Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted.
That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough.
If they were losing wealth and portion of income, you might have an argument. But they are not and you do not.
The top 1% earn 22.4% of ALL income (AGI). [0]
The top 1% held 30.8% of all US wealth in 2024. That amount has grown from 22.8% in 1989.[1]
>> the top 0.1% of households in terms of wealth held 8.5% of the nation's wealth in Q3 1989. By Q2 2025, that had risen to 13.9% For the rest of the top 1%, the percentages rose from 14.3% to 17.1% over the same period. So the wealthiest top 1% now holds more than 30% of all wealth. Those gains came at the expense of the less-wealthy household categories, all of which lost ground on a percentage basis. The bottom 50%, for example, saw their share fall from an already low 3.5% down to 2.5%. [0]
NONE of this is because workers have somehow become worse
ALL of it is because those at the top have become more greedy, and have been enabled by craven politicians of a particular party who support that.
Interesting I discovered two new-to-me temperature symbols (℃ and ℉), but couldn't find the Alt-0176 ° generic degree sign that shows up on the MS Character Map app. I also found the There Exists symbol ∃ !! I'd been seeking for years; it was so useful since finding out about it in college logic courses... This will be even more useful when the Alt-code fields are all filled in! Thanks!
The solution is to stop taxing human labor/income and to start taxing every financial transaction, from buying a piece of candy, a computer component, a service, a house, a data center, or a share of stock, etc.
Just the volume of Equities + TRACE fixed income/structured + munis + real estate is over $200Trillion. A mere 3% tax on those would put the $6T US budget in large surplus. Add $1.7 Quadrillion of ovrerall payments and a 0.3% tax on transactions (yes, $3 per $1000) would also put the US budget in surplus.
All of it would also involve far less tracking and bureaucratic overhead, and indeed far less govt intrusion into people's lives (i.e., not digging into every source and amount of income).
Also gains on sales of things like stocks and commodities should be taxed proportionally to how briefly they are owned, with an asymptote approaching 100% for HFT.
YES!! I've long thought the tax rates on cap gains should be extremely progressive with holding time, ranging from 99%+ for sub-second holding (HFT) to sub 5% for decade+ holding periods. This would also effectively eliminate the utility of basis reset on inheritance, since the rate for multi-decade holding goes so low.
Also a great idea I saw recently is to treat any encumbrance of a capital asset as a realization event. For example, early investors in a company holding stock may have $millions in unrealized gains. Those gains are 'realized' and taxed on sale of the stock. However, if they take a loan using the stock as collateral, it is not taxed because there is a matching obligation to repay the loan and the stock ownership doesn't change (except in a default). Such loans should be taxed as a realization event, since they are pledging the stock at its current value, not its comparatively microscopic original purchase value.
How not; wouldn't it be straightforward to have tax rate tables based on transaction size? E.g., transaction <$10=0, <$100=0.1%, <$10k=0.2%, <$100k=0.3%, <$1MM=0.4%, =>$1MM=0.5%, with restructuring payments to avoid taxes to carry heavy penalties.
Not many poor people will be making million-dollar+ transactions, and it seems like taxing ALL transactions will help make the rich pay their fair share, as their money tends to have low velocity relative to consumer goods, but they still do a lot of transactions.
EDIT: Also it should have zero taxes on necessities such as food & non-luxury clothing, similarly to how current state/local sales taxes work.
Also, if there is sufficient tax rate and income to do UBI to above poverty level, wouldn't the need for a progressive tax structure become obsolete?
A major benefit of a class action, especially for complex cases, is that the costs of prosecuting the lawsuit are spread over many plaintiffs. Pursuing an individual lawsuit in federal court can cost well into six figures, which is not a good bet if your potential recovery as a single plaintiff is in the same range. And that is assuming the large corp you are suing doesn't do the usual tactic of burying you in papers, spurious motions, and every trick in the book to run up your costs in money and time.
Class actions bundle those costs for 'all plaintiffs who are similarly situated' and the judgements are also for all plaintiffs at once, so class actions are where large companies can be properly stung.
This is also why so many companies put clauses in their contracts that you agree to forego any possibility of participating in a class action.
So, if you are subject to a systematic malfeasance by a company, the best route is a class action; they've already got it setup that you'll almost certainly fail trying an individual action, unless you have very deep pockets and close to a decade of free time.
Of course attorneys can take on individual cases on contingency and make viable a case where the plaintiff lacks the spare six-figures of costs to even start the case.
That does NOT mean there is no effect beyond "case valuation".
