I am reminded again how in 1935, the US Congress passed a tax law that created a new top tax bracket of nearly 80%.
That tax bracket contained exactly one person, John D. Rockefeller, and was designed to stop him from causing so much trouble.
In case anyone needs the precedent.
It also remains way past time to make any US government contracts with Elon Musk's companies contingent on his not having any further role with them.
Make the majority shareholders in SpaceX choose between Musk and their money.
The 1930s and 1940s top tax brackets were reversed under Johnson and Nixon - but that left the top tax bracket at about 70%.
We may blame Reagan and Bush 41 for cutting it far further (to 50% and then <40%).
@michael_w_busch @coolcalmcollected with those high brackets came the growth of businesses specializing in packaging and selling tax shelters. Business was brisk in these products
That would be a reason to create better rules.
@michael_w_busch @patrascan @coolcalmcollected My workplace subscribes to a bunch of our country's top finance rags, and the whining on print in them by the richest people here who "had to flee the country and move to Switzerland to escape the taxes" just makes my blood boil. One of them even managed to play the victim when he realised he'd been kicked out of the national healthcare system as a consequence!
@veronica @michael_w_busch @patrascan @coolcalmcollected
"I found a way to not pay into a system... And now I can't benefit from that self-same system! In being oppressed!"
@veronica a governmental system that holds the rich to account?! I am super jealous
@michael_w_busch @coolcalmcollected Agreed! Raising the top brackets won't work unless the loopholes are removed.
@coolcalmcollected @michael_w_busch
Being forced to service the rotting carcass of Margaret Thatcher for eternity in hell
Lookin' at you Elon
Oct 22, 2026, 2:04 PM@michael_w_busch
I like the idea of stripping Musk's security clearances, which would take him out of decision-making at the majority of his corporations.
Tax capital gains the same as income. Eliminate the cap on SS/Medicare taxes.
Another measure would be limiting the amount of money people can borrow against stocks and stock options including external audits of private corporations used as collateral.
@michael_w_busch when i said i wanted us to do 1930s politics again i meant the new deal not fascism…
@michael_w_busch also, how much Rockefeller basically stole from public goods and wealth
@michael_w_busch In ancient Athenian democracy, they just straight up exiled people whose wealth allowed them to interfere too much with governance.
In case anyone needs a different precedent.
Planetary Protection prohibits us from inflicting Elon Musk and the other few richest people who are currently causing so much trouble upon outer space (this is not a joke).
And kicking them out of one country would just make them another's problem.
Oct 21, 2026, 10:18 PM@michael_w_busch @lrhodes exactly. When people boast about getting out of California i say so you’re taking our problem to another state. (Confused look) well, our problem is overpopulation with not enough infrastructure/housing/tax revenue to accommodate the growing population. People came here b/c of the infrastructure then decided that they didn’t want to pay taxes for the next generation…and around and round we go.
@michael_w_busch @skoombidoombis @lrhodes Does it prohibit us from shooting them directly into the sun tho?
Oct 22, 2026, 6:02 PM@DarkAthena @michael_w_busch @lrhodes nope but whose rockets will we use? They won’t use theirs since theirs regularly explode…this is giving me wile e coyote thoughts now 😂
Oct 22, 2026, 12:32 AMBut just yeeting them into the sun...?
@lrhodes @michael_w_busch I looked into this and finding out that not only is it true but it was more generic and literally involved basically being potentially "too powerful" for any reason including too many powerful friends to prevent a tyrant is just so wild.
I'm like, astonished it was that well thought out honestly
@Lunaphied @lrhodes @michael_w_busch granted, next to the ostracism, they also had the pharmakos
Oct 22, 2026, 12:27 PM@Lunaphied @lrhodes @michael_w_busch Yeah, it is kind of wild, but also in modern society a lot harder to erm, exile anyone. Also even to tax anyone other than the lower 98% — Vi
@helle @lrhodes @michael_w_busch there seems to be a lot to it namely being rarely used and basically completely unused after a certain point.
But uh, I think there's plenty of places we could exile people to. I mean. I'm not sure they'd survive. But then again, sometimes that was true of being exiled too.
Probably the closest to exile is being forced to change identity and nationality and banned from certain civic participation.
Not that it wouldn't be misused but like whatever
Oct 22, 2026, 12:31 PM@Lunaphied @lrhodes @michael_w_busch Legal persona death penalty (and given a new identity) and a ban on associating with all priors? But even that leads to cult of personality problems. Like a lot of these people have people other than close associates that would just give them stuff beyond basic survival..... — Vi
@helle @lrhodes @michael_w_busch yeah basically. anyway what I'm saying is you should be forced to transition or die, easy, one you feel miserable forever but live but it's not anyone's job to pay for you to stay in prison forever
Oct 22, 2026, 12:34 PM@Lunaphied @lrhodes @michael_w_busch LMAO, of course this comes down to the most cursed forced femme fiction — Violet
@helle @lrhodes @michael_w_busch hey I didn't say femme!
Oct 22, 2026, 12:35 PM@Lunaphied @lrhodes @michael_w_busch So how many women would be in this bracket? I guess maybe a 1 to 50 ratio — Vi
Oct 22, 2026, 12:36 PM@Lunaphied @lrhodes @michael_w_busch But yes, I know force masc fiction is also a thing, just usually dressed up differently. So just force transition fiction? — Vi
@helle honestly I don't know how is it dressed up differently?
Oct 22, 2026, 12:55 PM@Lunaphied Okay, I need to actually write that post a little better. But I am second hand writing this off of an essay I read ages ago and then have my own takes on as well.....
Maybe I'll have something more coherent in a bit, lol. — Violet
@helle @lrhodes @michael_w_busch okay the one case I know is the Therenos lady and I'm not fully convinced she's not actually transmasc
@Lunaphied @helle It's no guarantee, of course, but she comes across as pretty cis femme in You Can See Everything.
