MartianNight
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User ID: 1244
You write this as if the concept of a wealth tax is completely unexplored territory, but in reality many countries already have a wealth tax, including most European countries. They simply assess your net worth for tax purposes on the basis of the assets you own: bank balance, stocks, bonds, property, etc. For private companies it's based on the book value of the company according to the latest financial statement. For shares of a publicly traded company it's simply the stock price at December 31 multiplied by the number of shares you owned.
So if the US wanted to create a wealth tax, it's not that hard to figure out. You can just copy the tax law from e.g. Switzerland.
If the government were to take shares away from Musk to take partial ownership of his companies
Ah, I see there's a misunderstanding here on what it means to tax a person's wealth. The government does not want to be paid in shares. They want to be paid in cash, where the amount is a percentage of your net worth. How you raise the money to pay your tax bill is entirely up to you. You can use other sources of income, borrow against your shares, sell stock, whatever.
In theory this can be tricky for people who are cash poor, own a lot of stock, but are restricted from selling it (e.g. immediately after an IPO) but in practice this is not a problem. All billionaires in America have figured out how to buy mansions, yachts and private jets while avoiding anything that resembles a taxable event. I'm sure they can figure out how to raise cash to pay their tax bill, too.
"Worst" case companies will start paying dividends and real CEO salaries again. They only stopped doing that because it allows shareholders and CEOs to dodge taxes under the American tax regime (since dividend and salary payments are taxed as income, while capital gains are only taxed when they are realized, which can be deferred indefinitely). If that trend is reversed nothing of value is lost.
MartianNight
6d ago
Based on a market cap of 2.5 trillion and 18.7 billion/year revenue, SpaceX has an EV/R of around 135. (For reference, an EV/R of 3.57 is typical for aerospace companies according to the first source I could find.)
Clearly the valuation is almost entirely speculative rather than based on current fundamentals. Of the three segments, it seems like the AI branch has the highest growth potential.
Here's another random article: Top analyst: 71% of SpaceX’s $2 trillion value rests on AI.. Of course, that's also just an (expert) opinion, but the fundamental argument seems sound.
Why would you pay >100x revenue for the space company when they already cornered half the market? Starlink already has over 10 million users; how much bigger can that number realistically get when most people will only use satellite internet as a last resort, when fixed and mobile networks aren't available? The only part that doesn't have an obvious ceiling like that is xAI.
MartianNight
6d ago
I'm not sure what your definition of fake internet shit is, but obviously a large (majority?) share of the SpaceX valuation is xAI; it's not all about rockets and space. And xAI is essentially a copy-cat of OpenAI/Anthropic/the other tech companies chasing AI.
As for the space operations of SpaceX, it's not really clear to me what kind of innovation you expect here. In 2025, SpaceX already launched more rockets than the rest of the world combined. They've established a reputation as being cost effective and very reliable, which is great but also means it's hard to drive costs down further or become even more reliable. From that perspective, it seems like it's practically impossible to significantly grow their core operations.
I don't think that's it, because in most cases the nonconsensual videos are professionally produced too; this is obvious from the acting and grooming and multiple camera angles and literally everything that gives it away as a professional production.
It's just part of the great censoring of the internet. You cannot even search for rape porn on Google or Bing anymore. Try it! Turn off safesearch, search for "rape porn", select video results, and you will get 0% porn results. Literally nothing! They don't block your query but they just show you non-porn results. And it's not Google and Bing blocking porn in general, because if you change it to "stepsister porn" you immediately get 100% porn results.
It's clear that rape porn has just been banned from the modern internet. It's being treated like child porn or revenge porn, despite being not actually illegal or even particularly immoral. This isn't super relevant to the topic being discussed in this thread, I admit, but it still grinds my gears, because it's a sign of the internet, once a bastion of freedom, becoming completely corporatized and sanitized. And I say that as someone who only rarely watches porn to begin with.
That was a different era. Rape porn has been removed from pornhub for years.
