He isn’t the economy. The workers are.
Yep. Bad for the economy, good for the people.
Yacht sales will plummet by 5% though!
I think you are confused, why would it be bad for the economy?
“The economy” = rich people’s yachts.
But he’s a Job Creator or some shit
Cuase their job creators we have to treat them special. Job creators can’t go to jail or anything.
You know who else are job creators?
All of the people doing the actual work.
Vietnam would like a word.
Edit: I’m not pro death penalty (latest update has Vietnam actually removing it for this crime due to this case) but just showing the absolute night and day difference between how they treat capitalist that cause death and poverty through their greed.
When they inevitably try to pretend they are pulling business from new York when Mamdani becomes mayor. Please, everyone, use this as an opportunity to show how evil the structures of capitalism are.
It will be a perfect time to explain class conflict to your liberal friends. The interest of the people of New York will be held hostage by capital. And overwhelmingly popular policy will be talk about as “unrealistic” and “poor economics”.
Yes, that is why capitalist must lose their power. They are holding the popular policies of the people hostage. That power should not exist in their hands but the hands of the people.
Capitalism is incompatible with democracy. The economy and politics are not separate. We cannot have a dictatorship controlling our companies and economy and call it a “democratic process”.
Fellow socialist 🙌
Okay, but what if the financial sector launches a capital strike?
Cuba is a great example of the results. Powerful worker state, but it is bottled up and suffocated by the US led embargo.
France is not comparable to Cuba in this scenario
I mean you said it yourself, it’s an embargo. Good luck doing that to France.
Then the world must go on labor strike. Capital requires our consent. Withdraw consent, seize the means of production and begin the class war. We are outgunned, but they are outnumbered, and we can easily get more guns once they can’t get any more numbers.
Viva Revolución, Viva Cuba Libre!
Bernard Arnault is worth 157.3 billion USD. $1 billion dollars is 0.6% of their wealth. That’s fucking couch change. These fucking ghouls are so worried about their precious wealth they are willing to doom all of us.
Plus, he looks like the end of a Q-tip.
Did they base Mr Mackey off a billionaire? “Gotta make my nut.”
Hey y’know what other famously French thing will be deadly for rich people if they’re not taxed?
His source is he made it up.
Actually it has some factual basis. He’s wealthy, it would be bad for him, he thinks he’s the economy. He just has a big, selfish, ego.
These people have the same revenue as a small country, so I can see where they’re coming from.
I still think we should use their bodies as fertilizer.
It could actually be true in the sense that producing 1mil things for 1€ each or producing a single overpriced luxury version of the same thing for 2mil€ is a 1mil€ difference in the GDP.
But I’d argue the first is still a better economy than the second. But economists will only like the second one.
Source: “trust me, bro”
Wealth tax or Guillotine?
✅️ France running up huge deficits because it can’t tax the wealthy
✅️ Wealthy obstruct any attempt to make them pay there fair share
✅️ prime minister after prime minister go down trying to fix the financial crisis
☑️ frustrated
kingpresident calls the estates general…
☑️ this guys head in a basket
Let me fix the first: “France running up huge deficits because Macron spent his whole political career reducing taxes for the ultra-wealthy, and these parasites still pocketed a large amount of France and the EU Covid’s relief money as dividends and buyback schemes.”
You know, I was just thinking how awfully ironic it is that the guy who least wants his head chopped off is going to the people known for chopping heads off, giving them a reason to chop his head off.
Every fucking time.
Goddamned, insatiably greedy motherfucker billionaires.
Confirmed by this quote in the article. Certified motherfucker.
Arnault, who lives in Paris, sparked a French national debate over tax in 2012 when he sought Belgian citizenship. However, in April 2013, he withdrew his application as “a gesture of my attachment to France and my faith in its future”, according to Bloomberg.
Epstein’s bud says it’s a bad idea. France has technology to solve this problem.
