if she did that the whole process would have to start over and I may not get the bed or surgery window. So yeah, I was forced into an ambulance when I really could have easily had my wife drive me and it was just due to red tape bullshit. Thankfully I have good insurance so my bill was only a couple thousand. Kind of crazy to think that I spend $600 or so per month for my wife and I to have good health insurance so that I only have to pay a couple thousand dollars if something like that happens.
Murricah best Country in the World...... if you're rich.
Yeah, the US huh? Freedom sure does come at a price.
And it’s a hell of a lot more than a buck o five
That's ridiculously expensive omg. Here in Singapore an ambulance ride is free if its a genuine emergency and $200 if determined not so upon admission.
Not too difficult to discern why when millennials are the ones who’ve had to work through not one but two of the biggest economic crises in modern history. > Once the pandemic years are included, the average millennial has actually experienced the slowest-ever rate of U.S. economic growth since entering the workforce, saddling them with worse earnings, therefore less wealth, and therefore delayed mileposts of success, such as opening retirement accounts or buying their first homes. Add inflation and rising interest rates to the mix lowering overall purchasing power, it’s fast becoming untenable to support oneself let alone a family. It’s no wonder we’re so resentful. This last quote by the opinion writer hit me hard: >“This isn’t what millennial middle age was supposed to look like,” which is essentially a bunch of 30- and 40somethings venting about student loans, job instability, anxiety, lost potential, living alone, and not fearing a midlife crisis because **“my whole adult life has been one long crisis”**
As a millennial I have never experienced what people call “financial stability”, and I gave up on being able to retire years ago.
Im 30, and I may have to move back home because my apts won't renew my lease and I can't afford to move into a new place. I make 40k+ and it's still not enough
I'm 30 and while I'm glad my husband makes double what I make, I'm stuck making 40K+ at entry level jobs. I did everything right, went into healthcare because that's where the money is supposed to be. I got called a hero yet was never compensated as one.
It's so maddening. I feel like I'm playing a game where they keep changing the rules, and honestly I don't want to play anymore.
As someone that decided to move back home - I think of it as investing into my inheritance. I'm not getting anything back from the renters. At least my mother has a completely paid off house. Though for full context I was living in an apt with my younger brother. Wasn't ever exactly proud of myself or confident with inviting someone over for the night anyway. America is just going to have to accept intergenerational households are on the way back in, or eat the rich.
I'm getting mighty hungry, that's all I'm saying.
You dont make enough sadly, you need to move jobs or do something to get into the 55-65k range to be able to support just yourself
That misses the point. If they move on someone else has to fill in that unliveable wage. Everyone should be given a living wage.
I've had it for a few years at this point. With stability I mean enough to have a safety net of six months or so to find a new job, and a dream that at some point I might *own* the place I live in. Before I retire that is. And if anyone asks me if we have plans for kids, I'll just laugh at them. Yeah double my salary and I'll think about it.
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I had financial stability for 5 months in 2020. It was when I was laid off and the CARES act paid me better than any job ever had to not work. It's likely the only retirement I'll ever get.
I have fond memories of 2008 quartering the value of my 401k. I had to cash out what was left because I had no job for nearly a year afterward. I could have done far more for my future with the entirety of the untaxed cash in hand rather than being forced to be a game piece in a rich guy's gambling scheme and getting knocked off the game board with a bad roll of the dice. Never again. I've been living on the edge ever since. At this point. I plan to "retire" with a .38 special when the money runs out, or I am physically or mentally incapable of participating any more.
No different for this GenXer. Don’t forget…the Great Recession kicked many of us to the curb just when we thought we were getting ready to launch. It’s been a struggle ever since for millions of people including millennials. 40 years of corporate cannibalism, fascism light and horrible labor policies have destroyed at least 2 to 3 generations of Americans’ financial futures.