Using the word "rape" in a search query gets you blocked with a snotty "uhm, sweaty, don't you know rape is bad and illegal?" popup. You cannot even search for CNC anymore. The C literally stands for "consensual" for fucks sake! But nope, Pornhub has decided consensual sex is "illegal and abusive". Somehow, this doesn't apply to stepsisters who are stuck in household appliances.
(And don't get me started on the boner-killing pride banners they have up right now.)
MartianNight
15d ago
Oh, that's just copy of Sofie Peeters Femme de la Rue from 2012.
It's funny how the scenario plays out virtually identically across the Atlantic ocean. A feminist woman walks around a large city, in an attempt to draw attention to the problem of street harassment. People Notice™ that the harassers are virtually exclusively of non-European extraction, which is exactly the thing they weren't supposed to notice: they were supposed to accuse men-in-general, not the men who have culturally enriched all major cities in Europe.
A similar phenomenon is the subway shirt. I would almost feel bad for these women if they weren't the ones voting for this.
MartianNight
1mo ago
The Nordics require a degree of financial transparency that would at least make most Americans I know a bit uncomfortable
You realize he said Swiss, not Swedish?
Switzerland is not exactly famous for its financial transparency; rather the opposite, actually, though the reality is a lot more nuanced these days (truly anonymous secret Swiss bank accounts no longer exist).
MartianNight
1mo ago
“One of the many tragedies of this war is that before the war began the U.S. Intel Community, including CIA, was in agreement that Iran wasn't developing a nuclear weapon”
I find this type of claim infuriating, not just because I believe they're lying, but they don't even make an attempt to reconcile their claim with known facts, such as:
- Iran has stockpiled around 440 kg of 60% enriched uranium.
- It is extremely expensive to create such a stockpile (especially for a country with a developing economy like Iran).
- Highly enriched urinanium (HEU) is useless for power plants, which need enrichment around 3% to 5%
- Academic research, if it relies on HEU at all, certainly doesn't need large quantities of it.
- The only known use for a large stockpile of HEU is to create nuclear weapons.
So we know that creating a HEU stockpile is expensive, and that literally the only use for such a stockpile is to create a nuclear weapon. Then the obvious conclusion is: Iran created the stockpile with the purpose of developing a nuclear weapon. Why else would they do it?
I would like to know how Joe Kent explain this away. Why did Iran invest so much into building a uranium stockpile, if not to ultimately build a nuclear weapon?
The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that Iran hopes to use it as a bargaining chip: it will give up its stockpile in exchange for America lifting sanctions against Iran. Maybe that's even the preferred outcome, over actually going through with building a nuclear warhead. But it only works as a bargaining chip if Iran is willing to go through with the threat, so that means they cannot be committed to not creating a nuclear weapon.
So this begs the question, what is the real reason?
No it doesn't. You're jumping the gun by assuming Joe Kent is speaking the truth, when there is plenty reason to assume he's in fact lying. Nothing we know is inconsistent with the following statements:
- Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, as evidenced by their weapons grade uranium stockpiles.
- Joe Kent is lying for political reasons (which happens all the time).
- Stopping/delaying the development of nuclear weapons was one of the reasons for the Iran war.
The nukes might not be the only reason for the Iran war, or even the primary reason, but there is absolutely no reason to assume they weren't a reason for the war.
MartianNight
1mo ago
Both cases are better excuse for riots and arson than Floyd.
No, because Good and Pretti were both white, and they don't riot for white people. Trump had nothing to do with it.
MartianNight
2mo ago
Oops, you're right. How embarrassing. Wikipedia tells me Thomas Sowell was a professor at UCLA between 1974 and 1980 and is now 95 years old, so clearly in a position to say whatever he wants. But the quote isn't necessarily recent; when did he say that?
If he was a tenured professor at ACLU that's still consistent with my point that he was in a unique position to say what was obvious to anyone with a brain. Kind of similar to Jordan Peterson who could say the things he said because he was a tenured professor who didn't have to worry about losing his job, not because he was the first person to ever think of them.
