Solving AI: Tax Wealth Not Work | SFM 103

• Spreadsheet from Adam
• Garys Economics YT Channel

AI is going to make someone wildly richer. The only open question is whether it makes the rest of us safer and freer or more replaceable and more financially fragile. We take a hard look at the “productivity miracle” story and ask what happens when the gains from automation and generative AI keep flowing to the top while millions live one emergency away from losing housing, health care, and stability. 

We connect that to an old prediction from Keynes: if productivity keeps climbing, ordinary people should be able to live like today’s high earners and work far fewer hours. Yet we’re still grinding through full-time weeks, and the precariat keeps growing. For us, that’s the heart of the problem: not envy, not abstract wealth inequality, but poverty as economic precarity. When the floor is missing, everything gets expensive: crime, stress, bad health outcomes, and desperate decisions that harm everyone. 

Then we get practical. We walk through the “tax wealth not work” approach popularised by Gary’s Economics and break down what it could look like in real policy: a progressive wealth tax, removing the Social Security cap, taxing capital gains like income, closing loopholes like carried interest, and even charging luxury assets such as private jets and yachts like we already do with cars and property. We also tackle the usual pushback about rich people leaving and the “unrealised gains” argument. 

If you’re thinking about AI governance, wealth taxes, universal healthcare, Social Security reform, and how to build a post-scarcity or post-precarity society, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who argues about AI or taxes, and leave a review with your take: what’s the first policy you’d pass to end precarity?

Transcript

Double Intro And Energy Vampires

SPEAKER_03 0:18

Hi, everybody. Hello. I'm Adam Brows. I'm Scott Moppin.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

This is Solutions from the Multiverse. You just heard us do our intro, though, because we have the intro at the beginning. Yeah. But then we do like another intro. That's okay.

SPEAKER_03 0:30

Double intro?

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Double intro. We're just two intro guys.

SPEAKER_03 0:33

No extra charge?

SPEAKER_01 0:34

No extra. We're two introverts.

SPEAKER_03 0:39

Whoa. Except I'm not, actually. No? No, I'm I'm more of an extrovert. I'm an introvert.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Oh, really? I'm an outgoing an ingoing extrovert. Have you heard of this?

SPEAKER_03 0:51

No, I you just made that up.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

No, no, it's a thing. An ingoing extent. Ingoing extrovert. That means that I go get energy from interacting with people, and then I go spend it doing things on my own.

SPEAKER_03 1:02

So you're like a vampire. You steal other people's for yourself.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

I have been in my worst times by my people who don't like me described as an energy vampire. I like to call it an ingoing extrovert.

SPEAKER_03 1:16

I fill my battery by draining other people around me.

A Plan To “Solve AI”

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Have you probably one of the most brilliant things on TV ever is did you see the energy vampire on uh what we do in the shadows? Yes. Oh, that was like a peak, like really peak genius. Like wow, really good. Yeah. No, I'm not an energy vampire. Because an energy vampire is like uh you leave their presence depleted, but people often tell me that they leave my presence energized. Yeah, no, you're an idea outpire. Yeah, yeah. I'm an outpire. Yeah, a vampire. No. I'm an output. Is that now who's making up words? Now the prefixes, you can make prefixes with the best of them. All right, let's do the solution. Yeah. Before we get too crazy. What do we gotta go? Okay, solution today is we're gonna solve AI. Good. We're just gonna say, here's what we need to do. I know it's cool. It's a big problem. Yeah. So we're just gonna solve it. And the solution is um maybe it's not completely original, but I think the details will be slightly original. Slightly original. Okay. Which is um, you know, we should move to a post-scarcity society, and we can do that by by taxing great.

SPEAKER_03 2:26

Where is this post-scarcity society we can move to? We can totally do it.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

I will I'll pack my bags and it's actually ridiculously easy to do if people realize that we can do it. I think right now people mostly think we can't do it. They look around and they say, There's scarcity, we can't do things. But people have to realize no, no, no, there's wealth, it's hiding because the wealthy are hiding it all from us.

SPEAKER_03 2:49

Okay, so break it down for me. I'm because I'm not going around, my friends aren't saying, Hey, there's scarcity. What what are we what are you noticing?

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Well, if you say to someone like everyone should like live a lifestyle like a person who today makes three hundred thousand dollars a year, and you just say everyone unequivocally, yeah, should make should should it doesn't matter if they make that much money, but their life should be like someone who makes three hundred thousand dollars a year.

SPEAKER_03 3:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

If you say that to people, they'll think you're crazy. They'll be like, where are you gonna get all that money from? Yeah, but it's actually just math. Like the wealthy are making that if you just divide the number, like if you just divide the income of the wealthy by everyone, it's like$300,000 a person.

SPEAKER_03 3:31

So the reason we're not making$300,000 each is because of the wealthy have hoard, they've just hoarded the wealth away, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Okay, and then this is not this is not, I'm not like just saying this like some crazy per like this was predicted by John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist, one of the greatest economists of the 20th century. And he he wrote this great essay, which everyone can go read because it's very short and easy to read. And it's called the M The Economic Realities of Our Grandchildren's Children, which is us, because he was World War I and II.

SPEAKER_03 4:02

Does he not know great-grandchildren as an option?

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Uh great-grand the of our great grandchildren's children. I guess you're right. Why did he say it that way? He could have just said our great-grandchildren. But that's what he says, our grandchildren's children. That's the title. Okay. So it's it is more memorable that way. Yeah, yeah. Just to do it an awkward way. I think he was trying to make you realize like your grandchildren and then their kids. Yeah. So he's trying to think about kids, you know, trying to think about if you say your great-grandchildren, it's kind of like, who's them? Who are they? But but you understand your grandchildren's children. Anyways, he he did the math and was like, look, if you just take today's wealth distribution, right? Him saying this in 1940 or whatever, if you say take today's wealth distribution and you just increase by economic growth, which, you know, 10% a year or eight for he was probably averaging, you know, five, eight percent a year, which is maybe might be high for what it is now. But still, if you average that growth, you know, for like he was looking at a hundred years, yeah, then you end up with, you know, like stonemasons are making like$300,000 a year. That's the map, that's what he figured out. But and so he was like, Oh, everyone's gonna be super wealthy.