Attorneys cannot simply take every case on contingency, and when the [potential reward]/[cost] ratio is not sufficient, the attorney must pass, and no suit will be filed.
Class Action literally makes it POSSIBLE
This is especially true where small-dollar harms are being done, but at scale of millions, where ripping off consumers is systematic, or where harms such as pollution affected many.
He engineers perceptions, finance, and govt funds, not technology. Every report and available evidence shows he is barely technologically astute, nevermind genius; the accomplishments of his teams are despite him not because of him.
Which is why a better description would be: The Greediest Man On Earth.
> Every report and available evidence shows he is barely technologically astute, nevermind genius; the accomplishments of his teams are despite him not because of him.
In particular, nothing that comes out of his mouth regarding AI makes any sense.
And still, people listen to him as if he was an expert. Go figure.
His latest bullshit was about Tesla cameras and fog/rain/snow - on an investor call, no less - "Oh, we do photon counting directly from the sensor, so it's a non-issue".
No. 1, Tesla cameras are not capable of that - you need a special sensor, that's not useful for any real visual representation. And 2, even if you did, photon counting requires a closed "box" so to speak - you can't count photons in "open air".
I just don’t get it? Do people hang off his every word just because he’s rich? What are they expecting for this worship… it’s not like he’s going to start throwing $100 bills to people because they agree with him on Twitter
Seen from the other side of the Atlantic, I've regularly felt that the US is rather prone to hero worship, see e.g. the passion dedicated to presidential candidates, former presidents, billionaires, but also how the main characters of pretty much all American biopics I recall can't ever be wrong.
If my observation is correct, I guess what we're witnessing with Musk could be a case of hero worship – and in any narrative in which Musk is a hero, he's of course right.
> Both SpaceX and Tesla are accomplishments if you consider where their competitors are.
CATL, BYD, and other Chinese manufacturers are absolutely killing it at Tesla's expense, Because their markets have actual, sharp-elbowed competition requiring actual innovation.
It takes a lot more effort to be first. When they were making the roadster, who else was interesting in BEV?
For SpaceX, who is landing rockets for reuse?
With all due respect, China at this point does seem to only get in when the early adoption is done. Then they just throw state money at the problem to catch up. They might be innovating now but they left the hard work to someone else
> China at this point does seem to only get in when the early adoption is done.
China started strategic planning on renewable energy in 1992. You're sorely mistaken if you think China intends to merely "catch up" - they are gunning to be the leader, and have the fundamental research to back the aspirations.
> For SpaceX, who is landing rockets for reuse?
Just Blue Origin. Commercial space is new and inherently has little competition; SpaceX is rightfully a pioneer. Traditional government space programs in Europe, the US, Russia or China were never cost sensitive on national security payloads, or prestige manned missions - maybe a bit on the science missions. China - like the US and few other countries with the research, industrial and GDP foundations - can go from zero to one in any field it chooses to prioritize[1], and has done so on a manned space station - which may be the only one in orbit come 2030.
1. Underestimating an adversary is one way to get nasty surprises. The US is currently playing catch-up on hypersonic glide weaponry.
Perhaps money alone is not a reliable factor, and there are certainly confounding variables, such as poor people having low access to healthcare including contraception and education about options and how to use it.
More important than money is economic security, the ability to expect a reasonable long-term access to a sound source of income.
Having to worry whether you'll be laid off next week and not be able to get new work, and have that worry be constant over a decade is a real discouragement to having children.
Having a stable situation in life is vastly underrated, and not easily measured by current net worth or income.
Maybe think for a second from the perspective of a couple or woman who WANT to have children. The problems they face in today's economy where both people need to work full-time just to survive are huge, and it seems even crazier to add the time and money costs of a child, let alone several.
The way to change all of that has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with economic and labor policy
Society decided it was OK to have the top 1% control 27% or all wealth and the top 10% control 60%, and allow companies to pay wages so low that a person working full-time cannot even get out of poverty, so 25%+ of the workers at the largest employer qualify for food benefits (and the employer even gives employees seminars how to get benefits), while the leaders/owners of those companies rake in more billions every year.
Society decided it was OK to make sure health care is expensive, incomplete, and bankrupting for any unexpected event.
Society decided it was the mothers who are responsible for all childcare and provide only minimum assistance for critical needs like prenatal care, and day-care.
You want more babies? Make just a few changes
Change requirements so corporations are required to compensate their employees merely the way the original US minimum wage was specified (including in the 1956 Republican Party Platform): So a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education. Recognize that the companies trying to exploit their workers by paying less so their full-time employees need govt benefits to feed themselves are the ones exploiting welfare, and do not have a viable business model, they have an exploitation model.
