We should just go back to like 80% tax rate after $100M income.
Tax assets.
I suspect very few people report income in excess of $100M and an 80% bracket would do very little for society other than a vindictive gesture to placate the masses.
Not saying we should or shouldn’t…but it’s not gonna fix all our problems like people think.
The napkin math says: 3900 employees. 400M is 2435x median income in the company, so that's $164k. So if we gave the CEO the same income as the median, and split the 400M across everybody else, they'd all have received a $102k bonus, a 62%-of-median-income bonus.
You tell me if a 62% bonus for the year would make any difference in your life or not.
It’s ridiculous that so many users of this startup accelerator forum want to ban private ownership. I guess I’ll bite…
Why would anyone start/own a company if the government is just gonna liquidate your legal ownership? It would be more lucrative to find the easiest job and do the bare minimum than be CEO under your half baked authoritarian system.
But why is this even a response in the first place to OP? Stick to the topic or else you come off like a religious zealot.
I don't know. Ask the people who started companies when the top marginal rate was approx 90%. Seemed to work out ok for them.
I have not proposed banning private ownership. The issue is how much of the revenue from a corporation can end up as private income. You may see those as connected, or even the same issue. This is a problem, in and of itself.
And your suggestion that anything remotely similar happened to the Reagan era corporations is plainly false.
> And your suggestion that anything remotely similar happened to the Reagan era corporations is plainly false.
This is getting tiresome. Highest marginal tax rate in the pre-reagan era was around 90%. People started companies. People got rich. Not Elon rich, or Bezos rich, but rich. The 90% tax rate didn't prevent them from being rich, it limited how rich they became relative to their income/compensation.
What's so special about the Moderna employees? They already make much more than the median American income. You're redistributing wealth from the ultra rich to the rich. Even if the USGOV took 100% of that $400M, that'd be a whopping dollar per American.
History is littered with failed "utopian" communist/socialist states. The ultra rich will always be able to avoid taxes legally or illegally. They're not gonna report income that gets taxed at 90%. The math doesn't work out. If we magically take 400M additional taxes from 1000 individuals annually that wouldn't even cover our federal debt obligations.
EDIT:
It's telling that you need to resort to quips about goal posts. I suggest you take a moment to read about history and macroeconomics...your brain must be tired from all these mental gymnastics.
I didn't sidestep it at all.
If the top marginal rate is 80%, a company might think differently about how to distribute its revenue, and one option would be a more egalitarian distribution.
But even if the company doesn't, the tax rate itself creates redistribution options to the entire public. So the same sort of scenario applies, except that the beneficiaries might just be 2000 people in some sort of particularly acute situation, unrelated to moderna. You tell me if you think that would make a difference.
Also, tone policing is generally discouraged on HN.
Who do you think maintains supply chains? Who is gonna sell food, energy, and build infrastructure? Entrepreneurship and capitalism for all its ugly tendencies has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.
Where does this ideology come from that says people will produce goods/services for free? Nobody is going to build homes or drill for oil without a financial inventive.
Share with me your fairytale about how we’ll all have apples/cars/whatever without free enterprise.
People like you would rather see the world burn than see the presence of the elite, who will always exist.