SPEAKER_03 5:08

That's what in his version, is that like the bottom of a larger rung, or is it like everyone makes around the same?

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Well, he was a capitalist and he's an economist. He's a just like no, he's just saying, yeah, it's what normal people, like a normal, like a nurse, like a normal working person, stone, like I said, like a stonemason.

SPEAKER_03 5:24

Normal working stonemason.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Just anybody. And he said people not only would work that make that much money, like have a lifestyle of that much wealth, yeah, but they would also only work 15 hours a week. Okay. Yeah, that's what he said. I like this because he not he not only projected forward the incomes, but he projected and wealth, but he also projected forward productivity increases. And basically, we've actually outdone his projections. Yeah, I was gonna say we have four the four-hour, obviously. Exactly. But anyway, so John Mary Keynes predicted this, and um basically we just what happened is we did exactly like he said the wealth increased, uh-huh, the the the work the productivity increased, but then just because the wealthy were able to take more and more of the pie, everyone just kept working like 40 hours a week, and you know.

SPEAKER_03 6:14

Okay, so I think I misunderstood. At first, I thought you meant like if we took the entire pie and divided it up equally by everyone, I don't then everyone would get 300,000. But you're saying that just the natural increase, yeah, the bottom like the normal salary should have been 300,000. Yeah, yeah. And then everything else, but but the reason it's not the extra stuff has been just sucked up like a vacuum cleaner by the people at the top. So they take yeah, like triple gains and we take zero gains.

AI Productivity And Who Gets Paid

SPEAKER_01 6:42

I mean, triple's way underestimated. Yeah, it's like a thousand. It's like a huge, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, well, that's uh and so and AI is just like the continuation of this, it's increasing productivity, it's increasing wealth, but it's push, but it's but all the gains are going to just a few people. And people like to say, like, well, you know, you shouldn't have a politics of envy. So you're just envious of the wealthy, and so you shouldn't do that or something. And so we shouldn't try to like expropriate money from the wealthy, and we should just sort of, I don't know, free mar let free markets do what they do or something, but but that's not that's not actually where I'm coming from with this. You know, I don't think it's about that. I think you put it well, actually, which is we should just have a society where people aren't just all dying. Yeah, yes. Which is what we're headed towards with AI, basically. We're headed towards a society where people are just all dying. I like uh people not dying society. Seems like society ends very fast if people So you're you're AI, you're not a fan of AI, right? I am openly not a fan of AI, yeah. Or not skeptic, but yeah, what do you want to call it?

SPEAKER_03 7:48

I am a fearful of Terminator's endpoint of AI.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

But you also don't like little uses of it. It's true.

SPEAKER_03 7:53

You don't like big or little uses, a slippery slope into Terminator's AI guy.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

So like if you're like generating like a hey, make me into a Pokemon image, and you like send a selfie and it makes you into a Pokemon, you're like, nope. I'm out. That is one step from that to is to terminate. It's gotta be something besides just Terminator that makes you not like AI. There's some inauthenticity to it, right?

SPEAKER_03 8:17

I mean, we get into I just I just it feels like a big stealing machine, and I'm like an I feel like I'm an art guy at heart, and so uh great artists steal. This is maybe sure, but not not like the uh sociopath AI. I think I don't know, but also the benefits all go to just a few people. Yeah, but I also think it's well the financial benefits. I'm not impressed with the output, and that's and I've I saw some things just recently that said that there was no noticeable impact on the economy or something after this. Yeah, and so I'm like, oh, okay, well then yeah, I'm not alone.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

But yeah, there's debates about that, like how much it's affecting the economy, and you know, people say, oh, you know, job the job market's flat, but that might also just be like because it's gotta be impossible to isolate effects from one thing, and there's there's layoffs in tech, but also layoffs in tech are cyclical, and like we're kind of due for like another cycle of layoffs, so it's like it's hard to say, but you know, it's also a giant war happening that's uh changing skewing the prices of everything and everywhere, yeah. But I but I I do think it makes people more productive. So even if it doesn't make you so you could say, well, workers get more productive, you fire the workers. Well, maybe you make workers more productive, you just make more stuff, which it seems to be the way I I talk to people every day who are engineers, software engineers, and I'm like, hey, are you guys like hiring fewer people? And they're like, no, we're just doing more. Like we had a whole list of things we wanted to do. We could do 25% of it. Now with AI, we can do 70% of it. We're not firing anyone, and we still want to hire people. We're just gonna do more, we're just gonna have more software. That seems good. That seems to be what people are doing more.

SPEAKER_03 9:57

That seems good because I what what's what you don't want is the opposite, which is like, oh, this uh the AI lets me do 10x the work, so I'm going to fire people, right? Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

I don't I don't really think it's it's like a six of one half of the other. There is some probably like cutback because you've got efficiencies, but mostly businesses are trying to do more, like they have an unlimited list of things they could do.

SPEAKER_03 10:22

Well, and you have bosses that are ranging in different act, like different types of bosses. Some some people are the buy the stock back instead of investing in, you know, like that sort of boss. And so you can do it in different things, and you'll have bosses that act different ways, and you hope for better, more better bosses that do the people stuff.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

You know, given that environment, um it just means that it's an opportunity to have the conversation about uh not just wealth inequality, because I don't really care about inequality, I care more about poverty.

SPEAKER_03 10:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

So I'm an I'm a person who I don't care if there's inequality, I just care if there's poverty. Which seems reasonable, right? Like I don't care if there's someone who's super rich who like invented a bunch of stuff or like even their family was rich. I don't really care. But I do care if in that same that same society that made that person really, really wealthy, right? There's like 50 million people who are like completely screwed financially and just in their life. That seems like not right.

SPEAKER_03 11:20

If you make yourself super rich by bettering everyone's life, go so be it. Power to you. But if you make yourself super rich by removing the safety net from everybody else, then that's right.

Poverty Means Precarity

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Or even just you exist in that society, that society made you super rich, it should also make everyone comfortable. Right. Like it shouldn't. So I don't really care about inequality, which a lot of people do, especially like super, super like left-wing people. I don't actually care about that. I care just about suffering, reducing suffering, which basically means reducing poverty. And by poverty, I don't just mean money, which is what a lot of people I think mean. I mean economic precarity.