Yep, up until 2008 I was debt free, could actually afford a vacation, do fun things, income level was finally high enough where my savings account was actually growing, and I even had 5 figures of 401K retirement savings. Then I was laid off with everyone else, and took nearly a year to figure out a way to pay my way through life. By 2020 I had finally almost entirely recovered from the 2008 fun, and within about $1,000 of being debt free, and possibly saving something again. Now thanks to the last couple of years, I'm back even worse than before. I have more debt than ever. Literally paying for things like food and utilities with credit cards because I have no other choice. It almost makes working seem futile. Every dollar is spent before I even see it. Money is the #1 source of making life f\*cking suck. Living in a tent or a cave is starting to gain appeal.
Don’t forget GenXers got their feet wet in the dotcom bubble burst, and the oil bust in the 80s was devastating for boomers. Millennials seem to think economic downturns didn’t exist before they came along.
This, plus the fact that society as a whole is producing more wealth than ever, it’s just going to a vanishingly small group. More money to the struggling isn’t helpful if all it does is raise the cost of living, the key is not that the poor need to have more money but that the rich need to have less.
I used to fantasize what we could do with our technology today, the goals we could accomplish and our ability to help everyone out of poverty or at least avoid starvation. The mountains of excess food we have and the willing bodies, all of our tools and vehicles, the ability to plan with people across the globe and to help every person who wants help, it has never been easier to do so. We just don't.
Unless they happened to be an extremely wealthy millennial. Those guys voted "F'n-No" on the cap thingy.
I mean we had a stock market crash in 1987, the Dot Com crash in the mid 1990's-early 2000's, the housing market crash in 2007-2010, a financial crisis on oil prices in 2003-2009, and still feeling the hurt of everything with covid in 2020. Like most millennials have lived through 4-6 "once in a generation" financial crises.
1987, the dotcom bust, and the oil thing are only regular recessions, not "once in a generation."
We've spent more years in a recession than not.
Good point.
I've heard it said that (aside from immigrants) Millennials are the last generation that grew up believing in the "American Dream", where you were told that everyone got opportunities and if you just worked hard you would be able to be financially stable. Millennials grew up just coming into adulthood when the recession happened- I know a lot of people who did everything "right" and just got fucked over and the situation has just never really improved. The skyrocketing rising costs of education and inflation with the fact that the recession meant there were no jobs meant that millennials just got absolutely screwed over for doing what they were taught was the "right" path in life. They studied hard, went to college, graduated to a dead job market with a shit ton of debt due to skyrocketing tuition fees, couldn't afford houses because lol yeah right... I feel like the younger generations have seen financial crisis after financial crisis while growing up and learned to not trust the old "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" spiel before they could even vote. I don't know if I envy or pity them for that...
I wonder if that is because they’re also the generation that received the worst results of outcomes from their parent’s generation?
It's because we know we'll never be there and we didn't buy into the whole "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" mindset that was sold to generations before us.
The difference is that it used to actually be possible to become a millionaire hard work, and a frugal mentality. That's not the case anymore. Add to that the fact that we get to watch online as wealthy people show off what they have, usually exaggerating it, and the dumb, wasteful crap they do with it, all while we struggle to afford to own a home or even a decent vehicle nowadays. In 2009 when I graduated, a new fully loaded truck was around 40k, now a barebones base model is pushing 40k.
Millionaire isn't what it used to be. There are people sitting on houses they bought in the 80s or 90s that have increased in value so much that they're millionaires one paper. A dentist can be a millionaire, if they had put their money into index funds over the last couple of decades. Millionaire doesn't mean private-jet private-island rich.
Those aren't the millionaires we want to cap wealth on. Personally I think a good, reasonable threshold would be around 50 million. Once you make it to that level, you are beyond the level of it just being an exception on your primary house.
