• Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          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.

    • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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?

      • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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          9 months ago

          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.

          • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            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.

            • HappycamperNZ@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              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.

              • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                No. Primary residences are always protected from tax agents. Nobody is going to be made homeless by a wealth tax. Take your fearmongering elsewhere.

                • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  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

  • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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    9 months ago

    No shit. If someone does not have money they don’t need then they can not buy stocks or any investment.

  • blady_blah@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I don’t think it’s good to have such wealth inequality, but I do this general investment into the stock market should be encouraged.

    401ks are so much better than pensions as a retirement vehicle. Better return on investment and more financial separation from the company I work for. I never worry about someone raiding the pension fund or a company going bankrupt, and I’ve received much better return on investments than the numbers you hear from pension funds! That’s not even considering 401k matching…

    • Riskable@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      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.

        • Copernican@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I think I crack the top 10 percent income earner I agree (not sure where I am in the USA net worth wise). I don’t consider myself rich, but that is very much in part because I live in NYC, but if I didn’t live there I probably wouldn’t be 10% earner. A big market change could have very significant impacts on my life, housing, etc. Fuck the 1% percent though.

          One thing I have noticed about folks that talk about income and wealth in my bracket is that they talk about Stock benefits like options, RSU’s, and ESPP as income. When I was making salary and around folks under 75k no one really talked about those types of benefits as income meaningfully (partially because they didn’t get it or didn’t get a significant amount of it). But for those high income earners in the top 10% that factor their stock as part of their income lifestyle, that puts them more at risk for greater income swings in the event of market crashes to a certain degree (assuming job loss doesn’t occur).

    • iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com
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      9 months ago

      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.

  • Illegal_Prime@dmv.social
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      It is extremely vague, because the top 10% of Americans in net worth are those who have over about $850,000.

  • Grogon@feddit.de
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    9 months ago

    It’s actually insane knowing that so many people on this planet live in extreme poverty, in slums, have no safe access to food and water and yet we have many single humans buying 15 cars, villas worth 15 million, yachts etc.

    At this point I shouldn’t take me out of the equation because even though I am not rich I still buy useless stuff I might not need and someone else needs the money more than I do.

    But I just can’t wrap my head around that a lot of individuals have so much money. No human should have 10x more than an average person needs. What justifies someone making albums and selling them for 15$ and that person earns 20 million $ cause so many people buy the album for 15$. At some point the money should flow to programs or other things that benefit society.

    Sure the album is great, thats why it is selling, but why a nurse for example is doing hard work and just will never earn that money. I’m pretty sure most nurses have done a lot more things during their career that SHOULD be worth millions. But thats not the point. Even nurses shouldn’t have more than 10x what they need. No one needs it. It’s great to have but no one needs it.

  • echo@lemmings.world
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    9 months ago

    Is this really a new thing? Haven’t the rich always been the stock-holders?

  • Wrench@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Seems weird to make this assertion, and fail to provide what the total holdings cutoff is to be in the top 10%.

      • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        154k is middle class. And everyone in this thread is trying to figure out how to fuck them the hardest.