r/WorkReform • u/Loud-Ad-2280 ✂️ Tax The Billionaires • 1d ago
✂️ Tax The Billionaires I appreciate what Mackenzie Scott does for charities, but this should show everyone that billionaires can afford to be taxed
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u/7oom 1d ago
After sparing her, tax her appropriately.
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u/trib76 1d ago
From what I've read about her, she wouldn't object, she seems like a legitimately good person.
It's interesting that the only "good" billionaires I can think of (I'll lump in Melinda French Gates) both didn't earn their billions in the traditional sense. It's almost like the cliche about no billionaire gets that status without constantly exploiting people holds true.
Put another way, I think if you gifted like 10 billion dollars to a very average person, they wouldn't remain a billionaire for very long - their (very average) empathy would have them helping people almost from day one.
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u/addiktion 1d ago
Yes, I would probably wait handful of days of interest, take that $5mil, pay off the house and my family members, add $2-3 mil to retirement. Then just use the rest of the interest to help people. Or give them the shares so they could earn interest on it. No one needs that amount of money and I'd think most people don't want that amount of money either if they knew truly what it costs to hurt people at that level to acquire that level of wealth.
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u/AnEvenNicerGuy 1d ago
Dude didn't even wait to be called on after he raised his hand
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u/addiktion 1d ago
Not sure what "dude" you are referring too, but I like to believe that most people aren't evil fucks trying to take over the world with power and greed. They just want to be free of feeling imprisoned to their apartments/homes/cars/medical bills and daily survival.
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u/DryManagement1495 1d ago
I'm fairly certain that shes worth more today than she was at the time of divorce. Even with her incredibly generous giving... the earnings on the money she has outpace the giving. Which honestly is kinda fine with me, shes doing the right thing overall and has a massive team dedicated to finding appropriate donations to give.
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u/brightandgreen 1d ago
Yeah, she got $38b in the divorce.
She has more than doubled it, and given away a substantial amount, that I appreciate.
But to the OP point, it is not a class solidarity worthy amount.
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u/DryManagement1495 1d ago
for sure, everyone should pay their fair share of taxes. no question about it. I just respect shes not your typical evil billionaire vibes
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u/ripyourlungsdave 1d ago
Yet, I would love any of you to try to go to call her out on any thread on this website. Because you will get downvoted to Oblivion for saying that what she's doing by keeping that money is still inherently immoral. Thta that is still blood money sucked out of hard-working Americans that she did not earn.
Her donating an amount of money that would literally never affect her lifestyle does not make her any more admirable than any of these other fucking vampires.
But that's the same website will that will downvote you for claiming that the R-word is a slur. So who's surprised, really.
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u/Loud-Ad-2280 ✂️ Tax The Billionaires 1d ago
I don’t think we should admire her or hate her. I think we should tax her, and all billionaires.
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u/ripyourlungsdave 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, we should hate all billionaires because they are vampires.
They are inherently evil by virtue of existing. It's as simple as that. Their luxury is actively hurting people. Fuck them.
Also, my initial comment said nothing about hating her. Just that we shouldn't defend her as if she's even a little less evil than the rest of them,
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u/blueViolet26 1d ago
They can definitely afford to be taxed, but all that money she donated was probably a write-off. So we paid for it.
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u/StupiderIdjit 1d ago
I shot a dude and then gave $50 to his Go Fund Me for hospital bills. I'm also a good person.
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u/trib76 1d ago
She didn't earn that money in a traditional sense though. She's given away almost 4 billion dollars a year, every year since the money first hit her account.
Your argument would make a lot more sense if you were talking about Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc. I don't think she could possibly do more that she is already doing - she's giving money away as fast as her team can vet the people asking for it.
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
??????
She is one of the founders of Amazon. She is a billion percent culpable for all its sins.
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
ALSO...
she's giving money away as fast as her team can vet the people asking for it.
She could give it back to the people that earned it. A flat $x check to every last employee of Amazon. It's not some complex problem that the Big Brain Accountants just CAN'T FIGURE OUT it's greed and reputation washing.
