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How Do We Pay for Universal Basic Income? Tax Stock the Way Companies Already Issue It.
(scottsantens.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
183 points (95.5% liked)
Pragmatic Leftist Theory
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The neolibs are too far right. The tankies are doing whatever that is. Where's the space for the people who want fully-automated-luxury-gay-space-communism, but realize that it's gonna take a while and there are lots of steps between now and then? Here. This is that space.
Here, people should endeavor to discuss and devise practical, actionable leftist action. Vote lesser evil while you build grassroots coalitions. Unionize your workplace. Participate in SRAs. Build cohesion your local community. Educate the proletariat.
This is a place for practical people to develop practical plans to implement stable, incremental improvement.
If you're dead-set on drumming up all 18,453 True Leftists® into spontaneous Revolution, go somewhere else. The grown ups are talking.
Rules:
-1. Don't be a dick. Racism, sexism, other assorted bigotries, you know the drill. At least try to default to mutually respectful discussion. We're all on the same side here, unless you aren't, in which case kindly leave.
-2. Don't be a tankie. Yes I'm sure you have an extensive knowledge of century-old theory. There's been a century of history since then. Things didn't shake out as expected, maybe consider the possibility that a different angle of attack might be more effective in light of new data.
-3. Be practical. No one on the left benefits from counterproductive actions. This is a space informed by, not enslaved to, ideology. Promoting actions that are fundamentally untenable in the system in question, because they fulfill a sense of ideological purity, is a bad look. Don't do that.
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I like the idea of using tax money to create a series of corporations that run strategic industries like power, water, transportation, and critical industry.
Every citizen gets 1 share. Shares are not transferable. The corporations are run democratically by shareholder vote, and profit share is paid out. UBI.
It works within the current legal frameworks, no one is the loser because we aren't taking from one to give to the other, everyone has an interest in the success of the companies, and the company is not weaponise for political purposes or mismanaged to justify selling to the private sector.
Actually directly owning the means of production.
It's an absurd notion that you cannot tax unrealized gains. We already do when it comes to property taxes.
It's also probably not out of the question to find a way to tax the super low interest loans that the 1% get as well.
"Worth" Dec 31 - "Worth Jan 1" = Total Annual Income.
Tax that.
Easy, done.
All these billionaires like to throw around their worth, fine, but if Elon Musk (for example) is worth 1 Trillion at the end of the year, and he was worth 300 Billon at the start, tax that 700 Billion difference as income.
No wrote off bull shit either at that level.
That sounds interesting, how do property taxes work where you are?
A lot of property tax systems require you to pay a percentage of the estimated value of the property every year in tax. Which is exactly the point, unrealised gains being taxed in the case of your property appreciating while you live there.
Wouldn't that bite people when housing prices go up? I mean someone having a 600k house isn't really having access to that money.
Tax the rich though!
Importantly, at least around here, your property gets reappraised (estimated) every few years. It usually doesn't take into account the condition or any upgrades, but it does account for market conditions. If you disagree with their estimate you can get a full appraisal, which will account for those specific changes.
I found this counter argument pretty compelling: the trouble is that investments are extremely mobile, and fairly cheap to obfuscate. Incorporating a big effective business is not. Property is not.
We are already spending billions upon billions spying and monitoring the American people. I'm betting we can turn a bit of that onto tracking investments.
I mean, we already do. It's not all that effective afaik? Preventing foreign ransomware from extracting money from american(-businesse)s via bitcoin is clearly within the state's mandate and incentives, has reliable bipartisan support, and seems like a pretty similar situation. We can't track and protect funds on a public ledger as it stands, and journalists struggle to track PAC political funding. I'm not sure the spy-state is up to it tbh.
$365/mo. hardly pays for shit, but it's a start.
Probably enough for universal healthcare. Single payer is cheaper than what we have now.
Counter: do we even need a stock market given how soundly it's failed the supposed purpose most capitalists claim it has?
As I said, I agree the stock market should be abolished entirely, but that's an extremely difficult sell. This is a much more actionable policy at the present day, which may even get some traction given the bipartisan conversation on AI.
Fair enough, and you did, my counter thought was more targeted at the article itself lol. Still a good video tho!
Well when I clicked on the link it loaded a couple minutes from the end, so.
If I had the power to force one bill through, I'd ban the stock market. Stock is fine for employees, makes for a great pension. But you can't own stock in a company you don't work for. If you want to invest in a company you don't work for, buy bonds.
There's no good reason for private ownership through capital investment. Private capital investment can happen without ownership.
Amen. Keep the stock market on wallstreet, let them bet on what they want, ans if it fails, they're the only ones that should lose. Tying it to our retirement, our healthcare, our bonuses...then we're the ones left holding the bag. Which, is classic corporatism/capitalism. Socialize the losses and privatize the gains.
The whole AI companies going public is just such corruption on a huge scale, forcing all of us, without our consent, to buy into these companies and then call them "too big to rig" so then our tax dollars will have to bail them out when they inevitably fail.
I'm glad the S&P had the werewithall to reject their disgusting fast track plan. Though, now Trump is floating having the government acquire stocks in them, so here we go again, same problem.
Revolution now please?