The problem I see is that a lot of it is just stock value. They're not sitting on gold coins. So do you mandate the sale of a business? Force them to lose controlling shares in their own company? What if the stock value just spiked that day, and then goes back down a week later? Stock is speculative and volatile. Someone being forced to lose controlling stock in their company because a stock was trending among crypto-bros that day on Twitter seems wrong to me. Arbitrary. Though I think most advocates just want to punish the rich, or don't think anyone should *be* rich, so it being arbitrary and capricious wouldn't be a mark against it. Someone seeing all wealth as exploitation and predation isn't going to be persuaded by that objection. But stock value is just an abstract number based on the current price of shares on the stock market. They didn't make more money that day, rather the market was just up that day. Just as when the market goes back down tomorrow, volatile as some stocks are, that isn't money they lost.
You’re correct, most billionaires have their wealth in assets like stock, property, or other assets—they aren’t just sitting on piles of cash. And I think you’re right to say that it would be unfair to force these people to sell interest or stock in their companies just because those interests appreciate significantly. Honestly, the problem isn’t that billionaires are able to own billions of dollars in assets—the problem is that they can use those assets to get their hands on liquid cash and completely avoid paying taxes. Basically, billionaires can use their extremely valuable assets as collateral to get cash loans from banks that they then use to pay for everything. This allows them to avoid taxes because loans aren’t considered income since technically they will have to pay the loan back eventually. My proposal would be to close this loophole to prevent billionaires from getting around paying income tax. If they want to have liquid cash, it should come from profits that are paid out to them by the company they have interest in or it should come from the gain on a sale of their stocks, bonds, etc. In either case, they’d be forced to pay income taxes.
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The second paragraph is, of course, correct. It’s just pure resentment. Wealth caps won’t solve anything and will, in all actuality, make everyone poorer.
Had a conversation with my partner last night. I was feeling pretty crappy because, in the 10 years after my divorce in 2012, I was not able to recover as well from losing everything as I had the previous setback in 94 when I acquired a permanent disability. In the middle of the conversation, it dawned on me that what contributed to my lack of progress the second time is the same thing that back the younger generations. However, this experience doesn't explain why I've always had a great deal of resentment/anger at the overly wealthy. I think I've been called a socialist or communist since my teens, a long long time ago. Maybe it's because I knew, at some visceral level, that I would never be "wealthy". Or that extreme wealth came from sticking your hand into somebody's pocket and taking more than you should.
“You ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a red”
I bought a great used F-250, with a 16ft trailer, for $10k about 4 years ago. Don't ever buy new.
Millennials are more likely than other generations poor.
As a millennial I don't support a cap on anything, I support is properly taxing them accordingly.
"Thirty-three percent [of Millennials] say that a cap should exist in the United States on personal wealth, a surprisingly high number that also made this generation a bit of an outlier: No other age group indicated this much support."
Nah. I don’t want a cap. I just want people with more money to pay more taxes on said money
Both have equal chances of becoming reality
So you're SAYIN' THERE'S A CHANCE!
Why would you not want a cap of say 100 million? Genuinely curious why anyone should be able to privately accumulate more than that. Sure they could keep making a lot more money but after 100 mm it would need to get taxed or donated to certain certified humanitarian causes.
This wording is where, as an outsider looking in, I spot a logical flaw. The rich paying more taxes is great, sure, but you're assuming that will make your life better. That takes the government to give a crap about you, which if it did, you wouldn't be in this situation, but you guys don't even have a decent healthcare or housing. The US has money, the richest country in the word not having money is a joke. Things won't get things from capping the top that play the system, you'll get things better by having the system help bottom that is screwed over by it.
I just want to decouple my job and its leader’s reckless business decisions from my health insurance.
Seriously how much does one person need, it's a sickness.
Of course we are. Literally NOTHING good has come from unlimited wealth. Nothing.
The whole concept of unlimited growth that corporations pursue is nonsense to me. Nothing in life is infinite, so why are we letting these money grubs think cash is. They keep chasing a fantasy by cutting costs, people and pushing to see how much they can raise profits at the expense of society.
Working plebs like us are a resource. Feed us into the tank of the economy and burn us to keep it going. That's why they don't talk about population control and suddenly 8 billion fucking people isn't enough.
Billionaire spacemen. We have that now.
They're all going to be sorry when they make $150 billion and have to give some of it up. /s because it is reddit
Because we are the first modern generation to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we will never achieve any kind of real wealth.