“Rich guy says that forcing the rich to pay for their fair share of the costs of having a Society where they can make lots of money, would actually be bad for those currently having to make up for the rich not paying their fair share”
“Making crime illegal would be detrimental for hospitals, electronics stores and insurance companies among others” says Europe’s biggest criminal.
The time for talking about taxing the rich is over. Bring out the guillotines already.
Let’s get the old blood going again.
Seeing that he is French, one would think he should know better than to invite this to happen.
Of course he’s gonna say that
Taxes on the working class are a gigantic portion of our income- billionaires taxes going up would literally be the equivalent of like a parking ticket for a working person. Inconvenient but you pay it and forget about it in a week.
Billionaires could and should be taxed at like 90% or more for income, and there should be a wealth or net worth tax for every single billionaire. The fucked up thing is that we (in the US) HAD THIS TAX CODE until Reagan fucked us all in the ass
The us tax system literally gave us a middle class and built the highways and created the largest economy on earth. AND THERE WERE STILL RICH PEOPLE
THERE WERE STILL OBSCENELY WEALTHY PEOPLE EVEN UNDER THAT TAX CODE
But they didn’t have more money.
I think about this clip from The Boondocks more and more lately
Firstly, that’s just naked projection. Secondly… GOOD.
Sincerely, we need to treat people who can’t or won’t conceptualize ‘enough’ as hoarders with mental illness. He can never use his immense opulence or spend all of what he has, and he can’t be happy with it either. He should be separated from it, given a stipend that will meet all his needs and desires from it while he GOES TO REHAB, and the rest should be reinjected into the economy for social gain, and used to pay for the public programs and systems that made society work to begin with. Mostly because if it never worked he would never have had this opportunity to destroy it for his own pride.
while he GOES TO REHAB
Or we could go back to the precedent of the Middle Ages, and have him learn to free himself of worldly things by spending the rest of his life as an anchorite. Build a cell around him, attached to some remote church, and leave a slot at the bottom for bread and water to go in and shit to go out.
I mean, I can’t tell if this is sarcasm, but also, yes.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
I like that term. Gonna call it financial obesity from now on.
Apart from this guy obviously being biased and a super villain: Nobody who held this opinion was ever able to even give me a rough idea of an explanation how it should supposedly damage the economy. The excessively rich don’t spend most of their wealth (which would induce growth through demand), they sit on it and watch it grow. Taxing it takes not a single cent out of the economy.
In this case we’re looking at proposed 2%. The fortunes of the excessively rich grow by 10% and more in a year. So with this tax they would still get richer and richer. Attach another zero to that number, then we’d be getting somewhere.
Nobody who held this opinion was ever able to even give me a rough idea of an explanation how it should supposedly damage the economy.
Because if you tax the rich, they move away! And that’s clearly bad because…
They take their wealth with them! Just think of all the jewellery that will hang of people’s necks in other countries and all the overpriced art that was never publicly displayed, now not visible elsewhere.
And of course they’ll take all the housing and factories and the land they’re built on, stuff it all in their pockets and fly away with it.Just think of all the jobs. Not the jobs, companies are already offshoring now, of course.
And ignore that companies make such decisions based on productivity, available infrastructure and supply chain networks.
No, they’ll move to less profitable countries because clearly not paying taxes is more important to rich people than making more money.And of course, we can’t tax people when they move away, so we shouldn’t tax them to avoid this.
Because if you tax the rich, they move away!
Yup. This wasn’t a warning about the economy, it was an ultimatum.
I think the point of the previous poster is that they can’t take with them the stuff that they value the most (for their own quality of life) or the stuff that matters for the rest.
Hence “they’ll take all the housing and factories and the land they’re built on, stuff it all in their pockets and fly away with it.” (emphasys mine)
Those threats are complete total bullshit.
If they really prefered an environment free of government intrusion (including taxes) they would be living and conducting their business in a country with no real government, like Somalia.