JK Rowling is another example. And many such cases.
Not to be a contrarian, and I don't mean to disrespect Thomas Sowell whom I know little about, but I don't think that's a revelationary quote. It's something obvious that any intelligent person would have observed, except that if you say it out loud, you will get accused of white supremacy and fired from your job.
Thomas Sowell has the benefits that he is a black man so the usual white supremacy accusations don't stick (I'm sure they'll call him an Uncle Tom, though) and he has life tenure as a judge of the supreme court. That enables him to say what everyone is thinking without the usual blowback. I'm glad he's saying it, but I don't think it's a particularly insightful or original thought.
MartianNight
3mo ago
Funny how that logic never applies to me as a European when I don't want to let in the refugees from the countries that Israel attacks.
MartianNight
4mo ago
the number of actual prepubescent kids molested by actual paedophiles each year in the UK appears to be in single figures.
That figure seems several orders of magnitude too small.
For example, RAINN claims “child protective services substantiated or found strong evidence that 63,000 children a year were sexually abused” in the US, and this is significantly less than their estimates based on victimization surveys. They also mention 34% of victims are under 12, which seems more or less the same as “prepubescent” so 63,000/3 = 21,000 prepubescent children. Divide by 5 to account for the difference in population size and you get around 4200 cases in the UK each year.
Another sanity check is to compare it with the murder rate. In the UK, around 700 people get murdered each year. It seems implausible that people are ~100x more likely to be murdered than sexually molested as children. If anything I'd guess the latter is significantly more common than the former.
So in all likelyhood, pedophiles molest hundreds or thousands of prepubescent children a year in the UK, not single digit numbers.
The extent to which the RAINN stats support your view is that despite being only 1/3 of minors, those 12+ are 2/3 of victims. And while the gender ratio is fairly even under 12, girls outnumber boys 4 to 1 among those over 12. So that suggests that indeed female puberty is a big risk factor, but it only explains roughly 50% of the victimization of children under 18.
MartianNight
4mo ago
It's funny because Der Stürmer's take much more accurately describes the position of Jews today.
Sure, I acknowledge that bots/shills exist; my point is that people are really bad at identifying them, and more likely to throw “bot” or “shill” out as insults or ways to dismiss an opponent, with little to no regard for the truth.
For product reviews, there is a clear incentive for the seller to prop up their listing with fake reviews, while legitimately happy customers often have little incentive to leave a review: if you buy a ream of printer paper, a set of kitchen towels or a box of pencils, how excited can you possibly be about your purchase? If the product is subpar, I could imagine leaving a negative review, as a form of revenge and a warning to others (I've done that myself). But for mundane products that basically meet expectations, you'd have to be exceedingly bored to leave a detailed 5 star review praising the subtle off-white coloring and the tasteful thickness of a sheet of printer paper. Consequently, I can imagine for those type of products, a relatively high fraction of rave reviews were left by shills.
For political discussions, the opposite is true. Lots of people like to waste their time online arguing about stuff that even politicians don't care that much about. These people are real humans. Take the presidential election, for example, where it was shown that Harris hired people (it's not clear if they were paid) to post positive stories on reddit in an attempt to generate buzz/get people to show up at the polls. Even knowing that that was a thing, I believe the majority of Harris supporters on reddit were genuine believers, not (un)paid shills.
This is based on the observation that reddit has millions of leftist users who would support Harris by default, versus only a handful of shills. That means the prior probability of any Harris-supporter being a paid shill is just very low, and I definitely wouldn't feel confident about identifying the shills. That can either mean I'm a terrible judge of character, or the people who confidently claim they can sniff out shills are just overconfident; the latter seems more plausible to me.
To give an example I saw today on reddit: this (re)post about Shell (the oil company) emitting orders of magnitude more CO2 than an average person has many people crying “shill”:
I love all the shills or dorks in this comment thread parroting fossil fuel talking points
man some of the people in this reddit thread must work for exxon-mobil lmao.