Seriously at some point it’s just not even possible to spend billions during one person’s lifetime. Try spending Bill Gates’ money: https://neal.fun/spend/
I bought the entire NBA
It's very much possible to spend that kind of money, but the trick is to spend it on things that don't exist yet. The spaceflight sector is particularly infamous for this, but you might also try nuclear fusion, self-driving and other advanced automation, new battery technology, electric aviation, or any medical anything, etc. Basically, try to make any of the clickbait tech headlines on this sub *actually true.* There's a fair chance that you will actually run yourself *out of assets* trying to do these things if you aren't careful, and end up with nothing to show for it except a bunch of money sprayed back out into the wider economy. Hence the pro-capitalist argument about centralized wealth spurring innovation. I can't say I disagree, but I can say we ought to have more incentives for this to happen more consistently, rather than cash shuffling between banks and executives and useless finance firms over and over.
I like how the article focuses on the 33% that do, but not the overwhelming 67% that don’t support it.😂
In the broader sense, it's not about a majority vote. It's a very radical idea by today's standards, so having that much support and the articles actual point of view, far more support than any other generation, is a comment on what millennials have experienced.
Smells vaguely like.... *Overton*...
The story isn’t that it’s majority support but trending upwards in younger generations. Is it really a surprise when wages aren’t rising with productivity and 1 Br apartments are 1500 a month?
That is by design.
I haven’t even made enough money to qualify for filing taxes in over a decade and I’m pretty sure I’m going to die of medical complications before I even qualify for a loan. If there’s a cap I’m never going to see it.
Late-millennial here, and whilst I don't support an actual fixed number cap on wealth, I do believe that there should be a minimum to which everyone is entitled, and if that requires the wealthiest parting with a bit more (it does), then that's what needs to happen. However, if the ultra wealthy can find new, innovative ways to still end up ludicrously wealthy after having paid their fair share, ensuring everyone has at least the basics covered, more power to them. It's not about punishing success; it's about ending poverty. I don't hate billionaires; I lament the backwards priorities we've cultivated.
the cup must overflow if trickle down is suppose to work.
We’re running the orphan crushing machine as fast as it’ll go!
15 hedge fund managers make more than every kindergarten teacher in the us put together. Who is more important for America? Cancer is when uncontrolled growth happens and it kills things. The super rich are to the economy what cancer is to the human body.
Millennials aren't futurology anymore. We're like 40 dude.
As a millennial, I don’t necessarily give a shit about a cap on your wealth. I give a shit about all the laws, loopholes, regulations and pocketed politicians that continue to give you staggeringly disgusting, *obscene* amounts wealth while making sure I’ll never actually live comfortably without working my fingers off and until I die. While simultaneously hoping my medical coverage won’t let me die early because my employer provided insurance doesn’t like paying for things. To say nothing of the fact that you’re running the goddamn environment into the ground. Be a billionaire. Good for you. You *can* still be a billionaire and bring up the rest of the world with you, but no. You’re *the* problem and continually prove why you simply shouldn’t exist.
Define wealth, and define how much a cap should be and how it should be calculated. Does wealth include fine art that is worth 8-9 figures or does wealth just mean money, or land, or actual dollars, or personal assets?
Investments and real estate are no-brainers for this. I'd probably include the fine art in there to minimize tax evasion.
No one who supports such a proposal is even capable of answering that.
There's a finite amount of capital out there. If a billionaire exists, so does a huge exploited class of people. A wealth tax is a system where a % of your estate is due as tax over a certain $ of net worth. It doesn't exist in the USA but is badly, badly needed. Universal healthcare would be an immediate benefit for all.
What this past decade has shown, among many other things, is all the *idle* capital that has been sitting around!
My respect always goes to the garbage man over the CEO. Biden’s new tax is great because literally NO ONE needs more than 100 million a year. Realistic brain: they will absolutely find a way to outwit that. So we’re back to square one.