I think he already moved to Belgium to avoid some of the French taxes.
Or in other words: if an environment free from government “meddling” and taxes is such a great thing, why aren’t they all living in a country with no proper government, like Somalia?
I always wondered what would happen if a big company just left. Like the building, staff, infrastructure and demand for the product/service are all still going to be here, its just “the big money” that moves away.
Whats to stop the country just sticking the flag on the building, writing “National [business]” over the door and just carrying on? The HR dept already knows what staff there are and what they do, the workers already know their jobs. Its only really the people in charge of accounting and resource-purchasing who would have a real challenge.
Extra bonus is that the country is now getting all the profit, so can spend it on schools and hospitals and shit.
Am I being overly idealistic? I can’t think of realistic reasons why not.
We do see this in reality sometimes.
When a company leaves, they usually still own the buildings (assuming they didn’t just lease them). Typically they would try to sell them off. It’s not unheard of that a similar company picks up the location and hires back some of the staff.
Think of one supermarket closing shop only for another to open in the same location.What happens if a company does not sell depends on the country.
When companies left Russia, several stores were continued under new management and afaik some businesses were not sold off but seized. Whether the owners were reimbursed for that seizure I do not know.All that said, I want to repeat that businesses leave countries usually due to lack of profitability. It has no (rational) link to a personal wealth tax.
Small correction: Them sitting on it and growing isn’t quite it doing nothing - for it to grow, the money has to be somewhere in the economy “doing” things. Then the rich person gets money for doing nothing because the company (and by extension its workers) are partially “theirs”.
The benefit of a wealth tax is less freeing up that money, and more so not enabling rich people to spend the money they get for doing nothing on excessive luxuries that only serve to pollute the planet and take up resources that could be used for useful things (and also doing something against excessive wealth accumulation in general, which is imo capitalisms greatest flaw - money leads to more money, and money = power, and we are living in the reality resulting from that)
I think it is more of a threat along the lines of “if you tax me more, I will play even dirtier to keep my wealth, lay off people in companies I am a major shareholder of etc and therefore economy will be worse”. And politicians know that many people will blame the government for any damage to the economy and they therefore bend the knee not to lose their seats. Everything really would be better if people understood who their real enemy is.
Personally, I would argue that taxing them is helping the economy.
Basically, even with only a 2% wealth tax, that’s money that would otherwise just sit in some account as shares or something that would only serve to make the wealthy more wealthy.
By moving the funds to the people by way of taxes, the money can be utilized for social programs, like housing and healthcare for the poor for example. Which would then give those people an easier path to sobriety (if needed), a “fixed address” so they can enroll in job training or simply get a job, since most jobs require you to have a fixed address for seemingly no good reason…
My point is, the money could be used to enhance the lives of all citizens. Rather than just people like that asshole.
In the current day an age, when Rent Seeking is a massive fraction of the Economic structure, people with tons of wealth are actually the main problem since they’re using that wealth to take limited resources away from the reach of the rest (with their higher wealth they can outbid the rest on price) to then rent those resources to the rest, extracting money from them - so for example, they can buy residential and commercial real estate and then rent them to people who need a place to live or conduct business.
I mean, in a way he is right: taking money away from the rich would damage the Economy as it is now and as measured by GDP because so much of what is counted as GDP nowadays is some people extorting money from the rest because they own assets which the rest need in order to merelly survive. If the big asset owners doing most of the Rent Seeking were forced to pay taxes on assets owned, they would have to divest from at least some of those assets, thus reducing their rent seeking activities which in turn would make the GDP number go down (at least at first) simply because the money flows from asset renters to the asset owners would be less and or in other words, there would be reduced trading in the Economy (that this is unecessary trading is irrelevant for this number).
However, less rent seeking would actually be better for everybody else, so the median quality of life would go up even whilst the GDP number would be implying that the Economy was getting worse.