SPEAKER_03 11:58

All right, you're gonna have to spell that one.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

So we talked about it on this podcast before. Okay, how how there's only that actually you're the middle class and the poor, the the and rich, these are like not good words. There really is the owners, the salariate, and the precariat. And the precariat is the economically precariously positioned people, gig workers, no benefits, no retirement, right? They have economic precarity. So when I say poverty, I don't just mean like, oh, you want a really big TV and you can't afford it. That's not what I mean. I mean like your economic every day, you're like precariously positioned. You could lose, and in a second, you know, whole swathes of your life could just like fall into the ocean and collapse, you know, get kicked out of your house, get, you know, lose your lose custody of your kids, lose this, lose that, all you know, end up back in prison, etc. etc. That's like that's like literally like 80 million people in the United States live in like horrible economic precarity. All right.

SPEAKER_03 12:54

So you yourself, I mean, how do how do we move to a post-scarcity society? Yeah, post-scarcity or post-precarity, even a post-precarity.

Tax Wealth Not Work

SPEAKER_01 13:01

What does that look like? A post-precarity society, yeah. So basically, people are like, well, how do you tax AIs? You can't really like you can't get in there and put like a toll on AI queries or something. That that doesn't make sense. And it would slow down the innovation and blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, they I mean, they put a toll, like, don't they just they make a toll, yeah. You could put like a sales tax on it. Yeah, you could put a little sales tax on it, but it it still kind of gets in there and starts mucking around and the government sort of kills the goose that lays the golden egg. Like, you want you want things to get better, you want things to be invented, but you then want to make sure that you know, there, like I said, there isn't like the billionaire in the society with the people who have nothing. Like, shouldn't be, they shouldn't be in the same society. So um, I think the solution comes from this guy, Gary's Economics. I'm just gonna do a full-on plug. Okay, Gary's Economics, check him out YouTube podcast. Okay, he was the he was a traitor, he's a multimillionaire. He was a traitor, he's a traitor. Oh my gosh. Yeah, you don't listen to this. Get him, get him. He's a traitor, he's a traitor on in not Wall Street because he was in England, so it was like in London, he was in the whatever in the in the city, he was a traitor in the city, and he was this like working class guy who just like ended up becoming like a trader on in the city and made like millions and millions and millions of dollars. And then he tried, he was like, he like from his position as a trader, like diagnosed that society was getting screwed over and was gonna be he also predicts that like the UK will become very poor. Um, and he's trying to like stop that. Okay. And so he he started off going to academia and trying to write papers about it, and he couldn't make any progress. So he started just a YouTube channel, like Ad Populum, and he talks all about his main thing is tax wealth not work. And that's his prognosis. That's what he says should be done. Tax wealth not work.

SPEAKER_03 14:50

What's the difference?

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Well, like an income tax tax is work, right? But a wealth tax, like property tax, your home, you might pay a property tax on your house. That tax is wealth because it's a tax on the home, which is an asset.

SPEAKER_03 15:01

Does that I mean I've heard the argument against that is that that'll make the wealthy people leave and go somewhere else.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

Yeah, so he explains why that's not true. Um, because everyone basically the problem, well, I'll just say briefly, the reason why that's not true is because assets don't move across borders. Like your house can't go across borders. Right. So who cares? Like if a wealthy person who owns a bunch of houses leaves, you still still they still have to pay their property tax.

SPEAKER_03 15:26

That was a rap when Mandami was good, they're gonna like all the billionaires are gonna say they're gonna leave New York City. I'm like, how many of those have checked out already? Nobody's yeah, nobody, right? They're not like, oh, leaving New York City now.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

I mean But but the point is not even if they did leave, it doesn't matter because the assets can't leave. Like, and if you you can also set up what's called an exit tax. So you can say, you know, for certain things that you're worried are gonna leave the country, but the cut the wealth was created in America by Americans, then you can say, Yeah, we're putting in this wealth tax. And in the wealth tax, there's an exit tax. So if you do try to leave, you have to pay like 50 per you know, 30 percent of the wealth you're leaving with.

SPEAKER_03 16:01

And I agree with you that that it's a it's a hollow threat. Like it's it would never actually happen back in like FDR's America where they were super high.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

It could happen if we made America into an absolute like terrible place to do business. But the reality is this we're America's the best place in the world to do business. And we love buying stuff as a people. So we're gonna market if we do if we do this correctly, we can actually make it an even better place to do business. For instance, if you create universal health care, universal you know, Medicare for all, it actually makes it easier to do business because you don't have to like pay everyone's health insurance premiums. Like, why do businesses have to pay all the health premiums? It's a huge burden on the businesses.

SPEAKER_03 16:40

Yeah, if you just took that off their shoulders, hurdle for hiring, it's just yeah, it's a huge paperwork nightmare for small businesses.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

And if you got rid of that, a bunch of small businesses would be like, cool, I don't have to deal with all that next year. And new entrepreneurs could be like, I don't have to deal with that ever. I just pay people a salary and I don't provide people health insurance. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_03 16:59

Yeah, you should be in the business of whatever your business is, not in the business of that and health premiums. Yeah, providing health care.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Yeah, so it basically you can make and you the the best example of this is if you look at Minnesota next to Wisconsin. So Minnesota has provided really, really good like social support for their their you know, their people. And Wisconsin is run by like awful like MAGA, you know, Republicans, and they've just gutted everything in Wisconsin. Uh-huh. And you can see the Minnesotan economy is just like blowing past Wisconsin's. And it's because people are like, businesses are like, huh, where should we relocate? And Wisconsin's like, come, we have low taxes. And they're like, Yeah, but you have undereducated population, bad roads and infrastructure, bad electrical infrastructure, bad, you know, like bad healthcare, bad. Why would we want to relocate there? And Minnesota's like, we have great infrastructure, we have great people, we have great health insurance, we're great. The businesses relocate to Minneapolis, even though they have higher taxes. So it's like, it's like there's this, there's this um uh there's this thing where providing these getting rid of precarity actually aids in a market, a free market economy working better because you don't have to deal with all the costs of precarity. Precarity is super expensive that makes for for society.