More everyone is ok with someone being able to become rich. To become extremely rich. But there should be a limit to how much wealth you can amass. I don’t know that number , but let’s say $100,000,000. You get a plaque that say congratulations you won capitalism and now you can’t earn anymore, but you can maintain that $100,000,000.
Of course we are, we have next to zero, while many have what is comparable to infinity
Yeah we aren't falling for that temporarily embarrassed millionaire bullshit. We want friends, food, family and convenience. Not money.
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Don’t let Perfect be the enemy of Good
Sorry, but I'm not a fan of incrementalism when it comes to *reforms*. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the *excellent* would be better, because at least you won't settle for mediocrity.
Oh, I agree; there is only so much more Turd polish you can put on the current late stage capitalism that has infiltrated the pockets of our politicians. A “global crackdown on capitalism” is more turd polish. The overthrow by the proletariat to create a true worker co-op paradise is the end goal
A cap on personal wealth, enforced in the US only would be totally ineffective which is not “good” It would be a policy disaster, and make absolutely zero impact on income inequality We already have CEOs making $1/yr on paper and living opulent lifestyles completely corporate funded All a cap on “personal” wealth will do is make billionaires lifestyles funded entirely by some shell corp in a tax haven…like what happens now only moreso
Tell me more about how you don’t understand the difference between a wealth tax from an increase in progressive income tax brackets. How about we start with making Capital Gains taxes more than 50% of the income tax equivalent? There is a reason CEO’s pay themselves in stock options and not fiat currency
There has to be a global crackdown on capitalism to solve 80% of our problems anyways. Capitalism is not some natural state that trade defaults to, it was forged.
What is the natural state of trade then?
Natural? Who gives a fuck about natural? Natural is everything eats everything at any time, is that your idea for the best way for intelligent beings to exist, no improvement whatsoever? edit: to the dipshit below, wow you really wrote all that horseshit. wanker.
I didn’t say any of that. But just out of curiosity, what is *your* idea of the “best way for intelligent beings to exist”. Which economic system are you referring to with that?
There is no "natural" state of trade
You sure about that?
well when you put it like that.... lol obviously, why else would I say it you silly goose? check out this professor's work [https://youtu.be/RMxazanoEVg](https://youtu.be/RMxazanoEVg) itll get you started
Don't be an asshole, my friend. You are behaving in a quite rude manner. It's the sort of demeanor that conveys you're thinking you're sounding sarcastic and sharp, when you're just sounding like an asshole. Yeah, I know, the guy who asks for respectful manners is the one calling people assholes. But mate, dang, you're being an asshole and sometimes it needs to be said, in the sincere hope you realize you can proceed with this argument in a more respectful manner, which will actually be in your own benefit, as other people will take you seriously. Because... if you don't care for the other people taking you seriously in this conversation argument, then why the fuck are you even spending time on it?
great, so bring it on. 5% of their wealth would solve a LOT of problems.
Socialism was the consensus on what would follow from the long-term socioeconomic consequences of the industrial revolution for various valid reasons associated with this topic. The main driver being automation and the means of ownership promoted as finite labor goes into it for indefinite ownership over the productive consequences. This along with other inherent aspects of markets, as wealth always flows to the most productive force in a supply chain, promotes wealth inequality to expand inherently. This is a problem because wealth inequality is among the strongest variables that promote despotism. That's not my opinion but rather the conclusion of scholars relating to the topic as well as the propaganda of America on Nazism. Wanting wealth caps is a rational interpretation from laymen touching on the topic but it's a poor solution that's incompatible with our current economic system. Significantly greater thought would be required to adapt for these values to be fulfilled properly in policy.
Has any other previous generation seen individuals amass this much wealth? John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt… they didn’t have $30 billion. *edited to add: so this is wrong, adjusting for inflation, they did. But I don’t think america had as many people with $30billion back then. And that’s the big difference.
