No shit. If someone does not have money they don’t need then they can not buy stocks or any investment.
tax. every. trade.
Abolishing the stock market in general would be nice, or at least moving towards that direction gradually. The wealthy don’t typically get their money from great trading, but parking their money and letting it grow.
The stock market itself isn’t the problem either though, it’s that the wealthy have money and the poor do not. If you want to buy a house and you don’t have the cash for it, you need to borrow from someone…and that means someone who has a lot of money. And you’ll pay interest for the privilege because there is a time value of money. That doesn’t go away without a stock market.
The real solution is to tax the wealth itself, either directly or through taxing the step-up in value after the owner of a stock dies, or a massively increased estate tax.
The stock market shouldn’t be abolished without also abolishing other aspects of Capitalism, yes. Workers must currently take advantage of everything they can within the current system. However, people should be striving towards worker ownership of the Means of Production, and keeping the stock market would allow Capitalism to resurface.
If you mean a small tax per share when purchased then that would be a great idea. Make high frequency trading, that contributes zero to society, unprofitable. It wouldn’t hurt household investors as the tax would be small but it would hurt the assholes who manipulate prices through trading back and forth.
High frequency trading is fully automated insider trading done in broad daylight, but nothing gets done about it because most people don’t understand what it is. It shouldn’t be taxed; it should be illegal.
It’s a long and convoluted route from that to their 401ks not bring as plump as they could be. Indirect robbery of thousands is more palatable than being mugged for a few dollars.
tax. every. trade.
What is the justification for taxing a trade that lost money? Said person certainly didn’t generate an income from that trade.
How much would you even tax for a trade that lost money?
The same justification as when you place a bet on black in vegas, it comes up red, and the house takes all the chips you bet.
You can call greed “rational self-interest” and gambling “speculative investment” all you like, but trying to change the language doesn’t change the reality.
When you’re gambling, you might lose, and society shouldn’t subsidize the days you gamble and lose. Only income derived through labor should be truly safe, as labor is useful to civilization, unlike gambling, often with winnings from previous gambling gained using loaded market influence dice and marked insider information cards.
The closest we come to “society” “subsidizing” stock losses is via capital loss deductions. Assuming you aren’t doing particularly crazy tax shenanigans, you are looking at up to 3000 dollars deducted from your taxes per year. For reference, the standard deduction is 13850 for an individual as of 2023.
But the thing about capital gains and losses are that they are only actually a thing when you cash out of the stock market. This means you are actually encouraged to “sell” your shares in a failing company and use it to invest in a company “on the rise”. Which is actually good.
What you are proposing would, ironically, mean only the super rich would be able to trade stocks to begin with. And they would only invest in the “guaranteed” companies like MS and the like which would hurt a lot of medium sized companies and workers.
Also, this all forgets that the vast majority of retirement schemes (even pensions when you look at where the money comes from) are based on investing in stocks. In large part because the idea is to benefit from an overall better economy.
So yeah… your statement about “betting on black” makes no sense and your proposed solution only hurts all but the super-rich.
But the thing about capital gains and losses are that they are only actually a thing when you cash out of the stock market.
Oh hey guys we can’t tax the wealth of the rich because their wealth isn’t in the form of sequential 2 dollar bills and simon didn’t say so it doesn’t count as wealth!
Of course it helps when Wall Street sends lobbyists to make the tax code work to their advantage.
We should have a wealth tax on net worth, if they don’t like cashing out stock to pay it, tough. It is completely workable, but since the oligarch class owns our government, don’t worry, it’ll never happen.
Also this story directly addresses where most of the benefits of this rigged con-game of an economy goes, and most Americans haven’t had significant pensions for a long time.
Following this line of thought - sacrificed alot and you now own a house (shocking in this market I know). Its value goes up 100k in a year due to forces out of your control. You now owe 30k in additional tax.
Should you now be forced to sell your home if you can’t pay this tax?
Following it further- you have a bank account. You save 20k. You now have an asset that is increasing in value - do you now owe tax on this?
There is a bloody good reason taxes are paid when gains are realised, or more accurately when money changes hands.
No. Primary residences are always protected from tax agents. Nobody is going to be made homeless by a wealth tax. Take your fearmongering elsewhere.
Primary residences are always protected from tax agents.
Primary residences are absolutely not protected from tax agents. They can and are sold to cover unpaid taxes. While it is true they don’t do it often and will sieze every other asset you own first, that commonly leads to loosing your home as well. Good luck paying your mortgage when you don’t have a car to drive to work anymore and all the funds in your bank account are frozen.
"if you have unpaid taxes, the IRS has the right to seize your home through a tax levy. If the IRS seizes your home for unpaid taxes, it uses the money from the sale to cover the cost of seizing and selling the property. Then, it applies the remainder to your tax bill. You can apply for a refund if there’s any money left. " https://taxcure.com/tax-problems/tax-levy/home-seizure
Removed by mod
One thing the article doesn’t make super clear to me is if that figure includes investment funds and whatnot, and to what degree. It sounds like it might but elaborated very little beyond a vague statistic.
So if everyone in the US stops buying publically traded companies, it would bankrupt the top 10%?
Only if you’re including the top 10%. The vast majority of retail investing makes little difference even when combined, in comparison to institutional investing.
Is this really a new thing? Haven’t the rich always been the stock-holders?
Don’t worry, it’ll trickle down… Annny day now.
My wife and I constantly lament how we were born a few decades too late. For everything
Born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore space. Born just in time to explore Dank memes.
Truly, a time to be alive.
The “Eat the rich” crowd continues to do absolutely nothing.
Unfortunately cannibalism is still unwelcome in society 😔
Just become rich, no need to eat anyone.
I’m shook!
Historical data would be great. How was that figure in each previous decade? Isn’t it true that at the peaks this tends to happen, and when we get a stock market downturn, the rich get poor faster then anyone else?
Even when the stock market crashes the rich don’t get poor. They can seemingly lose ungodly amounts of money exceptionally quickly but even after all that they’ll still be rich because being rich is a comparison: If everyone on a mountain falls down the ones at the top will still be there.
I mean if we’re talking about top 1% you’re probably right, but I believe in the top 10% there’s a bit of movement. Out from it and in to it from below.
And there are plenty of examples of people going from being extremely rich to being bankrupt and never recovering. It’s not impossible, but probably requires quite a lot of effort and/or stupidity. For instance, when Iceland went based and let its banks fall, this guy went from being worth $1B to -$750m. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Björgólfur_Guðmundsson
Click on the link. Literally the first thing in the article is a graph over time.
tl;dr it was about 80% in 1990, and is now 92.5%. Or alternately, the bottom 90% of the population owned 20% of stock market wealth in 1990, and now they own 7.5%, so around one third as much as a generation ago.
Only if you consider “getting poor” going from a $200B net worth to $175B net worth.
Yeah, probably, but now you’re talking about top 0.1%, not top 10%. I mean technically the former is also in the latter, but you know.
Cause and effect
Seems weird to make this assertion, and fail to provide what the total holdings cutoff is to be in the top 10%.
According to Wikipedia it’s an annual income of 154k as of 2019.
154k is middle class. And everyone in this thread is trying to figure out how to fuck them the hardest.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