SPEAKER_03 18:14

That makes sense. And you make a nice place where nice places want to come and be set up. Right, people want to be there, right? And talented people want to be there. Their family they drive around on nice places, right?

The Spreadsheet Of Wealth Taxes

SPEAKER_01 18:25

Right, right, instead of like a hellscape with gated communities everywhere of wealthy people or something. No, no one wants that. No one wants mad for yourself low tax low tax. Yeah, low taxes, mad max, or somewhat higher taxes and like paradise, like fantastic, you know, place to be. I mean, it's just a reality, it costs more to live in nicer places sometimes. So you can tax the wealthy, and so I made a spreadsheet that I'll put into the description. So if anyone wants to open the spreadsheet, it's a public spreadsheet. I've shared it across various communities and gotten some feedback from people and made it better with people's feedback. What's in the spreadsheet? It's twenty-five ways to tax wealth instead of work. Okay, and it will raise, I did all the math, it will raise somewhere between 15, like twelve thirteen and eighteen percent of the federal budget, and it'll displace or raise uh somewhere between thirty and forty-five percent of income tax. So it's not like a hundred percent of the federal budget or something, but it's a major contribution if if we did put these into place. So what what's it what's on the list? So like the very so the very top one, and I rank it by how much money it could bring in, the very top one is um a progressive wealth tax. That's the key thing. And I just put it at two percent for every dollar over two million dollars, four percent on every dollar over a hundred million dollars, six percent on every dollar over five hundred million dollars, and eight percent for every dollar over a billion.

SPEAKER_03 19:52

Okay. Is there currently any wealth taxes?

SPEAKER_01 19:55

Only homes, houses.

SPEAKER_03 19:56

Property tax.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Well, it's a wealth tax, okay, because property is an asset. It's a wealth tax. So we have wealth tax already, homes, but we don't have any wealth tax on stocks, bonds, you know, gold, general, yeah, wealth, assets, you know, just a bunch. There's a bunch of assets, insurance policies, and stuff. There's all kinds of assets. Okay. And you could create some carve-outs, maybe you put insurance policies outside of it or something, but um, that would just make a ton of people do a bunch of insurance policies. But you know, anyways, but this would be smart. This would raise somewhere between 200 and 300 billion dollars a year, um, which is nice. Um and the other ones are like, you know, the next one is remove the social security uh cap. What what is that? So if you make like up to I think it's like a hundred and eighty thousand dollars or something, okay. After your$180,000, you don't pay any more Social Security tax.

SPEAKER_03 20:49

That's how it is now? That's how it is now. Meaning you don't get more meaning you don't pay in more. Okay. Even if you get paid a lot of money. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

So if you remove that cap, then people who make this is in some ways taxing wealth or work still, because it's like high well, high, high well, high work, high paid workers would pay more into social security, but it's a no-brainer. If you did this, it would fund social security forever. So when people say like, oh, social security is running out of money, this is the solution. You just remove the cap. I didn't know that the cap even. Yeah, I know. That's the thing. Rich people are just hiding all this from us. Rich people are just trying to blind us to these things that are super easy solutions. What? Yeah. So, like, so like I think I think Bernie posted, you know, uh he posted like January 1st at like like like 20 minutes after midnight, and his Twitter post was like Elon Musk has just hit his social security cap. He will pay no more into social security this year. Right? And it's like, what? Why wouldn't he just keep paying? Because he's wealthier, he should just pay yeah for every dollar he makes, he should pay 2% Social Security.

SPEAKER_03 21:55

No, no, I think I was heard the term social security cap before, and I thought I just always thought it was like a cap on the amount of money. It's a tax break for the company.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

That's not a it's a tax break for wealthy people. So you do that, that's 150 to 200 billion right there. Okay. Lots of money. Good one. Uh, that does take. Tax work a little bit. People are going to say I'm a hypocrite. That taxes work. But it also taxes wealth. It's a good one to put in there.

SPEAKER_03 22:23

It's proportional, too. It's a good one. Yeah, it's progressive.

SPEAKER_01 22:27

It also makes Social Security bulletproof forever, which is awesome. Yeah. Like you, the whole conversation of like, oh, how are we going to pay for it would be gone. No one could ever say, Oh, but Social Security is going to go bankrupt. It's not. It would never go bankrupt if you had this. It would just be self-sustaining forever. Yeah. No problem. Uh, without, you know. No, another one is equalize capital gains tax with income tax. Okay. So just make it so that if you make money from your assets, it's just taxed exactly the same as if you made money from income. There's 23 more of these. We're not going to go through all of them, but the big ones are like, yeah, progressive wealth tax, remove social security cap, nice, equalize capital gains uh taxes. Um, you can carve and you and remember for all of these, you carve out like the first 10 million dollars. Like none of these will affect like you or me ever. Like, because neither of us are ever going to take out in one year. Meaning it'll only affect if you pay 11 million dollars. If your capital gains is like millions of dollars that year, then you pay it.

SPEAKER_03 23:25

It's never gonna affect normal people. The the more someone's gonna complain about like I paid so much, it's like because you made so much. Right, right, right, right. I had to give so much because you have so much. Right, right, exactly.

Leaving The Country And Unrealized Gains

SPEAKER_01 23:36

It's proportional, right? Right. So, people, anyways, the the thing people will say against the progressive wealth tax, the common thing is people will leave. We already talked about that. The assets can't leave, and the assets that can leave, you can put an exit tax on. So basically solves that problem. All right. The the other problem people say is uh, oh, well, that's not fair because those are unrealized gains. Have you heard this term? I've heard this term. Yeah, so like if you buy a stock and it goes up a hundred percent, so you double your money, right, but you haven't taken it out yet, it's like you technically haven't made the 100% yet. Schrdinger's gain. It's Schrdinger's gain. So it could be a dead cat or a live gain in a box. Because all of a sudden a boom. Yeah, right. It might go shine. So when you say, Oh, we're gonna charge you two percent for every dollar over 20 million uh on your pro on your on your, you know, if you have 40 million dollars, then on 20 million dollars there'll be a two percent tax. We don't have to do the math, but you know, you pay and you could say, well, that's all those are unrealized gains. I'm gonna have to like sell my stocks just to pay the tax. And people like don't like that. So what do you do? You just tell them that that's already how property tax works. Like, if you can't afford the tax on your house, you can't live in that house. You have to sell the house.