Revolution now please?
Just as soon as we get about 30 million organized revolutionaries. Heck, call it 3 million if they're organized enough.
Probably gonna be waiting a bit for that tho.
Unfortunately. The only good thing about all this pain is that more people are finally waking up a bit and are finally looking up. Ironically, billionaires might be creating more socialists right now than socialists have in years lol
Maybe, hopefully, still not a great situation. The problem with accelerationism is that it tends to overestimate how sensitive the proverbial frog is to the water temperature rising. Bread and circuses are a powerful thing, even when they're just relatively cheap instead of free. "Creating more socialists than socialists have in years" isn't a particularly high bar. I have my doubts that the quantity is statistically significant, being exposed to the average American on a daily basis.
Yeah, it's obviously hard to tell and not a great situation, no one should have to suffer. I still deal with them everyday and many and incredibly self motivated. Which is exactly what capitalism wants you to be. But, I do see many who are even further up in corporate roles that feel the same as I do.
I really feel the world is coming to a head, where humanity is finding itself, globally, with two very generalized camps. Those that are selfish and that hoard money and power and those that are empathetic and care about supporting each other in spite of profit. I know which side I hope will win, and as more and more of the bread and the circus is torn away, more people in those high up places start to question things.
It really sucks that so many fall into the selfish camp and until they're personally affected they won't move.
I think broad success is going to come from finding people outside the "leftist" label that embody leftist ideals. I think there's too much online atheist energy for our own good, Christians can be a valuable asset if we can learn to leverage the teachings of Jesus. Red state voters have that dog in them, if you learn how to engage it. I think the main problem is that we let vocabulary get in the way of the message.
I think you don't need to eliminate the stock market. You build the social safety net by taxing the rich and then the average worker won't give a fuck about the stock market because they won't need it.
It will make the stock market grow slower. Almost definitionally. I don't understand why we've designed policy around that growth rate. But we definitely do. Anybody got a long read on why that happened?
actually keyes has a thing for that but they never want to do half his things. He basically says in bad times you spend and lower taxes and in good times you tax and save up. its really pretty sensible when you think about it. Congress never really wants to do half of it though. So they lower taxes and spend fine but never shift to saving and raising taxes.
I'd read this, but I don't trust myself to find the source. Do you have a link?
No its not like a read a ton of his books. Just thing like youtube vidoes and wikipedia but it appears to be common enough knowledge that im not worried about it being appreciably wrong. I mean im sure I don't grasp some finer details.
Wow.
$1.4 trillion injected to a consumer base would cause mass inflation. We've already seen this with the "stimulus" checks. Money isn't real; the resources would have to be there in the first place. If they aren't, it will just cause an increase in demand without the actual supply, thus raising prices.
the problem there is it was money out of thin air. If taxes had been increase and we did not run with debt inflation would not be an issue. money gets put in and taken out.
This is the study you may be referencing to. It does not say what you think it does and instead puts the half the blame on Federal government spending. It does not break out this as just the stimulus sent to the average person.
Here we see an entirely different conclusion.
"the authors find that world import price inflation was mostly driven by global forces rather than country-specific supply shortages or demand surges."
Fuck taxes. Taxes was the compromise and they broke that agreement. Throw all of these billionaires in prison and criminalize ownership, control or influence of wealth over a maximum.
Did you read the article? The tax is in the form of mandatory share dilution that can't be evaded. Obviously more thorough changes are preferable, but this is a system that could work immediately.
Of course not. It's the internet. Unless it includes all asset classes and deals with stewardship of imagined entities that own things (corporations, charities, non profits etc), I have doubts. Especially if the ppl most prolific at evading community accountability are not thrown in prison and barred from wielding power.
If your perspective is "Anything less than perfect isn't even worth considering" then this might not be the community for you. It's not that I disagree with your underlying sentiment of desiring actual meaningful change, but that's not what this community is about.
Anything less than effective isn't worth doing.
There's a difference between perfect and effective. Less than perfectly effective is still effective. Less than perfectly effective, when perfect is presently unobtainable, is what this community is about. This is less than perfectly effective.
So long as the players can keep playing, changing the rules of the game isn't an effective solution.
It's not perfectly effective. It accomplishes something.
Some of us don't want to live our lives on standby until the rules of the game change. Sure, we should change them, but that's a multi-generational task.
It isn't effective enough to be worth doing. I'm not chasing perfection, as you keep insisting, just recognizing history.
When has this kind of direct taxation through stock dilution been tried historically? I don't see any history to recognize here. The article explains how it couldn't be dodged like other taxes, so historical wealth taxation isn't relevant.
When has seizing assets ever been tried? Constantly.
You really should read the article. This isn't that.
I did read it, did you? It takes 1.5% of all companies in the form of stock or ownership, that are big enough, and gives it the citizenry every year. Seizes assets and give it to citizens. Then it gets sold to....whoever the fund manager decides, and it is all easily corruptible and that is exactly what would happen if it ever managed to pass, which it won't.
Then it gets sold to....whoever the fund manager decides,
No, it gets sold gradually onto the open market.
You have too much faith the integrity of this system can be maintained.
I'm just open to novel mechanisms.
Sure.