@Lunaphied @helle Exile wouldn't be practical as a substitute for, say, capital crimes, because what country would want to take them — at least, without guarantees of some sort of human rights violation — but I actually think exile for democratic endangerment could probably be instituted without much trouble. Most of the potential offenders are wealthy enough that other countries would be happy to have them come spend some money there for a while. They tend to do that anyway.
i'd be ok with a "musk" tax.
@michael_w_busch yeah I think all of us here know that but unless the American people give enough Dems power continually for multiple election cycles then yeah maybe things could go that way tax bracket wise.
But let’s be realistic. This is not gonna change anytime soon not by a longshot. But in the future, it could change. But I’m kind of burnt out on just hoping for things to turn good when the evidence suggests that looking around everything is indeed not good.
Oct 22, 2026, 12:05 PM@scottytrees @michael_w_busch I wonder how many times in history a political system reformed that drastically, if a system is broken at 80% , you don’t repair it.
@michael_w_busch Capitalism has evolved. Now it demonstrately owns enough economy, finance, media and politics to avoid that to happen again. We have daily reminders to it, more or less directly.
At some point this may change, tables may be turned. I feel that we're still far from that point, but sometimes there are good abrupt changes. More then crossing fingers, we need good actions performed by people wanting to act good.
@michael_w_busch How did that work out?
Pretty well for the next couple of decades.
@michael_w_busch Decades? He died in 1937, 2 years later.
What his wealth redistributed? Did poor people fare better?
@newstik Note carefully that @michael_w_busch made no mention of “redistribute wealth”.
The high tax on the ultra-wealthy was “to stop him causing so much trouble”. Outsized concentrated private wealth, such as hoarded by Rockerfeller, translates to political power, and that's the problem to stop.
The purpose of taxing the ultra-wealthy is *not* to “redistribute” their wealth. We don't need that, the national government creates money any time it wants to.
Instead, we need progressive taxation (highest on the ultra-wealthy) in order to:
* Reduce inflation: Remove hoarded spending power from the wealthy means they have less power to drive prices up.
* Rein in private minority concentration of political power.
https://democraticleft.dsausa.org/2026/06/08/taxing-the-rich-means-taking-their-power/
@bignose @michael_w_busch Ok. If the point was “to stop him causing so much trouble”, we'll never know if it worked, because he died just two years later.
The point about slowing inflation by taxing very high earners exceptionally high isn't clear to me. The more people make, the smaller a share they spend.
If you take 80% away from the top earners, the money is going to someone else, who is going to spend a higher share of it = more demand for products +/ services = higher prices.
@newstik
> The point about slowing inflation by taxing very high earners exceptionally high isn't clear to me.
In any country that has sovereignty over its money (USA, Australia, UK, Japan, etc.), the country's government creates money by fiat: they pass a law saying they spend money, and that act credits an account at the central bank. It's a number in a spreadsheet.
By the government then paying for things, that money then can circulate among private entities as our currency. Or, some entity could cease to circulate it for some duration and hoard it, increasing their power to spend compared to the rest of us.
Taxation (by that country) of entities or transactions is the opposite of creating money: It is the country selectively removing money from the economy.
So, an entity paying that tax thereby returns (“revenue”) the money; it is now out of circulation, effectively destroying it. That entity has less spending power, and thus less upward effect on prices.
Oct 22, 2026, 12:15 AM@newstik @michael_w_busch 1935 was also the year of the "New Deal," credited with raising living standards, building infrastructure and creating broad wealth in American society.
Sounds like the high tax was part of a suite of changes that worked out pretty well.
This is what should have been reenforced quite some time ago, as now they are trying to grab power… and get rid of the Citizen United decision… it is undemocratic.
Oct 22, 2026, 1:47 AM
@michael_w_busch That's right! Hope everyone reading this tells 1 person they know in California to vote YES on 40 and NO on 41 and 42 to pass the billionaire tax.
Here's an interesting prompt / research project:
If the US centi-billionaires were taxed like in the 1960s, how much extra tax revenue would that generate?
Follow-up: How many Apollo program budgets would that cover? Would they still be billionaires?
…that's ammunition for other platforms to silence "teslaTimmy420" droning about the alleged importance of a certain someone for progress.
The point here is not just to fund public goods. It is to end the extreme economic inequality causes so many problems.
We can argue about the upper limit - someone with tens of billions can still cause problems, just not as much as someone with hundreds of billions.
The fans of billionaires would of course object. To which I have taken to pointing out that this is classical liberalism, since some of them claim to adhere to that (although I doubt they've read John Rawls).
Agreed. I try to argue that extreme wealth is not only hinting at injustice, but also a sign of inefficiency of a society.
They didn't need obscene inequality to incentivize some of the greatest feats of the 20th century (hence the Apollo reference).
Any originally useful organ that consumes far too many resources, eventually harming the entire organism, isn't called 'rich' or 'worth' either.
@michael_w_busch It seems that the exact claim of it just affecting Rockefeller is a bit of an internet lore thing (and it would've been his son, Jr) but it gets even weirder.
There was as you can imagine a big push to tax the rich and clean up the wealth gap, the "Share Our Wealth" campaign, and then the guy got shot (interesting "coincidence"). And got taken over by some slimeball.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_Our_Wealth#Program_mismanagement_after_Long's_death
In private Roosevelt reportedly admitted in private to trying to "steal Long's thunder."
Very interesting. Seems like we're right on schedule to repeat the exact same thing literally 100 years later. Ridiculous how it cycled that fast, it took wayyyyy longer for most societies
@michael_w_busch @PlasticJohnny But next time make it 95% like Wilson did.