SPEAKER_03 24:47

You have to have enough functioning yeah, you have to leave enough of your stuff functioning to just to pay for the property tax.

SPEAKER_01 24:53

So we already do that for homes, first of all. So it's not crazy, it's not like whacked out to think that you would have to pay property tax on stocks and bonds. Right. Uh, and the other thing is the person who's usually saying that makes like$35,000 as an RB and they're like defending millionaires. Like only multi, multi, multi, multi-millionaires would pay.

SPEAKER_03 25:12

It's their job to put over a disingenuous argument.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

So these like non-multi-millionaires who will never in their whole life ever pay this tax are like it's this is offensive.

SPEAKER_02 25:24

Yeah, how it's it's my unrealized gains. Like, get out of here. Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

The audacity. But but even taking that on the side, just thinking about like if you are a multi, say you have$50 million,$100 million, and you have to pay, you know, six million dollars to this year in taxes. Yeah. Okay. First of all, just like last year, the stock market went up 22%, like 20%, somewhere around 20%, which means you already made$20 million this year. So if you have to pay four percent, four million dollars, you're still in the red, like you're still in the green, in the black, right? Right. Uh, the and and most years the economy goes up by, you know, stock market goes up eight percent. That's the average. So I mean, if you're only paying four percent, you're really only paying half your gains that year.

SPEAKER_03 26:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

And it's for work, you didn't do any work. No, this is just money making money for money's sake. The price of making money, right? There's no like you didn't lift your pinky finger, right, to do anything. So, so so you're really it's really not justified to kind of fight for that.

SPEAKER_03 26:22

But but also what it really means is people would be like, why does the government deserve half? And you're like, right, they won't it's not about deserve, right? It's a what are we gonna do in the world?

SPEAKER_01 26:30

We're gonna get rid of we're gonna get rid of scarcity, yeah. Right, we're gonna get rid of precarity. So the other thing to think about is that money doesn't just like get destroyed. You sell the stocks, other people buy those stocks. Yeah, so all it means is that other people own the stocks. That's all it means. It just means that there's less concentration, it means economics attacking right instead of a hundred people owning all the stocks, there'll be like a thousand people who own all the stocks, they'll all be wealthy jerks, they'll all be wait we're creating more wealthy jerks. Hold on, no, no, no, no, hold on. Like, if you make it so that like people always say, I don't want there to be billionaires, billionaires should be illegal. You know what they're saying? They're saying instead of one billionaire, I want 10,999 millionaires. Like, there's still wealthy people, there's still jerks who are well, these wealthy millionaires. You're just saying you don't want it so concentrated, right? That's all you're saying. That's all I was saying.

SPEAKER_02 27:26

So saying, like, I don't want one evil person, I want a league of sort of evil, freaking evil who all could like chat with each other, work together.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

I want them to cooperate to dominate us.

SPEAKER_01 27:39

But it is better for society because those hundred those 10 people fight with each other. Yeah, and actually, keep each other. That's good. Yeah, they fight with each other, they want to be president instead of him, or they want their newspaper to succeed instead of their newspaper, you know, like they fight up in the clouds, and actually that's better for society. So, anyway, but I do think it's funny to say, like, to show how right wing Americans are, like, people don't really understand how right wing, even the left wing of America, is because people who are like ex quote unquote extremely left wing think it's really radical for them right on the left to say, I don't want there to be any billionaires. But what they're really all they're saying is I'm totally fine with 999 million, like 999 million dollars being owned by one person.

SPEAKER_02 28:24

Yeah. So so I mean, that's not left wing, that's capitalism. Like, that's really still incredible.

SPEAKER_03 28:32

Well, the most left is still pretty if you still really wrap it onto the world politics as a whole, right?

SPEAKER_01 28:38

So the real left real left wing would be like no one can have more than like I mean, what do you need to be like super wealthy? Like 10 million dollars. Like, if I had 10 million dollars, I'd be like eating caviar at every meeting. Right, but think about if you were like, no, you can't even make more than 10. I'm not proposing this because I don't want to have that fight really. But no, no, no, I'll accept your$10 million offer. So, what if you said, no, I don't even want people to be allowed to have more than$10 million? You people would think you're first of all, you you're a communist. I mean, you're complete communist, but it's funny that people in America on the left wing America who think they're like communists, who think they're like really left wing, are totally fine with people having like$700 million. It's so crazy, right? So America is like extremely right wing, even our left wing is like extremely right wing. It's kind of funny.

SPEAKER_03 29:31

Yeah, as you say that, I'm like, why are private jets allowed?

SPEAKER_01 29:36

Well, that's on here. That's on here. So one of them is taxing all so taxing private. Oh, every year you have to pay a private jet or yacht registration fee. Just like your car. We already have to pay every year, you have to pay$500 to own a car in California. I have to pay a fee per yacht, you mean every year? I can't get it on the side. So right now there's no there's nothing like this. But you could just say, yeah, if you want to own a yacht that's over, maybe say it's over 40 feet long, or you could set some limit, you know, it's super like a big freaking luxury boat, right? And you're not using it for commercial purposes, you're it's your boat, then you have to pay, you know, you have to pay$10 million a year or$5 million, whatever it is. You know, you pay a percentage of the yacht fee of it every year. It's a yacht fee. And the same thing for private jet. You want a private jet and you're not using it for commercial, you're not like a private jet operator who's using it to to you know, you run a business where you fly people around. But even then, you could put a tax on private jet tickets, you know, if it's like a jet that carries less than six.

SPEAKER_03 30:33

I'm the one private jet guy that does barrel rolls for you. Oh, yeah. Like every other private jet that's just boring here to there. But I'll do like loop-de-loops and this guy, we're gonna go have fun.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

Hang on to your butts for the fun jet. So, yeah, there's a bunch of other ones in here, you know, uh corporate buyback tax. So any kind of stock buybacks, you just tax like 10% or whatever to do that.