Someone reasonably replies to the last comment:
They’re not defending a corporation, they’re defending basic logic. To attribute every emission to the company that produces the oil and gas is downright stupid.
And yeah, I agree. These are just normal people deviating from the “oil company bad—upvotes to the left” playbook. I tried looking at the history of some of the top commenters and they seemed to have normal histories with no clear indication of paid shilling. That doesn't prove they aren't shilling, of course, but given that none of the shill-accusers give evidence to support their beliefs, I conclude that they were making those accussations baselessly.
I've seen this so many times now that I've come to believe that on reddit and spaces like it, words like “bot” and “shill” aren't used to identify actual bots or actual shills, but they are terms used to dismiss real people who express unwelcome opinions.
Please just answer the question. What method did you use to determine that the obvious paid shill was obviously paid to shill? That should be easy to answer since it was so obvious, right?
edit: instead of answering, phailyoor chose to block me. Cowardly behavior, that all but proves he has no reasonable answer, and my suspicions were correct all along.
Now maaaybe you might have a point that normies can't tell me from those other people you hate. But they way your post is written it seems like you're accusing me of being a retard.
You're not beating the allegations if you're not able to field any argument why I should treat you differently than the majority of people who accuse others of being bots and shills without evidence.
Your argument sounds indistinguishable from: “People seem to really despise you when you call a witch a witch. Whenever I call a woman a witch, there are people defending her by saying ‘that's just a woman with a slightly crooked nose’ when she's obviously the bride of Satan.”
Given that I know that most people who call women witches are full of shit, I'm not inclined to believe the women that you called witches were in fact witches, unless you can give me a solid argument why your ability to identify witches is so much more accurate than that of other witch hunters. And you can't just say “Yeah those other witch hunters were phonies, but I'm the real deal, trust me okay!” because that's what all those other witch hunters would say too.
Recently I've had a related observation while browsing a different website, which has an amount of bots and shills.
Not sure which site you're vaguebooking about, but my experience on reddit is that most of the time someone gets called a bot or a shill, the accused is really an actual human who simply dared to deviate 0.01% from hivemind-approved window of opinions. I know this because I'm often the target of such accusations (I am neither a bot nor a shill), and because I've reviewed the comment history of many of those people who get dismissed this way, and rarely are there any obvious signs of them being anything but a human being with an organic opinion.
To be clear, there are bots on reddit, but they mostly seem to be karma farming, and not making detailed political arguments. They will typically (re)post generic oneliners on cat pictures and the like. And there are shills, like Kamala Harris reddit astro-turfing campaign, but it's not even clear they are paid, and rather just act based on their own righteousness.
So how do I know you're not doing the same thing? Dismissing people whose views you disagree with as being paid for or generated by a LLM? In particular, when you say:
I saw a similar thing on a local Facebook group, where an obvious paid shill posted a wall of text clearly written by ChatGPT
Can you clarify how you determined that this person was getting paid to post that content? Did you see their paycheck?
And yes, people sometimes use ChatGPT to write arguments for them. I find that super obnoxious too, but mostly those are just losers who are too lazy or stupid to defend their own views. They're despicable, but they're not bots and they're not shills; they're just lazy morons.
But what I hate even more than those morons is the circlejerkers who avoid engaging in discussion and instead just label every outsider as a “bot” or “shill”, encouraging the rest to downvote rather than engage with their arguments intellectually. How do I know you aren't doing exactly that which I most despise?
MartianNight
4mo ago
The video from the other side is posted e.g. here: https://x.com/i/status/2015131503622021472
But it doesn't make the situation clearer.
MartianNight
5mo ago
This only makes sense if the required busywork can be done at little additional cost and doesn't come at the expense of useful activities you might otherwise employ.
For example, if you need to drive into work every day, then you waste a lot of energy/money burning fossil fuels, wearing out your car, wearing out the road, etc. for no economic benefit.