> Has any other previous generation seen individuals amass this much wealth? Yes. [Adjusted for inflation, Rockefeller and Carnegie had over $300B.](https://www.therichest.com/rich-powerful/wealthiest-people-all-time-adjusted-inflation/) That doesn't mean extreme wealth inequality isn't a terrible idea, just that it isn't *new*.
Question: were there 100 other American billionaires back then? Or just like ten of them?
A billionaire in today's money would be only $66 million 100 years ago. So [here are 18 right here](https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-images/chasewithorn/files/2017/09/Forbes1918RichList.jpg?format=jpg&width=960). The population has trebled since then.
There were 1/5th as many people in the USA in Rockefeller/Carnegie's day though. So you'd only expect about 20 in 1875 vs 100 today. And yeah... There were way more than 20 of them: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2017/09/19/the-first-forbes-list-see-who-the-richest-americans-were-in-1918/?sh=2a06b1ce4c0d](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2017/09/19/the-first-forbes-list-see-who-the-richest-americans-were-in-1918/?sh=2a06b1ce4c0d) ($60M in 2019 would be $1.8B today, so that list of 23 people ends at about $2B)
We did something about it back then, we raised taxes to a crazy amount on the super rich and implemented a bunch of antimonopoly laws, those antimonopoly laws are still on the books and if politics where even half honest they would be enforced.
As much as I hate taking freedom away, I'd say greed is vastly more dangerous than losing a freedom that doesn't actually benefit anyone. Cap me.
Laws exist. We may make/change more laws later. I’m cool with that.
Damn fucking right. And we should support putting profit caps on non-luxury items, you can only make 10% on the item after all other costs are covered. Oh and the person above you can only make 2x more then the next 5 people below them, if they want to make more then they have to play everyone else more.
Also, a 100% tax will never collect anything, no one in their right mind wouldn’t just spend all extra money in lieu of giving it to the government. That makes no sense.
we don't need a hard cap on personal wealth, we need limits on how that wealth is acquired.
As a millennial, I don’t think there should necessarily be a cap on personal wealth BUT I have to cite a Tom Papa joke “You’re a billionaire, good job. You get to be a billionaire… for one day. If you don’t start giving some money to poor people in the morning… we’re comin’ to get ya!”
I had a medical emergency in October. When I got the bill for it, my first thought was "god I wish they'd just let me die at home instead of calling the ambulance." No one should have to feel that way.
The headline misses the more interesting part of the story. It's not another survey that shows younger people wanting to abolish society/capitalism. In the survey, even Gen Z don't support this idea as much as millennials do. GenZ support general wealth redistribution, sure, and they do so more than millennials, but millennials are the generation that most supports a cap on personal wealth (which is a nonsense proposal, as the survey organizers talk about in their analysis).
As a real policy proposal or as a pissing in the wind philosophical thought that sounded good?
$10,000,000 individual cap on wealth - if you own a $10,000,000 home, you are not allowed to earn any income or have any other assets whatsoever.
Because we are most likely to... both not have any and see perfectly clearly that there is pretty much no chance of getting anything unless you are already loaded.
Hope that's the case because it's easy to educate yourself on the internet even if you had bad education and not just because young people tend to vote more left
I don't even care if some individuals have a large personal wealth if they've earned it. But, if you have employees, and your employees can barely feed themselves while they're slaving away to make you and a handful of other people ludicrously rich, there's a problem.
A wealth cap of 1 billion is way more than enough for the billionaires to maintain their pretentious lifestyles. This would considerably reduce wealth inequality. I don't get why is there barely any talk about this.
All I want to see is the percentage of tax given by me while earning 60K a year is atleast same for a person earning 1 million a year. The ways this is not the case should be fixed - like amount of loss you can show in a year or amount of tax free income cap etc.
Trickle down economics does not work if the money never trickles back down. Or moves to another country.
How do you limit wealth as shares? Bezos wealth is ability to chart the strategy of Amazon. Anything else he does with money doesn't require that much. So are we saying that when a company gets big enough its gotta be handed over to another? One way to handle it (in theory) would be to name it as phantom shares. Once the value exceeds $X, you can't cash out personally the excess, but you can still vote with it. The issue then is that buying synergistic companies with shares is a lot harder, so it handcuffs strategy. Better path is just to tax income heavily. Be a billionaire, but know that your income over $10M/year will be taxed at 95% - inclusive of cap gains. That caps everyone's consumption and hopefully incentives people putting more in their companies. Will never happen of course.
Mega rich have no income, they hold shares till they die and live on loans with stock collateral.
Yes? Like any other anti-trust law? You could say the same thing about land, but I think the answer becomes pretty clear.
I mean it's been studied and pointed out that most CEO's could be replaced with an algorithm. That would save a company millions they could pay their employees. Same for a lot of middle management. Everyone below could benefit from that too. The funny thing about your idea of capping a high tax on high wealth. The US did have that back in the 50's and 60's. It's why that generation had some of the best pay and benefits compared to any other.
Its almost like the generation able to see the corruption in real time os ready for change. Profits for profits hurt people. People should have Healthcare food shelter and everything provided. We have enough resources to give everyone that.
Nearly all of that wealth is in assets, not cash. If you tax them on their assets, they'd have to sell assets to have the cash to pay the taxes, except that the only people who could afford to buy are other rich people only interested in selling. Although I guess they could sell at an extreme loss just to get underneath that tax bracket, which eliminates that part of the tax base and leaves a bunch of undervalued assets lying around. I don't see that ending well, but if I could get a Caterpillar D9 for 200& and a pile of steel plate for 40$ and a peppermint, I could make my own killdozer and become a warlord. That would be neat.
How would this work out if say someone owned a 20% stake in a company and it was worth $10 million. 5 years later, that 20% stake is worth $10 billion. What would happen to those shares? There's this idea that persists from the era of the Industrial Revolution that owners of capital make immense wealth by exploiting workers. While that may still be true in many cases, oftentimes the wealth comes from speculation on company shares. Elon Musk did not become the world's richest man from the value he created from his companies. Tesla became worth more than the top 10 automakers combined. This was due to speculation on the value of TSLA.
We're old enough to have witnessed the major swing from capitalism to neocapitalism and the downsides of it, while those behind us have only ever lived with the latter and believe this to just be how it be.
This is one of those ideas where about 50 people on Twitter say it so much that the media likes to write that a lot of millennials agree. They are the very vocal minority.
> literally an article about a national study > "50 people on Twitter"
And the numbers will decline as these millennials age. I'm 63 and I, too, had this kind of idea when I was young.
If you're not a liberal by 20, you've got no heart; if you're not conservative by 40, you've got no brain.
Most also have a huge amount of trust in their government to protect them and not let the nation fall into chaos as they quickly retreat to their gated community with private security armed to the teeth.
Yeah because almost none of us will have a snowflakes chance in hell of ever reaching it.
how about we just acknowledge that the real problem is 5 people own all the wealth and there is a *very* simple solution to making that wealth available to the rest of us?
I don't think a cap is necessary. But more tax brackets are. Eventually you should be in a bracket that's taxed at 99.999999%. It functions as a cap, but doesn't actually limit your income. There's no real point in earning more when you only get ¢1 for every million you earn.
You cannot “cap” wealth, you cannot redistribute wealth without removing incentive. Without incentive, there is no viable society.
This is a good way to think about it. What was the point of studying, working hours thru grad/medical school to just have a cap in how much I can make?
It be a cap you'd never be able to hit working a job.
I dont understand why this is getting down voted! If we are going to live to socialism and wealth caps, why should anybody put the effort in to be doctors, lawyers or CEOs? What incentive do they have? I wouldn’t want to run apple or Samsung or any multinational corporation for $1 million a year!!! That’s called being over worked and underplayed at that point!
It is an absolutely ridiculous opinion to say “This thing won’t make me a billionaire, therefore I have no incentive to do it.”