SPEAKER_03 30:53

Um you keep saying things that I'm mad aren't already. I know, right.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

You could do you could do a digital service tax that taxes just the revenues of huge tech companies. That's a good one. Uh, you could tax, oh, ending the carried interest loophole. Do you know this one? This is a really whack. Is it ending the carried interest? Carried interest loophole. No, I'm afraid I don't. I'm I'm not surprised. This is a very wonky one. This is one where like a lot of people I'm okay on this one. Yeah, okay. So this only affects three to five thousand private equity or hedge fund managers, and it's just this total giveaway, tax giveaway to hedge funds and private equity. And you can just close it, you just get rid of it. And 3,000, 5,000 people would have to pay like more taxes because they're already insanely wealthy. Nice. And it's just, yeah, you can just close it. That's like$20 million billion dollars.

SPEAKER_03 31:40

Are these considered like tax shelters?

SPEAKER_01 31:42

Is that what the that comes that comes down more here? Uh Bermuda Insurance, closing insurance loopholes, uh, private uh oh, uh yeah, there's a bunch of ones where it's like, oh, dynast dynasty trusts. So you want to get rid of dynasty perpetual tax avoidance through dynasty trusts, get rid of that, Titan registry resident requirements for and end special deals for U.S. territories as tax havens. Okay. So all the Bermuda and Cayman Islands. Cayman Islands, you just shut that all down. Learned about that in the first place. Yeah, there you go. Um, yeah, you can just do like, you know, there's a lot of interesting things, and then the very bottom one is opportunity zone manipulation. So there's some like attacks opportunity zones that people like do scams around. Okay. You could get like five billion dollars just by tightening up rules and enforcement. Oh, okay. Yeah, so it's like, oh, this city has like lower taxes if you like operate a farm. So the someone puts like a data center and then they like put a farm around it and they're like, it's a farm, and they get a tax. You know, they do they do the I that's not a real example, but you know, that's something like that. And they manipulate opportunity zone. That's like the lowest one, five billion. So that's like the bottom one. But there's more. I mean, there's probably more. This is like just me as like a not a yeah, I mean, I know a lot about this, but I mean, someone who really was like a tax expert would be like, There's 20 more you could do, you know, or whatever. But the top one is the progressive wealth tax where you're taxing more of the wealth the higher it goes. Um, you could do it with property taxes too, with homes. You could say a state could actually adopt this. So a state, because most property taxes are state, right? Not federal. A state could say, hey, if your home is worth, you know, less than a million dollars or less than$500,000, your property tax is only one percent. But if it's worth, you know, for every dollar it's worth more than$500, it's two percent. And for every dollar over two million, it's four percent. And for every dollar over five million, it's five percent. You know, you could you could create a progressive wealth tax on homes. That would actually be really smart because it would bring in a lot more money, and again, it would tax the wealthy, which is they have a lot, they have a lot, and they're not working, like homes don't it's not labor. No, the home doesn't work, it just sits there. Well, and so you have to kind of operate it, you have to kind of clean it and stuff, but that's it, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 34:01

And sometimes you see those reports where like Jeff Bezos paid zero dollars in taxes, whatever. Or you're just like, What? And then people are like, Oh, don't you think it's worthwhile that he did all the business things? And you're like, Yeah, but he's not doing it for he's he would do that anyway. Right. He did it for the massive profits he did.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Or you could say, like, well, but I worked all year and right, yeah. Aren't you glad I did my job? And I have to pay taxes, right? Right, right, right. And then oh, the another one in here is the the rule, the billionaire minimum tax or like the wealth minimum tax. So it's like, no matter how much tax loopholes you do, you still have to pay 20% of your income every year to taxes for for people, you know, over whatever it is, a million dollars. The no loop rule. Yeah, you just eliminate it's called the buffet rule because Warren Buffett famously said, I pay less taxes than my secretary. Yeah, yeah. And it's a it's a it's ugly, it's ugly, that's ugly. That's not good. Right. And so he said just make make the rule, the buffet rule, it's called the Buffett rule, where it's like there's doesn't matter. You do all the loopholes you want, at a certain point, you still have to just pay. And because it's a minimum, it's just a minimum tax level. And that'd be that'd be a good one too. There's a lot of good, there's a lot of really good uh uh possibilities, and it wouldn't it wouldn't hurt the I think also people forget if I say let's put higher property taxes on more wealthy, bigger homes, yeah. I'm not saying we should burn those homes to the ground, right? Those homes are still there. The people who own them might be holding up a sign that says burn the homes. I'm holding up a sign. Uh the people who own the homes now, maybe they own five homes, right, and all of them are like$10 million homes, and they say, gosh, I'm gonna have to pay like whatever that is,$50 million, 5% of$50 million. I'm gonna have to pay whatever that is, two, two and a half million dollars this year in property tax. You know what? I'm just gonna sell one of these homes. Some other rich millionaire jerk buys the home.

SPEAKER_03 35:55

Right.

SPEAKER_01 35:56

It becomes part of their hands it to someone. You know, so it's not like you know, this is again, this is not communism. And you're not saying destroy the, and I'm not saying give them to the poor. The poor will not get these homes.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

These homes are gonna be the wealthy.

SPEAKER_01 36:10

They're still gonna be it'll just mean that the wealthy will kind of spread it around a little bit. The wealthy will be amongst the contributing back to the society. And they'll contribute back. So you can be more like Minnesota and less like Wisconsin. You can say, hey, we have incredible infrastructure, we have incredible electricity, we have incredible uh, you know, green energy, we have incredible air quality, we have incredible health care, we have incredible, we don't have homelessness, we don't have poverty. Why? Because we put this awesome progressive uh property tax in place and we started to get you know 20% higher taxes from the tax base, most of it's coming from wealthy people. Great. I was like, what's the wrong? You know, and what did it do? It made a few wealthy people sell their homes to a few other wealthy people. That's that's the only real effect.

What Post-Precarity Looks Like

SPEAKER_03 36:54

So so if someone were to G need a magic wand, you're 25 plus, and we go into a post-scarcity society. What what would you imagine is like the first big change you would notice? Like what where would you see the effect?

SPEAKER_01 37:07

Well, first of all, there'd be no homelessness. That would be gone. Okay. And the crime rate would go to almost a zero. Like you already see this in Holland. Holland has a virtually no crime rate, they have no prisons, like they have so few criminals that they actually can't support prisons anymore. So they just closed all their prisons, and they just, if there is someone who needs to go to prison, they just like tell them to stay home.