If you have children that you put in daycare (often also subsidized) then perhaps it would be better for society if you took care of them yourself instead of working a bullshit job of little economic value.
The philosophy behind UBI is that while giving people a guaranteed income may decrease economic activity, it would improve society in other ways: people have more time for exercise and cooking from scratch so they become healthier, they will have more time for reading so they will become better informed, they will create art, they become more active in the community, e.g. volunteering to maintain parks, pick up litter, caring for the elderly, and so on.
I'm a little skeptical about the extent to which these things would actually happen, but a clear prerequisite is that people actually have the free time and energy to do those things. That means you cannot put UBI recipients to work on useless activities, or you have all the downsides and none of the upsides.
MartianNight
5mo ago
For Pathways, I think people tend to assume malice instead of incompetence, incompetence instead of indifference, and indifference instead of malice. Let's take a closer look.
For incompetence, you have to look no further than the introduction, literally the second screen of the “game”, which contains the phrase “hearing something hurtful while gaming”, but as soon as you click the Next button, the word “hurtful” changes to “racist”.
People on the internet called this out as devious subliminal programming, but of course the more likely explanation is that the script changed at some point, and someone simply forgot to change the text on some of the slides. There are a lot of other places where the game just looks shoddily-made; suggesting incompetence or indifference, rather than something more nefarious.
For the second part, indifference, I notice that the “game” very much resembles the type of mandatory training employees of large corporations must take on an annual basis. If you've ever done these you surely noticed they have three things in common:
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The desired answer is always obvious, e.g. “The CEO has asked you to prepare the slide deck for tomorrow's shareholder meeting. Quarterly sales have been really great and the stock price is sure to go up when the news is made public. What should you do now? (a) Use your savings to buy as much company stock as you can (b) Call your friend who is really into investing; he'll be grateful for the tip (c) Keep your mouth shut because sharing material non-public information is illegal”. Here you can guess the correct answer without knowing anything about the law.
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The most correct answer is often overly safe, while the wrong answers can be surprisingly benign, e.g. “You noticed your coworker Alice has lost weight over the holidays. What should you do? (a) Compliment Alice on her weight loss (b) Tell your other coworker Bella that if she didn't pig out at lunch all the time she could look like Alice too (c) Say nothing, since commenting on people's appearance is not appropriate in the workplace.” Here answer (a) would be totally normal in a smaller workplace, especially if Alice has talked about her attempts at weight loss before, but in a large corporation you're in the danger zone when you mention anyone's appearance for any reason.
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The scenarios are surprisingly diverse. You would expect the wokescolds in HR who mandate these trainings to make the straight white male the villain every time, but in reality that's not the case. For example, sexual harrassment training will have a woman slapping a man's ass, racial sensitivity training a black guy making disparaging remarks about hispanics, diversity and inclusion training a homosexual cracking an inappropriate joke about straight couples, and so on; pretty much the exact opposite of what you would imagine the most typical interaction that causes someone to be sent to HR.
This may seem surprising if you assume the goal is to train people (i.e., improve someone's performance by transferring knowledge and teaching practical skills); after all, how can you improve when the answers are so obvious that you barely hvae to think about them? However, in reality that's not really the goal of these trainings: they only exist to legally cover the company's ass.
They have two purposes: they provide fodder in case they want to fire someone (for whatever reason). And they allow deflection of blame in case inappropriate behavior happens at the company. If a victim of sexual harrassment sues the company, they can point to the ineffective mandatory trainings to “prove” that the company did everything in their power to prevent it from happening, and they are not liable for the misbehavior of individual employees. The C-suite doesn't care how much inappropriate behavior goes on at the company; they only want to make sure they won't be held accountable for it.
It's like hanging a sign reading “management is not responsible for your belongings” which is much easier than actually taking responsibility for keeping them safe, and allows management to dispose of belongings at their discretion.