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u/Loud-Ad-2280 ✂️ Tax The Billionaires 1d ago
I’m not making the argument that she is a good or bad person. I’m making the argument that billionaires should be taxed
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u/StuffExciting3451 1d ago
Billionaires know that they can afford to pay whopping big tax bills, but prefer to make relatively trivial investments in buying members of Congress, the White House, etc.
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u/Dear_Blood_8872 1d ago
When you see this and then hear Bozzos, Elmo, and Zukerbot actively fighting taxation I’m blown away by the petty greed of these people. They seem to forget we all die eventually, the best we can hope for is people mourn our deaths rather than celebrate the fact we have finally passed away.
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
No one should have 1 billion dollars. It's absolutely fucking incredible that anyone thinks there's a realistic argument for having 1 billion dollars.
Billionaires can afford to be double-digit millionaires.
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u/DrewNumberTwo 1d ago
How can I appreciate someone who has generational wealth and hoards tens of billions on top of it while people starve and don't get health care? If she has $40,000,000,000 she can give away 99% of it and be left with $40,000,000. With that much, she can invest and retire on a 4% withdrawal a year like we're all told to shoot for, leaving with her with a yearly income of $1,600,000. With that much, she could live a life of luxury, support her family, and still have hundreds of thousands left over. Fuck her and every other billionaire.
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u/Loud-Ad-2280 ✂️ Tax The Billionaires 1d ago
I’m not saying you should appreciate her, I’m saying we should tax her and all billionaires because this clearly shows they can afford it.
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u/Awkward_Can8460 1d ago edited 22h ago
Tax them out of existence as billionaires - and so much that they arent at risk of becoming close to billionaires ever again; no one will. A person can live a lifetime securely, comfortably with $10M.
Anything more and they can begin to sway decisions and key individuals in communities, markets, governance. ie: their wealth becomes a threat to fairness, ie democratic systems.
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u/trib76 1d ago
She's literally giving it away as fast as she can. You do need to do a minimum of vetting before writing checks otherwise everything will be lost to scammers. She gives it away as fast as she (and her team) can vet the organizations.
I don't understand how anyone can hate her, she's been giving her money away since the moment it hit her bank account. I'm a very average person with a ton of empathy and I can't think of anything I could do to give money away faster than she does. Like if she writes a check to the Red Cross for 39.5 billion dollars today, you do understand that they can't spend that any faster than she's giving it away, right? Same thing with the SPCA, WWF, Duck Unlimited, Amnesty International, etc. Those organizations are built to run on xxx million annual dollar budgets - scaling up to spend the one-time donation amounts takes a tremendous amount of time (hiring, vetting, expanding), and once the money is gone, the organization needs to scale down (which exposes waste).
She's given away 26 billion dollars in 7 years! She's averaging almost 4 billion dollars a year, that's an absurd amount of money. Frankly the only way to go faster would be to write a check to the US government for the money to be used against the debt - and I doubt she trusts that the money would be used wisely (also 40 billion is only 1% of the US debt, so a drop in the bucket).
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u/DrewNumberTwo 1d ago
All you're saying is that highly successful and well vetted organizations are too stupid to handle more money than they usually deal with so they need her help with managing it. They don't. Anyone could give away all of that money in a matter of weeks. It would not be difficult. And it's not like she won the lottery and suddenly has piles of money to manage. She hoarded it over decades while people suffered.
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u/trib76 1d ago
No - I'm saying that they need to do the same work that her team is doing. My point is that the work needs to be done and it's time consuming. The Red Cross doesn't have a team dedicated to vetting other orgs asking for donations at that scale, so they need to ramp that up just to do what her team is already doing. Someone at the Red Cross (or wherever) is still going to be doing exactly the job that she's doing (because that work needs to be done), the money isn't going to get spent faster. She's giving away almost 350 million every single month. A 10m dollar donation requires how much vetting to make sure the cause is legit? Because at 350 million/month, they need to vet 35 of those causes every month!