SPEAKER_03 37:28

Yeah, I mean, the idea being that crime most crime is all based on almost all. Yeah, it's like I I if I don't if I'm not lacking, if I'm if my needs are met, right? Most of my crime urges are not I'm not.

SPEAKER_01 37:40

Well, there's still white collar crime, but there wouldn't be like property crime. There's gonna be crimes of passion, eliminate everything. Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 37:46

There's no fraud, giant chunks, right?

SPEAKER_01 37:49

But you're gonna and you're gonna remove the crime that scares people. Like I don't stay up at night in my, I don't wake up in the middle of the night and say, Oh my god, tax evasion. You know, I wake up and say, shoot, is someone like trying to beat on my door? Like, you know, that's the crime that you can't do. Yeah, and just prop, like, you know, oh my god, I gotta lock my door because otherwise someone's gonna break into my car. Yeah, that would all be gone. No one would break into cars. There's no reason because they'd all have the transportation they need. Why would they break into a car? You know, um, so yeah, so no virtually no crime, no, no, no crime, no scary crime.

SPEAKER_03 38:21

Plus, if they like became the kingpin of a giant crime, like a car stealing rink, yeah, they're gonna have to pay so much more taxes than they would have had to before.

SPEAKER_01 38:28

Yeah, because they're wealthier now. Oh my gosh. Yeah, so much more than they're doing so well, and they're not gonna want to want to pay those taxes, they're gonna leave those car closed. They're gonna stop. So, yeah, homelessness would be gone because homelessness is just totally economic, um, an economic issue that could be solved overnight. Literally overnight. There's there's 16 million houses in America that are empty each night, yeah. And there's 500,000 homeless people. Uh uh, you and I both? Eight so that's 32 times the number of homes per homeless person. One homeless person, there's 32 empty homes. Yeah, so it's like it's not lack of.

SPEAKER_02 39:00

I think we can solve this.

SPEAKER_03 39:05

What else would happen? Well, you and I are both children of teachers, and so I think the always needing Department of Education could be like give give people like give schools, give healthcare, but yeah, put like money into all the things infrastructure, like fixed bridges.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

The arts, I mean, Ireland just made their artist basic income permanent, so there are I don't know how many thousands, a couple thousand, I don't know how many thousands of artists in Ireland just receive money to work, just to live, and they just make art. And Ireland's just like, yeah, that's good. That's like nice. Yeah, it's really valuable. This is overall very nice, right? Right. So let's just do it, you know. And so you could do, and that that's a little more like, oh, you might say, Well, that's kind of weird. Okay, well, let's stick to the ones that really are obvious. Homelessness, you know, yeah. Uh people just die, even rich people in America have worse health care outcomes than rich people in uh countries that have universal health care. Yeah. So you could just say, Well, even rich people are gonna literally be healthier if you provide health care for everyone. Um, but that also eliminates, you know.

SPEAKER_03 40:14

You're not gonna be locked into terrible jobs, like that you can despise your life eight to ten hours of your day every day.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

And AI will be doing most of the work anyways, so it's like whatever.

SPEAKER_03 40:25

Oh, yeah, right. How so we'll have more time to organize against the terminator parts and keep them down. I don't think the terminator is the good parts.

SPEAKER_01 40:32

You you worry about the terminator thing, but I don't I don't really worry about that. I don't think it's really realistic. You say the first bot with bright red glowing eyes, and they're like, isn't it cool? I'll be like, I I think here's where I've here's where I'll level with you on the terminator thing. What the terminator thing is actually saying, I think, in its deeper meaning, is not that the computers themselves will kill and like term and will be vicious to the mass of people, but that the wealthy using AI will be vicious to the working class. That's the reality of I think the the story of the Terminator.

SPEAKER_03 41:09

That we have to face.

SPEAKER_01 41:10

Yeah. What we have to be worried about is not that the AI itself will will will uh you know turn on us, right? But that the wealthy who have already turned on us. Yeah, they've already built a black rock like private. Yeah, yeah, they've already deliberately built every s America's already wealthy enough now that it is not an exaggeration to say that every instance of poverty, every instance of poverty and the pain and suffering that comes from poverty and its its consequences is literally by design. It is by design, it is intentional because it you can't say anything else. If you were sitting on a boat and the boat was full to the brim with food, and then a few people were starving on the boat, and you how could you you know it would you would have to say it's by design. I we might you know otherwise you could just go down to the store of the boat, take out some food, give it to the people that were starving, but the mer the people who run American society don't do that, and so it's by design, it's deliberate to have the poverty. If we just eliminate the poverty, society will be better, it'll just be way better. And and AI is a good opportunity to to to to get people excited about this. Like, okay, this is totally doable. We can make a post-precarity, post-scarcity society, and it doesn't mean that we're not communists, this is not communism, because there will still be billionaires there and they'll still be super wealthy, and the only effect on them will be like that they had to sell some of their homes to like their friends. That's like the only effect, or like they have to sell some of their stock to like other multi-millionaires.

Terminator Is Really Class War

SPEAKER_03 42:45

So is so are we using AI to achieve this post-scarcity, or are we doing the post-scarcity to ensure like insulate ourselves against the effects of well?

SPEAKER_01 42:55

We could use AI if we use if we use AI to do political activism, which would be smart to do. So I know you're like allergic to AI, but I think you know, if you use AI and really activism too. I mean, don't just double double allergy. But if tomorrow people were like, let's use AI to organize the working class, that would be smart. That would be really smart to do. But the problem is the capitalists are using AI and they want to organize, yeah, to fight against this idea because they'd rather just own everything. They don't care about you dying. Like if you get cancer tomorrow and go bankrupt and die, the wealthy literally do not care. Right. They do not care.

SPEAKER_03 43:30

Like you say, the the system is designed to grind people in the gears. And if you don't believe the people designing the system are like, we're just making sure it's not us.

SPEAKER_01 43:37

And if you don't believe me, watch the breaking bad, but in in France. Have you ever seen this? Le Breaking Bad. And it's just a it's just a chemistry teacher who gets cancer and then he just goes and gets treatment for the cancer because it's your result.

SPEAKER_02 43:51

It's a one episode, it's a one episode, it's just over, and he survives and it's like, yeah, it's that but then they never get that sweet, sweet meth.

SPEAKER_01 43:59

I know that this chemistry teacher figured out, right? Exactly. And actually, that's a really good the breaking bad's a great microcosm for this because the guy is doesn't have health insurance, clearly, you know, because he's in America, right? And he's like a teacher guy, he doesn't have health insurance enough to pay for the cancer treatment. So he starts selling meth. Well, what does meth? Do meth just destroys people's lives. Yeah. Completely destroys and wrecks people's lives. Usually people who are vulnerable already because they're in poverty. Like you don't hear about a bunch of like wealthy people getting addicted to meth. I mean, wealthy people die from uh like opioid. There are addictions that wealthy people have, you know.

SPEAKER_03 44:34

Well, wealthy people also have the true gambling to treat their addictions and the people who get sick.

SPEAKER_01 44:39

But but meth is truly something that affects the poor, and they look people just die, lose their minds, and go crazy. And it's absolutely horrific. Well, guess what? You provide health insurance to the what's the breaking bad guy's name? I forget Walter White health insurance. Well, then all that meth doesn't get made. You know, that's good. That's how you see how the kind of the precarity starts to fold in and disappear as you eliminate some of it, it eliminates more of it. It's kind of a multiplier.

SPEAKER_03 45:05

So yeah, it's when you're certain when your system works for more people, then fewer people are forced to work outside the system to do stuff.

SPEAKER_01 45:13

Yeah, and you just don't have to be as if I'm less precarious, then I can kind of hold up everybody around me. You know, if you're less precarious, then you can kind of hold up everybody around you. So if you eliminate precarity, as you eliminate it, it eliminates more. It spreads, you know. Like if you say like cars are inherently very precarious, they can break down, they can run out of gas, da da da. As soon as you put a train in, everybody's precarity is eliminated. Because that train is never gonna stop. It always runs. Sometimes it breaks down, but very rarely gets fixed within an hour, it runs again, it carries. There's a system, yeah. You're not in charge of it. And it costs way less than the you know, the 50,000 cars that would have had to be there instead. So like if you eliminate precarity, you you you you constantly like eliminate more and more and more of it. So yeah, I think this is I think this is the whole the whole framework of talking about poverty and precarity in the United States is is all about like oh, you want to like hurt the wealthy to like you know benefit the poor. And it's like, not really. Like the wealth, like I said, the wealthy instead of having five$10 million homes or$20 million homes, are gonna have like 18$10 million homes. And some other wealthy people, instead of having four, will have like five because they'll have bought the one from the other guy, you know.

SPEAKER_03 46:26

And like you were saying earlier, it's not hurting anyone to help everybody, right?

SPEAKER_01 46:30

And it makes it makes it Minnesota instead of Wisconsin, it just makes society better. Right. When there's a knock on your door in the middle of the night, you're not like, oh my God, who is this? You're like, this must be Ed McMahon. I've won a million dollars. Yeah, or like, you know, but I don't even need it anymore. It's like the Shire. It becomes like the Shire. You just have the the other hobbits are there, and your life is nice, and you're not afraid of like Nazgul coming in. And sorry, I'm reading Lord of the Rings now. So always afraid of NASGOL.

SPEAKER_03 46:55

That's like a first thought whenever.

SPEAKER_01 46:56

Anyway, so maybe people say, Well, this is not a solution, but it is. There, the novelty of this is if you haven't been exposed to this tax wealth not work idea, yeah. This is the solution that I'm proposing that that Gary's Gary's economics proposes that's not very mainstream yet, but I think could become mainstream. And so maybe you hear it for maybe you hear it here first.

SPEAKER_03 47:14

Or if you didn't quite understand some basic terms that other people knew that is like the ones that you caught up to me. Yeah, yeah, like you knew about interest tax. Like how I pretended to not understand things for other people. That's right. You're pretending shrewd, clever technical.

SPEAKER_01 47:29

Very shrewd. But yeah, anyway, so we can maybe we can just leave it there. But okay.

SPEAKER_03 47:33

So yeah, so if you guys want to get up there, tax wealth not work. Is the first thing that's gotten me like not I'm I'm like, okay, AI, cool. Okay, we can I can be cool with it at this at this range.

SPEAKER_01 47:43

If it can do this, then oh my god, if AI did this, I'd be all over it.

SPEAKER_03 47:46

But can it make Will Smith eat spaghetti?

SPEAKER_01 47:49

Have you seen the recent ones?

SPEAKER_03 47:50

They're really accurate now. Oh no. This man is never gonna be allowed to eat normal spaghetti to be filmed. It's just not allowed anymore. That's true. He probably hates spaghetti.

SPEAKER_01 47:59

He should get some foundational model to pay him like 20 million dollars to like get up on a stage and do a publicity stunt where he eats spaghetti. That'd be he probably will do that. Actually, should we bet that he'll be to a what he gets to a party?

SPEAKER_03 48:12

I bet that he'll be paid some amount of money for just performance of spaghetti eating to eat spaghetti in some performative way.

SPEAKER_01 48:20

Just for a foundational model to be like, ha ha ha, we got one.

SPEAKER_03 48:24

Yeah, the way that like a human chess master fights against the supercomputer and like everyone can. Oh, it'll be a Turing test. Uh huh. Which one of these is actually the audience has to pick out which is Will Smith eating spaghetti for reasoning. This is awesome.

Will Smith Spaghetti And The Sendoff

SPEAKER_01 48:36

This is like we're we're like OpenAI's PR team right here. We got that. Oh, we gotta call Mr. Netflix. Hold on. All right, everybody. Go out there and uh end precarity. Yeah, tax wealth not work. I love it. We probably have to still tax work too, because like I said, this only gets like 10 million. This only gets like 20% of the federal federal thing.

SPEAKER_03 48:58

It's a it's a step in the right direction, which is what we would need right now. Let's do it. Let's stop stepping in the wrong direction.

SPEAKER_01 49:04

Yeah. All right, everybody. See you next time. See you. Bye.