Now it all makes sense. The questions are easy so that nobody can complain the rules are too difficult to understand and follow (usually, you literally cannot fail the training: if you pick the wrong answer you get to try again). The acceptable answers are narrowly defined so that there can be no discussion about borderline scenarios: your remark about Alice's weight loss was clearly unacceptable no matter your good intent. The scenarios are diverse, so that straight white males whose behavior is meant to be kept in check cannot complain that the training was biased against them or singled them out specifically. Of course this doesn't mean that the company is really going to hold women, blacks, and gays to the same standards as men, whites and heteros; the beauty of rules like this is that they can be applied selectively: you only bring up the off-color joke someone made at the Christmas party after you've decided to fire him, even though it will rarely be the reason for the firing.
So how does this apply to Pathways, which isn't a corporate training and doesn't have legally binding effect? I suspect Pathways is simply made by the same people who usually make those corporate trainings (the bland art style is a big giveaway) so they simply fell back to their usual modus operandi.
They made Amelia a woman because they didn't want to make it look like they were targeting straight white males (the most obvious demographic to be recruited by British nationalist groups). They don't care if this makes the training less effective in changing anyone's behavior, because the creators don't get paid for the effectiveness of the training. They get paid to make a “game” that consists of N slides and covers talking points X, Y, Z. They made the bare minimum effort to meet their obligations and called it a day.
Now to the malicious part. From the government's side (who pays for this), I also don't think they care if the game changes anyone's behavior. The goal of this game is to normalize the authoritarian actions taken by the government against citizens who watch the wrong videos or express the wrong political opinions online.
In the game, Charlie, a college student (that's 16-18 years old in the UK, I believe), has to “ask a trusted adult” before watching a video on a site recommended by his friend; an absurd expectation of a 16 year old. The obvious choice of just watching the video leads to the admonition that “downloading or streaming certain content can lead to a terrorist offence conviction”. This seems to serve no purpose except to train the populace that the government arresting people over watching videos online is reasonable and appropriate. The game was never intended to deter a Charlie from downloading the video, just to make sure that others don't riot when they convict him as a terrorist later.
After all, everyone played the same game in school, so they know that the appropriate way to respond when someone links you a video is to run to your mommy, not watch it on your own and make up your own mind with a blatant disregard for counter-terrorism legislation. Instead of being outraged about what happened to Charlie, they just count themselves lucky that they haven't been caught watching videos without parental approval themselves (which is what everyone always does, obviously).
To summarize, Amelia isn't a more effective antagonist not because the authors were clueless on how to make her less appealing to the chuds, but because the goal wasn't to actually put teenagers off white nationalist views, which would be too difficult to accomplish anyway. The game was ordered to legitimize authoritarian action against those who sympathize with white nationalist views.
It's not even clear that the current backlash is detrimental to the goals of the game. The sheer number of Amelia remigration memes being posted online can be used to justify even tighter control over the internet (look at all those white supremacists!) and people repeating the absurd phrase “downloading or streaming certain content can lead to a terrorist offence conviction” helps to normalize UK citizens being arrested for simply watching politically incorrect videos online.
MartianNight
5mo ago
We probably agree then. I read your initial comment as saying that if “the police are not allowed to block you” then the only alternative to lethal force is letting people get away. I think you can have cops not standing in front of cars and still apprehend a suspect who tries to get away most of the time, which is preferable (to me) to having cops shoot drivers over minor offenses, even if it allows a minority of suspects to flee successfully.
MartianNight
5mo ago
If you just drive away fast, they won't be able to follow you
Why not? All they need to do is drive equally fast behind you.
That's how it seems to work in practice too. Almost every time I read a newspaper story about a car chase it's something like: police noticed someone commit [small traffic violation], gave suspect the stop signal, instead of stopping suspect tried to make a break for it, police chased them, eventually, suspect lost control and crashed their car into a [tree/ditch/lamppost]; suspect was arrested with minor wounds, car is a total loss.
This seems like a pretty good alternative to shooting and killing the driver from the start. (If you don't kill them, you'd have to chase after them anyway.)
