this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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If the US actually taxed someone like Bezos a fair amount to narrow the wealth gap, Bezos would just go to another country that will gladly accept his enormous amounts of money and help him move his assets & businesses over. The US would then lose a very large chunk of money, and as we all know, the US wants to be "The BEST country in the world", so that's not something they'd willingly let happen.
Maybe it's not that simple, but I think that's the general reason we haven't seen the ultra-rich tax increases we all want. The politicians like money, the rich like political power, and the US wants to be the biggest and bestest. Just like a peanut butter jelly sandwich, you can't seperate the peanut butter & the jelly once they're put together.
The reason we haven't seen those tax increases in the ultra-rich is that they have a direct line to the legislators that the common folk don't have. They will spend a billion dollars if that will save them one dollar in expenses. It's cheaper for them to buy a senator than to pay a fair amount of taxes.
That's exactly what I said but maybe I was misunderstood. Or maybe the peanut butter jelly analogy wasn't tasteful.
This argument would make sense if tax rates didn't use to be much higher. They didn't flee back then.
The rich has paid the politicians to make it this way, and I'm saying the reason it hasn't gone the other way is because the rich & the politicians are butt buddies. I feel like that's the core of my argument so I'm not sure how it doesn't make sense.
Plus none of this is certain anyway, they might flee, they might deal with the taxes, they might just say fuck it and get away with it because if you have billions of dollars, what's stopping you from hiring a private task force/protective service of your own...?
As long as they remain US citizens the tax laws apply. If they stop being US citizens make them register as foreign agents and publish all lobbying attempts. In addition we should make any organization that is not >50% owned by US citizens a foreign controlled entity and remove their ability to lobby in private. There are other changes that would need to happen like making it illegal not to be able to trace ownership of an organization to an individual but its better than nothing.
At this point almost anything is better than what were doing now. Its getting really old feeling like we're a hostage to these people. If they are to tied to the economy as a whole that doing something as simple as making them pay a fair amount of tax they need to have assets stripped from them until they aren't a theat any longer.
The problem I see with this argument is the "we need to do this, and then this, and then this". If it were that simple to make changes, the rich would be taxed fairly already. We're having trouble making one change, how would we accomplish a series of changes? I'm not defending the rich. I'm just saying how it is and arguing there's more to it than just "kick the rich out" and/or "tax the rich".
I probably just took this meme too seriously. And like you said, I'm feeling a hostage to these people as well.