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‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’: mayor Zohran Mamdani in his own words
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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politics
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simple solution, tax rate goes up by margins based on the standard deviation from the last year's income mean. for income more than one standard deviation above the mean, your tax rate for that margin is the percentile rank of your income compared to the last year's incomes. something like that would be fair. then mandate certain percentages be spent on education, welfare, etc. anything left over in the budget from the last year gets split evenly among all taxpayers.
That's actually a really simple and neat solution. My only worry is there's minor possibility that it could be abused, but not nearly as much as current systems are.
yeah, loans and hising income.overseas, stuff like that. guarantee 5% for the irs budget and regulate them to track down income tax schemes.
there would be some struggle, but things would level out after a couple of decades, and head towards real prosperity.
of course the idea is rough, you'd want narrow margins, and the ability shift it if there aren't enough high earners, and to apply the same scheme to corps too. all sorts of edges cases and fail points to consider.
Here's the problem: Zuckerberg and Bezos have an income of $1/year.
Of course, they also earn a tonne of shares, but you can't tax that until they cash out. Which they don't, because they don't have to - if they need cash, they take a loan, meaning they have negative income.
And if you start taxing unrealised gains, they'll think of yet another method of ignoring it, while you'd be killing all the middle-class people who've invested money in stock.
bezos takes a smallish salary, I don't care about that myth, or them, or unrealized gains. we need to rebalance the tax system. if unrealized gains are really such a loophole, then tax borrowing against it. This would hurt small borrowers too. so what?
the rich man loan problem is a red herring. if we ever rebalanced the system, there would also be political will to close loopholes. thus tax code can be directed at large borrowers or some other solution. your response is the "oh it is hopeless so don't consider it" crap brought up on reddit every time this subject comes up.
I agree, but you can't "not care" about these things unless you want to bankrupt the working class.
I didn't say "it's hopeless", I said it's extremely difficult to do that without fucking over regular people.
And if it's something that's "brought up every time this subject comes up", then you'd think there's some merit to it, no?
even if you consider moving the goal posts to include capital gains, most working class, earning far below the mean, as median income in the us lags the mean significantly, most investments are tax deferred accounts covered under legislation already.
you've moved the goalposts to "taxing unrealized gains" by billionaires to evade the essential truth that tax margins are out of whack.
then you only continue to "discuss" that far off goalpost. you are a troll.
How is including capital gains "moving goal posts"? What are you talking about?
WTF? I didn't, the other guy did! Did you accidentally reply to the wrong comment? I'm so confused...
your statement doesn't follow from mine. bankrupt.the working class? they would be in the proposed tax margin.
you are just gibbering because taxes.
If you tried reading what I wrote, you'd see where it follows from your comment.
You're just parroting the age old "tax the rich" without a second thought to the pitfalls and risks there.