Are you a billionaire worried about a wealth tax?
Perhaps consider getting a second job, and stop buying coffee and avocado toast.
Pull yourselves up by the bootstraps and do a better job of saving your money.
Seriously though look how much these three have increased their worth in the past couple of years.
Elon Musk
$180B
+$43.1B YTD Change
Jeff Bezos
$139B
+$31.8B YTD Change
Mark Zuckerberg
$90.3B
+ $44.6B YTD Change
Income inequality is at an all-time high. Don’t tax businesses, tax these people and break up their monopolies. One step to ending income inequality is real market competition – dismantling monopolies, and oligopolies and reducing the red tape in starting new businesses.
Howard Schultz Another Billionaire who is out of touch
View this post on Instagram
No one would have problems with billionaires like the former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz in this country if all their workers got paid a real living wage. No one earned a billion dollars on their own.
Schultz was born in 1953 and lived when the economy was growing. He got help from the government growing via subsidized housing. Affordable housing funding was cut by 70% in the 80s and has never come back.
These billionaires do not understand people are struggling. Something needs to change.
Income inequality is not good for society
Once income inequality hits a certain point society and/or empires collapse and it would be good for everyone, including the billionaires, if we balanced out things in the United States. Some new ideas like Baby Bonds have been introduced in Congress. There seems to be a wider acceptance that we need to tax the ultra-wealthy more, but the Supreme Court will soon hear a case that could affect broad swaths of the U.S. tax code, corporate revenue and federal wealth tax proposals.
Upper-income households have seen more rapid growth in income in recent decades
The growth in income in recent decades has tilted to upper-income households. At the same time, the U.S. middle class, which once comprised the clear majority of Americans, is shrinking. Thus, a greater share of the nation’s aggregate income is now going to upper-income households and the share going to middle- and lower-income households is falling.
The share of American adults who live in middle-income households has decreased from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2019. This downsizing has proceeded slowly but surely since 1971, with each decade thereafter typically ending with a smaller share of adults living in middle-income households than at the beginning of the decade.
Income growth has been most rapid for the top 5% of families
Even among higher-income families, the growth in income has favored those at the top. Since 1980, incomes have increased faster for the most affluent families – those in the top 5% – than for families in the income strata below them. This disparity in outcomes is less pronounced in the wake of the Great Recession but shows no signs of reversing.
From 1981 to 1990, the change in mean family income ranged from a loss of 0.1% annually for families in the lowest quintile (the bottom 20% of earners) to a gain of 2.1% annually for families in the highest quintile (the top 20%). The top 5% of families, who are part of the highest quintile, fared even better – their income increased at the rate of 3.2% annually from 1981 to 1990. Thus, the 1980s marked the beginning of a long and steady rise in income inequality.
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram