A change in taxes like that would incentivize people to leave the bay area, lowering cost of living. If the families you know suddenly lost all or most of their earnings over $400k, but their mortgage/rent were cut in half, they’d benefit. The insane hot spot of cost of living there would stabilize closer to the national median cost of living. They would be affected in the extremely short term, but they would either move away or wait a year or so and start feeling the benefits of the change.

The only downside is that homeowners would see property values drop. I’d propose that some amount of the tax dollars be allocated to paying off the difference in property values for primary residences. Idk I’m not a legislator, but I’m sure there are reasonable carve outs to not fuck over “the middle class” in the process of trying to help people climb up to that status. I’m just some dipshit who sells his time and labor 12 hours at a time, not a career politician or lawyer.

Idk about you, but nobody I personally know makes over $400k per year. (I know it’s €, but I’m in the US and the euro and dollar are similar enough in value). I’m in a very wealthy and expensive area of the US, so I know plenty of people who make over $200k. My plant manager probably makes about $300k. Even then, still not over $400k.

Do you or people you know work to earn anywhere close to €400k? If not, (which I strongly suspect,) then I’m not sure why you would balk at that tax rate. Isn’t €400k plenty for getting through a year? Can’t the rich fucks budget a little better and maybe prepare their own breakfast instead of throwing money away on coffee shop lattes and pastries? I mean, that’s roughly the advice they’ve been giving us poors for 20 years… Doesn’t it work?

If somebody is in the position of making over €400k per year, they should be happy to give back to the system and structures that made that possible so that everybody can benefit. There shouldn’t be unhoused people freezing to death or hungry people starving to death in the same country that sees salaries that high. Full stop. I say go further. 100% tax over €400k until all people are humanely housed, clothed, and fed, then relieve that back to 90%. It can come down to 80% once 80% of workers has a €50k salary, and again to down to 70% once 70% of workers has a €100k salary. Incentivize these greedy fucks to help themselves by helping others first.

I wish you were right. If I thought there was an actual shot at Google suffering consequences for bullshit like this, I’d short the stock. In reality, they’ll somehow be up. They’ll launch some stupid new thing and this will be completely forgotten. It’s bad enough that every time Maps updates, it resets my customization to avoid tolls. I live in NoVA. These tolls are absolute fucking bullshit and I ain’t paying it.

Because any country fighting a war on defense against aggressors/invaders knows that the path to winning is to hold strong, wait out the clock, and drain resources from the enemy. Something as essential as that will cause urgency to redirect resources and personnel to replace/repair and then better defend it so that it doesn’t just immediately happen again. This makes defense easier because there’s less of an offense while that’s happening. This also can cause internal loss of support since Russian citizens can see the costs of this going up. They will know people who were sent to die on the front lines. They will see taxes go up and availability of goods go down. Once Russian citizens start to question and criticize the campaign, there could be a snowball effect that ends with Putin and his cronies having to make a choice between stopping the invasion or losing power. I don’t think Putin will ever stop, so the real choice will be desperate attacks (which could include nukes, triggering article 5 and effectively ending Russia) or a coup. Putin has checkmated himself whether he is aware of it yet or not. His best case scenario at this point is dying of natural causes in office and leaving that hard decision to his successor who will probably back down and be a pariah for it, saving Russia in the process.

[citation needed]