I understand it creates a greater risk to the general public (what if the fleeing suspect crashes head-on into another passenger car?) but that doesn't seem to be a super common outcome, and I don't think “if I don't shoot this guy he might end up causing a fatal accident” is sufficient justification to use lethal force from the start.
Just do what a lot of my city's residents do: don't have a license plate.
That only rules out the one option, plus it gives cops a cause to stop you on sight even if you did nothing else wrong. Again, imagine if you're driving drunk and you don't want to get caught, do you really think it's smart to remove your license plate? I think it just makes it much more likely that you'll be pulled over in the first place.
Not having a license plate is not a serious crime, so they're not allowed to chase you.
I understand the confusion but I never said I think police shouldn't chase criminals. Of course they should. I'm arguing they shouldn't shoot them dead if they try to flee, unless the situation explicitly warrants it (i.e., the suspect is known to pose a grave immediate threat to public safety), which is not true on average and was not true in this case.
MartianNight
5mo ago
I agree police should be allowed to chase people who try to flee. I was addressing the false dichotomy between shooting drivers and allowing them to evade justice completely.
MartianNight
5mo ago
Just because they don't block your car doesn't mean you got away scot-free. They can follow you, block roads, use spike strips or PIT maneuvers to make you lose control in a way that's unlikely to be lethal, and so on.
Even if (they let) you get away, they can use your license plate to find out where you live, and arrest you at home. In addition to whatever you were suspected of before, you're now guilty of evading the police too. If you commited traffic violations while fleeing, those wil be added too. If they chased you, your car is likely to get wrecked.
All in all, plenty of good reasons to comply if you're innocent or guilty of a relatively small offence only (e.g. DUI). In short, it's not trivially easy to evade arrest if the police is not generally allowed to shoot drivers of vehicles.
It's a bit more complicated than just 0.38% because the tax rate is progressive, plus there is a municipal tax that is a percentage of the cantonal tax added on top (typically around 50%). I think you can get up to around 1% in the worst case, but it's mostly theoretical because in practice rich people move to a place where they get taxed less, unless they are either extremely principled or they really want to live in one of the major cities no matter the cost.
The point is that these taxes are charged every year. 38% would be insanely high: in just 10 years you'd have lost >99% of your wealth. That's not reasonable.
By comparison, at a 0.5% rate you pay e.g. $5000 per million dollars in savings. Over 70 years, you'd lose 30%. If you have a top rate of 1%, then you lose 9,5% in 10 years, or 50% in 70 years. This strikes me as reasonable, especially since you can usually generate some return on your wealth too (the US stock market has yielded >10% on average in the past decade even compensating for inflation).
I understand that there are some people who want that, but I don't think those are realistic proposals, in that you wouldn't be able to pass them into law even at the state level, and if you could, the main effect would be driving out billionaires and businesses, rather than generating a huge amount of tax revenue.
I'm rather more interested in proposals that:
Right, it's impossible for Musk to raise $400 billion all at once, that's why the wealth tax should be a small annual percentage instead. Selling 1% of his shares each year wouldn't tank the stock price the way that selling 30% would. But you're still getting 10 billion a year out of him alone.
I don't buy the concern about Musk losing control of the company. Musk already uses his class B shares with 10x voting power to maintain >80% control with <50% of the shares. He can sell 75% of those shares and maintain majority control. Or use tricks like equity swaps to raise money without losing his shares. Or just make the company pay 1% dividend per year (though that requires it to become actually profitable). Plenty of ways to pay taxes while remaining both CEO and majority shareholder.
So given that Musk can stay in control and pay a hypothetical wealth tax, it's not clear to me what value you think is being destroyed by taxing wealthy people somewhat. Unless you say it's always better for billionaire to have a dollar than the government, on the basis that billionaire's investments are more beneficial to society than whatever the government wastes it's money on (healthcare, pensions, education, foodstamps, the military), but that's highly debatable.
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