headline but I couldn't agree with him more.

Government is $4 trillion

Philanthropic is $360 billion, 40x less than the private sector.

I found those figures instructive.

“If you’re going to have true social change, real societal betterment, it has to start with the private sector.”

I don’t disagree. It’s a free-for-all when you open that one up for discussion, but defining what corporate social responsibility means and voting for leaders in that area with investment dollars has a lot of merit.

Problem solved.

Everyone's brains just went splat. I know. Doing something that makes sense, instead of simply taxing labor is too much to comprehend. Taxing wealth not work. What a concept.

If 50% of someone's portfolio is already after tax money, i would think that taxing the unrealized gains is asking to pay taxes on the return from money already taxed.

Since the gain is unrealized, your taxing someone on future earnings on money already taxed.

At over 5 million in net worth maybe it should.

If I had 5 million right now I could give half of that away and STILL have enough money with 2.5 Million to live at my current income level until I turn 100 without making any investment or having any interest at all. If I put it even into very conservative investments like bonds I could do even better over time.

You don’t need 5 million to exist or survive or to even thrive. So what if your money over that is taxed twice.

They'd invest in a foreign market, or buy foreign goods. And currently we have no way to track that kind of transaction, so we couldn't say, "you moved X to this market, so your bill is Y."

There's also the impression that invested money is not generating any economic activity, or is just generating economic activity for a handful of people. There are a lot of positive downstream effects from investing money in the stock market.

On the whole, I agree with the OP though. Too many executives are comp'd way out of line with what they need or earn for their company. Everyone here bitches about CEO's, but that's table scraps. There are only 500 CEO's of Fortune 500 companies, and only a subset of them are paid obscene amounts of money in salary every year. The problem is when high level execs are comp'd huge amounts of stock that have value, but are not truly taxable income. And when those assets are eventually liquidated and taxed, they're not taxed at the rate you or I would pay for equivalent salaries.

8 people own as much wealth as half the planet.

Maybe realistic wealth taxes wouldn't be that hard to sell, even though the billionaires own the media.

Elizabeth Warren says the game is rigged and she is right.

http://nordic.businessinsider.com/the-end-of-political-parties-us-elizabeth-warren-grassroots-progressive-2017-4/

. . .i'm anti-confiscatory taxation. Taxes the same $ twice seems to fit the definition of confiscatory.

When you pay sales tax on something bought with money you payed income tax on it is “double taxed”. The estate tax on money already taxed on income is “double tax”.

You can literally take any tax you pay with money that you were taxed with as income and say it’s “double taxing” the money to tax it when you earn it and when you spend it.

I borrowed 100K and bought an acre of waterfront property in a country I have never visited. I sold it a year later and made a 75K net profit. Imagine how many years someone without my credit / means would have to scrimp and save to "save" 75K. Folks with wealth should have to pay part of it for their wealth's "safety". That way there will be more opportunity in the future. Letting capital gains build year after year without paying any taxes on increased net worth, and then handing it off to the kids untaxed is ludicrous.

Some people pay close to half of their "wages" in one form of tax or another. Sales, property, income, ss, medicare, electricity, cell phone, and a tax on everything you touch.

Our system is rigged so the wealthy get wealthier, and it is harder for working fools like myself to break out. We are taxed to death.

And i don't agree with your point, but i can't get behind double taxation.

On the 60 billion they "made" by our corrupt system built to help the rich get richer.

What would you do?

I'm all ears.

Aside from sales tax, i don't get taxed twice on the same money. Property taxes are deductible. State taxes are deductible.

You're all ears? I don't think so. You just proclaimed a solution. Why would i think you were open to other ideas?

You want a couple (taking you at your word that you're really open):

- Tax dividends far more progressively. Taxes on dividend payments max out at 58.3% of wage income rates.

- Do the same on capital gains, which actually DISCOURAGES near term (not short term but 1 to 3 year) sell off, which would stabilize markets and somewhat mitigate speculation on a day to day basis, and narrows the equality gap by making the same nominal volume (a half million, for instance) of money closer and closer to the same rate as one would pay on income.

- Raise the rate on true short term gains to the max marginal income from wage rate. No progressivity. Just 36%, after the first 10k. Greatly discourage short term profit taking and speculation.

- Raise the cap on SS and make medicare and medicaid progressive. Reduces the need to borrow against the SS fund, enhancing the solvency, and discourages a need for further tax increases on more modest incomes because debt service no longer increases faster than GDP growth.

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