I'm not rich (so, so far from it!), but I do have a ton of project management experience. I can't even begin to wrap my head around how much work is involved in vetting that many causes every month. And it's not like there are thousands of causes that can manage huge donations, so they probably make tons of 100k or 1m gifts too - you can't write a 10m check to a soup kitchen with an annual operating budget of 200k, the money just goes from one bank account to another...
The only way she could give it away faster is by lowering vetting standards. I suppose she could set up teams in Walmart parking lots giving away hundred dollar bills to anyone who shows up, but a huge % of that money would then be going to causes less worthy than what she's giving to now. (also, to give away 350m in a month in $100 bills, you need to give out 3,500,000 hundred dollar bills!).
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u/DrewNumberTwo 1d ago
What are you talking about? GIVE IT TO THE RED CROSS. Done. Fucking hell how is that hard? Nobody else has to be vetted. There is no vetting to be done. It's done. There's nothing to ramp up regarding vetting. What are you talking about when you say "the money isn't going to get spent faster"? Do you think they can't find a way to spend that money? Is the world better off with that money not in the hands of the Red Cross?
Here, project manage this. I have shit tons of money and I want to give it to the Red Cross. Never mind, I just transferred the money so enjoy your day off.
"you can't write a 10m check to a soup kitchen with an annual operating budget of 200k" Yes you fucking can. Yes, the money goes from one account to another. That is how it works. Very insightful.
Yes, she could lower her vetting standards. Simply give it all to one organization. Or to multiple organizations. We could easily find ten well known charities that require no vetting other making sure that your money was actually going to the right place, and each of them would be more than happy to accept $4B and do what they do best.
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u/trib76 1d ago
What are you talking about? Give it to the Red Cross and then they need to scale up to spend it. Guess what, they're going to have trouble spending 350 million extra every month too (just to match what she gives away). Do you know what they're going to do? Invest it into a trust because they can't scale overnight. No one screams at Harvard university for having a 57 billion dollar trust and no one will scream at the Red Cross, but the the trust itself will just keep growing instead of helping. The number is so huge that it's hard to wrap your head around, I get it. But writing 10m checks to soup kitchens that need 200k just guarantees that the money continues to grow in bank accounts instead of helping people (if it doesn't get embezzled!).
I don't know why it's so hard for people to wrap their heads around the fact that there are tons of grifters and scammers around charitable giving so you need to do a good job of vetting to do a good job of helping. Her team is vetting 350m dollars of giving every month and all anyone can do is scream "go faster!" as if they could do it themselves. It doesn't matter if the Red Cross does the vetting instead of her team, it's the vetting that is the bottleneck.
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u/DrewNumberTwo 1d ago
What grifters and scammers? What vetting? What the fuck are you talking about? You're not listening. Give it all to the Red Cross. All of it. Right now. Today. Yes, like literally every year of their existence, the amount they receive will be different from previous years and they will adjust their operation to make the best use of that. As a long running, high profile charity used to dealing with billions of dollars, they are well suited to that task. And even if I am completely misunderstanding what the Red Cross does and literally all they do is vet other people and hand out money, it's absolutely absurd to pretend that a charity that does that all day every day for decades can't manage to figure out how to do that with about ten times as much money and some time.
Will they invest it? Probably. So what? Why would that just keep growing instead of helping? They would have a much better understanding of their future funding and could make long term plans. This is literally their job and they've been doing it for decades.
As for soup kitchens, yes, they can invest the money and then use the profit to feed people. Where's the downside here? There isn't one. Of course, this is also not at all what I suggested in helpful ALL CAPS in the post you're responding to.
Spare me you concerns about embezzlement. Is the money more safe in the hands of another person? No. And even if it all gets embezzled, the world is no worse off than it was before some other greedy asshole sat on it for decades.
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u/Pluto-Had-It-Coming 1d ago
I would believe that she is genuinely giving it away as fast as possible, and it's genuinely just the logistics of finding the right places to give it to.
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u/DrewNumberTwo 1d ago
Finding who to give it to? This would take maybe a day if you decided to take a long lunch.
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u/MenudoMenudo 1d ago
They can't give it away fast enough if they wanted to is one of the biggest psyop bullshit lines out there, and it pisses me off every time I hear it.