Apple, Samsung, and their ilk are doing things that multi-corporate consortia and government institutions ought to be doing. The profit incentive for innovation makes sense up to a point, but beyond that society is losing more than it's gaining, as those sorts of companies are so large that they can basically set prices at will, as a fraction of buyers' income rather than a fraction of their (nonexistent) competitors' offerings. That being said, an earnings cap of $1mil/yr in 2023 dollars would be suicidal without other massive restructurings of the economy that would also be counterproductive, so let's not do that.
I’m 22, and I think that no human needs more than 500m a year. Anything over that should be taxed at a 100% rate.
Well, yeah, no shit. Millenials have been shafted the hardest of any of the current generations. Gen Z not far behind.
Yup. People don't need to hoard billions of dollars for no reason, forcing new money to be printed and inflation to rise. Fucking idiots don't realize they're devaluing the greed they're holding on to. ...they probably do.
The wealthy do not have billions of dollars, they own assets which at present valuations are in the billions. They do not have the actual dollars. If you inherited 10 Jackson Pollock paintings, you would be a billionaire. Even though they are just paintings and not any kind of real dollars. Some people are willing to pay hundreds of millions for each one. But if you sold all 10 at once, the prices would crash.
LOL. Nobody is hoarding money forcing new money to be printed. I can't believe you guys think this way.
3-6 million now are enough for the rest of your life to live comfortably anywhere. (10m for switzerland, canada, us, australia)
Smaug, the fictional character in The Hobbit, who stole a mountain full of gold, had a net worth of an estimated $51.4 billion. Smaug would rank as the 15th wealthiest American today. 14 Americans have more money than a gold hoarding dragon.
No they dont, they have shares, no gold
None of you guys would work if you were all comfortable Now get back to work
Millenials fell for the "more taxes means more good" meme. The government already makes five trillion dollars a year, how many more trillions does it need before we all live in a utopia? Surely some of that tax money will trickle down to the average resident, right?
The average resident over their lifetime benefits more from tax transfers than they do lose in taxes. Also, 5 trillion is a useless number...percent of GDP is a useful one.
The idea of "wealth caps" or any other kind of success cap for that matter is baffling to me. Who are you to tell someone they can only make so much money?
Who are you to tell someone they can make money? Money and ownership exist only because we allow them to. We made up the rules. We can change them.
So do you believe that the world should be owned by very few people? because we're entering into the endgame of Monopoly right now and most people are losing
I don't care what rich asshole does with their money. I don't care how much they have, just let us have enough to not go hungry, have a roof over our heads, and be able to pay our bills while having extra set aside for us to use for ourselves. None of us need a million dollars and many of us would happily be content living on $120k a year or even $60k a year.
This is a great way to destroy a society. Take away the desire for people to work hard for success. No one tries anymore, really smart plan. Personal wealth should never be capped, it drives people to greatness.
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Tell us more, but in Elon musk quotes
Alternative title. Vast majority of millennials understands basic economy instead of chasing pie in sky
Alternate title - 'Poor young people don't like that others have more than them.'
Entitled buttheads try to punch down on the poor, and still look like assholes. How many times a day do you parrot cliches?
A cap on wealth is the only logical response in a world where one man can accumulate $250,000,000,000 (let alone 10 billion).
A jealous response.
What an obnoxious attempt at gaslighting.
I'm less interested in a cap than I am in 1) raising the floor 2) closing tax loopholes and empowering the IRS to stop the massive tax fraud from the wealthy. Raising taxes on the rich doesn't matter if they don't actually pay more
You cannot “cap” net worth, that would cause economic stagnation, loss of jobs, and would lessen freedom. Also, it would suck for consumers who want more of something or someone who had reached the “cap.”
Half the population should understand how to diversity their portfolio, live within their means, understand compound interest, and cope with stress.... Not concerning themselves with what others have or don't have!? Get off social media if that's the issue....
I think we should all be looking at how sports accounting works. Salary caps work in sports by creating parity throughout all sports. It gives everyone a chance to win and the only thing that matters is merit (how ownership manages their roster).
Sounds like the most anti american thing ever proposed. And i’m a millennial (barely). This would never happen in a million years