Add making healthcare sufficient and affordable for all, including children and support for daycare and the time and effort to raise children.
Change those things, and instead of a couple looking at making an already hugely insecure future even more insecure by having children, they would see an opportunity to confidently embark on building a family without feeling like one misfortune or layoff could put them all in the street.
Do you have a citation that the US federal minimium wage ever had the objective that "a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four" because I can't find it in the Wikipedia entry[1] or other top level search results. I also don't see this idea in the 1956 Republican Party platform[2]. At best from reading a few other sources it looks like at its peak in the late 1960s it would have been enough to keep a family of three above the poverty line (though that hardly implies they could afford a mortgage and higher education).
> a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education.
Here’s the problem - some people will still make the choice to have ‘get ahead’ by having both partners work. They will then use their relatively greater economic power to get better housing and more stuff. So others will join them, and they will bid up housing (because it’s the most important thing) until we’re back to where we started and even those who don’t want to do that now have to.
It’s a sorta tragedy of the commons situation.
The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Because until we have one or the other (or both) people will just keep bidding up accomodation to the edge of what’s affordable on two incomes.
Simpler "fixes": Prevent corporations from owning single family homes and don't allow anyone to own more than one single family home.
It'd crash the housing market, making homes MUCH more affordable, immediately. As corporations—who currently own 25% of all single family homes in some markets—are forced to sell off their inventory.
They could still own multi-family dwellings, just not single family homes.
The wealthy would just build multi-family dwellings for themselves, owned by corporations (that they own), and rent them to themselves. So it wouldn't really interfere with their rich lives much.
Yes, there will likely be that phenomenon, but will it occur faster than the approx 2% level of optimum inflation?
>>The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Creating a universally-available baseline lodging situation for everyone is certainly a public good that would yield a LOT of benefits from eliminating homelessness (benefiting not only the homeless but also everyone who their problems affect) to promoting family stability.
Whether the best way is to incentivize a glut, subsidize social housing, or just provide a housing stipend for anyone in need, another system, or some combination of all-of-the-above should be subject to study and experimentation.
Evidently, the requirement for democracy in the US to survive is for the people who failed to vote for the only viable alternative to Trumpism must feel the suffering they are happy to visit on others, and so recognize that voting for "my team" incompetence is a bad idea.
The suffering is only beginning. It takes an insanely long time for large systems to show effects of bad decisions. Usually the party that has wrecked the economy in every presidency for the last 50 years benefits from the lag and the party of recovery gets blamed, putting the wrecking party back in power. Perhaps this round of the wrecking party will be too effective, and blame will go where it belongs.
>>"...She asked for an extension to complete her treatment, or at the least a short period to consult with her medical providers about whether and how she might be able to return to work before the treatment was completed. .."
>>"An extension of Annie’s leave would have cost MongoDB nothing. We made it clear that they did not need to pay her or hold her job open for her. We just asked them not to fire her while she was in such a vulnerable state, as we feared that would result in tragedy. We just wanted a little more time to get her stabilized."
There is no plausible need of management that would outweigh simply letting someone stay on the books as "employed-on-unpaid-leave" for some extra weeks or months.
Whoever did this should be held personally responsible for negligent harm.
And yeah, never touching their software, IDGAF how useful it is.
But only to the extent that the regime fails to get its way.
If the regime continues, they will definitely push us back to a dark age, partially intentionally, partially through not caring about the future or being too stupid to figure out the consequences. And Theil, Musk, Vance and that whole lot are part of the crew pushing for that — technology for me but not for thee.
That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough.
If they were losing wealth and portion of income, you might have an argument. But they are not and you do not.
The top 1% earn 22.4% of ALL income (AGI). [0]
The top 1% held 30.8% of all US wealth in 2024. That amount has grown from 22.8% in 1989.[1]
>> the top 0.1% of households in terms of wealth held 8.5% of the nation's wealth in Q3 1989. By Q2 2025, that had risen to 13.9% For the rest of the top 1%, the percentages rose from 14.3% to 17.1% over the same period. So the wealthiest top 1% now holds more than 30% of all wealth. Those gains came at the expense of the less-wealthy household categories, all of which lost ground on a percentage basis. The bottom 50%, for example, saw their share fall from an already low 3.5% down to 2.5%. [0]
NONE of this is because workers have somehow become worse
ALL of it is because those at the top have become more greedy, and have been enabled by craven politicians of a particular party who support that.
[0] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-the-1s-share-of-...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/30/income-to-be-in-top-1-percen...
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