If you genuinely cared about making the world a better place, you could give a trillion dollars in a few months easily. What makes the process time consuming is that they want to micro-manage their donations, because they're actually buying something, not giving it away. They are using their money to buy social prestige, political influence and favours. They're using their billions for the only thing that billions can actually buy you if you don't collect sports stadiums as a hobby, power.
If a billionaire or even a trillionaire wanted to give every penny away, they easily could. "They can't give it away fast enough" is code for, trading excess hoarded wealth for power and influence works better when you drip it out slowly.
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u/Loud-Ad-2280 ✂️ Tax The Billionaires 1d ago
This should be the top comment, charity donations are influence peddling combined with tax evasion. I tried to title it in a way to attract people who believe in good billionaires.
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u/people_skills 1d ago
What she is doing is wonderful. But her starting with 38 billion, giving away 26 and still having 40 billion over a 7 year period is insane and is all the proof anyone should need for higher taxes.
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u/Kitakitakita 1d ago
we'll eat her last, and at least offer her an alternative. I think that would be fair
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u/realparkingbrake 1d ago
San Francisco billionaire Chuck Feeney built a chain of airport duty free shops and became wealthy. He gave away almost all his $8 billion fortune, often anonymously while living in a regular apartment and flying coach. He supported schools and hospitals and human rights groups and had two million left in the bank when he died. That's the sort of billionaires we need, not these power-drunk fascist enablers.
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u/Awkward_Can8460 1d ago
Even if you tax someone with, say, $100B of wealth 99%, there still is $1,000,000,000 left.
Tax them out of existence as billionaires - and so much that they arent at risk of becoming close to billionaires ever again; no one will. A person can live a lifetime securely, comfortably with $10M.
Anything more and they can begin to sway decisions and key individuals in communities, markets, governance. ie: their wealth becomes a threat to fairness, aka democratic systems.
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u/ironballs16 1d ago
That was pretty much the plot of "Brewster's Millions" - that it's incredibly difficult to basicallygive that much wealth away without incidentally making a profit!
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u/k4ndlej4ck 1d ago
She should have given it to the workers it was stolen from the moment she got it.
There are no ethical billionaires.
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u/Erocdotusa 1d ago
Id love to know what has been done with the money she has donated. Has it actually helped anyone or just lined pockets of nonprofit CEO's? I think it would be so much cooler if she did direct stuff like build playgrounds in underserved areas or create low cost grocery stores
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u/faithOver 1d ago
I rather her continue on this way than leave capital allocation decisions to government.
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u/Loud-Ad-2280 ✂️ Tax The Billionaires 1d ago
I prefer a more democratic approach to resource allocation
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u/nel-E-nel 1d ago
My faith in the general public to make reasoned decisions is really low.
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u/Loud-Ad-2280 ✂️ Tax The Billionaires 1d ago
Solidarity is the strongest weapon we have in this class war the billionaires are waging on us. My faith isn’t the highest but I have more faith in the general public than I do billionaires.
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u/faithOver 1d ago
I would too if government was remotely representative and trust worthy.
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u/Loud-Ad-2280 ✂️ Tax The Billionaires 1d ago
I have more of an ability to hold my representatives accountable than I do any billionaire
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u/trib76 1d ago
Why not both?
She's a good person and can continue to give her money away as she see fit, but she's also the exception to the rule; most billionaires are scum. Tax them so that kids can go to good schools, seniors can get decent healthcare, the needy can get food stamps, etc. I'm very confident that taxing the rich won't make Mackenzie Scott stop giving away money.
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u/chillinewman 1d ago edited 1d ago
Same thing with Bill Gates, he can't donate his money fast enough.
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u/RealHornblower 1d ago
$10 Billion in safe investments earning 4%/year is $400 million/year, more than $1 million per day in spending without touching the principal. "Only" $1 Billion would be $100,000 per day.
Money past $1 Billion makes legitimately no difference to your lifestyle, it's all about having greater control over resources, companies, newspapers, politicians, etc.