Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett Are Richer Than Poorest Half of US | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett Are Richer Than Poorest Half of US

theguardian.com

33 pointspmoriarty33 comments

If your net worth is positive, you are richer than the poorest 10% of the US.

[edit] A different source suggests the net worth of the bottom 25% of the US is about zero, so you're even higher!

Also, these numbers are for households, and I wouldn't be surprised if poorer families averaged larger households, so in terms of per-capita wealth it's probably even higher.

not sure what measure of net worth you're referring to but if it means assets minus debt, I suspect a lot of poor people don't have any debt (ability to be in debt itself can be an indication of wealth :))...

You don’t even need a positive net worth. The poorest American is richer than the aggregate negative net worth of the referenced ~25% of the population.

Yep, I definitely feel better already, its only $248.5bn more money to reach > 50%! /s

Ok? Their wealth is mostly in stock of companies they founded. When they sell it, they'll pay taxes on the gains. When they receive dividends, they'll pay taxes on that too.

If the implication is that some of that wealth should be redistributed, how would that work? Should the government confiscate shares of stock? Then do what with them?

Redistribution is done via tax rather than confiscating stock. The popular idea is some kind of wealth tax. Often goes hand in hand with UBI.

The wealth is in the form of stock. If they hold the stock, and they're not selling it, where does the tax come in? They would have to sell the stock in order to pay the tax, paying capital gains tax in the process? Bezos doesn't have $95 billion sitting in a savings account.

Let's pretend it's land instead of stock. If I own a parcel of land with $10 million, but don't have much cash, and the government wants to tax me 10% of my wealth, where do I get the money to pay the tax? I'm forced to sell off part of the land? What, every year? Until I don't own anything anymore?

They could sell some of the stock to pay for that the same way their employees do when their stock grants mature couldn't they?

So you're forced to slowly give up more and more of your company? What if you're trying to keep a certain percentage to maintain control?

You can't. The whole point of a wealth tax is to prevent people/families from staying wealthy forever.

The acquisition of wealth is not a zero sum game so why would you want people/families to get poorer ('stop them from staying wealthy forever'). How about getting people to climb up rather than forcing some down?

Your idea of the 'point of a wealth tax' is a curious one. I am not aware anyone has suggested this aside from failed communist regimes where remarkably, some families at the apex who make/made the rules continue/continued to live rather well.

The current conversation about a wealth tax was jumpstarted by Thomas Piketty, who argues that the natural tendency of a capitalist economy is to make the rich get richer and the poor to get poorer (relative to each other - in absolute terms everybody should be getting richer). Basically the point of the wealth tax is to provide a counterweight to that tendency.

Again, depends on a wealth tax, but if its the same as the tax you'd pay if you had that wealth sitting in the bank, and its worth billions but you never get a return, then very very slowly you'd lose tiny fractions of your company. Yes. But that would be a very odd situation

Depends on how you design it. But if your wealth is tied up purely in stock that gives you no return in terms of cash, then yes, you'd likely have to sell some of that stock.

Responding to the Edit about land: Well actually wealth tax is often used as an idea to control property prices. If you own $10 million in land. That land makes you no money, you'd have to work out how to make money from the land or diversify to make a minimum return that covers the tax. The consequence of which is land/property becomes a less desirable investment compared to say investing in businesses unless that land actually makes a return. Theirs pros and cons and a lot of discussion on wealth tax etc. But taxing income also has pros and cons. The question is do you want tax to tax evenly across peoples wealth, or do you want it to tax evenly across income? or some mixture of both?

I think this should be less about their massive wealth - rather the relative poverty and insecurity of most people who live paycheck to paycheck..

Is it a zero sum game?

No, the economy is NOT NOT NOT NOT a zero-sum game.

http://www.asktheharvardmba.com/2008/05/03/is-global-economi...

If you accept it is not a zero sum game this is in no way equivalent to suggesting the strongest should have their way on how the cake is cut.

Regressive shares do not make a larger total all by themselves, in fact at some point there are very negative returns to the total when the wealthiest get a bigger share.

>World economics are definitely NOT a zero-sum game. Were that truly the case, you’d still be sitting around your cave with your buddies Thak and Grunt, snacking on beetles and grubs. Clearly, the world economy is larger today than it was 25 years ago.

This guy forgot the small detail that when we were neanderthals we yet had to explore the world.

Why would that be important?

A trick I use for trying to fathom such large amounts of money would be "Assuming a conservative rate of return, how much money can my wealth generate?"

e.g. at 3%, Gates would generate ~$200M per month in returns. The bottom of the forbes 400 (~$2B) still pulls in $5M per month. If you just barely qualify for the "1-percenter" title, you "only" get $25k per month.

And none of them were born particularly rich or privileged. Nice to see hard work and wise choices can elevate one to such great heights.

Hard work, wise choices, and of course luck.

That's not to say that wealth doesn't stay concentrated. For instance, the wealthiest families in Florence today are the same wealthiest families in Florence 600 years ago[1], and families like the Waltons, Kochs, S.C. Johnsons, Hearsts, Du Ponts, etc all have a legacy of riches which sort of undermine the purity of our meritocratic Big Three.

That said, it's definitely a little refreshing and wouldn't have been possible under pre-Mercantilism systems.

1 https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...

You and I have very different definitions of being born rich then: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/

Troll much?

There is an international law firm called KL&Gates the Gates in it is Bill’s dad you want might to google them.

And some quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett :

> In 1942, his father was elected to the first of four terms in the United States Congress

> Buffett's interest in the stock market and investing dated to schoolboy days he spent in the customers' lounge of a regional stock brokerage near his father's own brokerage office.

(His father brokerage company was Buffett-Falk & Co.)

> In high school, he invested in a business owned by his father and bought a 40-acre farm worked by a tenant farmer. He bought the land when he was 14 years old with $1,200 of his savings.

Neither of my parents were in Congress, nor started and ran a brokerage office, nor owned a business - much less a business that others could invest in.

I mean, two of them have pledged to give away their wealth, and the other is actively seeking ideas to do so.

If they’re giving it away anyway, what’s the problem?

I guess if you’re in that lower 50% of the US, it might sorta suck that Gates is sorting out renewable energy and malaria and not just directly giving you money? But it’s possibly a little repugnant to complain about it?

(Although I fully acknowledge it isn’t ACTUALLY poorer folk complaining about it, it’s moderately well off journalists fake-complaining about it to rile up other moderately well off folks on the internet.)

I do not like how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's funding of alternate education models has given undue weight to the views of just one person. I think it is undemocratic.

Quoting http://curmudgucation.blogspot.se/2017/10/gates-shifts-gears... concerning the Foundation's recent decision to spend an additional $1.7 Billion on education:

> So there's a slight shift of direction, but one thing stays the same-- the Gates conviction that he can serve as an unelected, unexperienced tsar of American education, reworking education to his will by sheer force of money. After seventeen years, he still hasn't noticed that he isn't helping.

60% of the country has less than $1000 in savings [1]. Thus I am richer than 60% of the U.S. and I'm pretty broke.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/pf/americans-lack-of-savings...

The article is talking about cumulative of those poorer 50%, heck I, living in a third world country am richer than 60% of Americans too.

When politicians talk about "the elite" are they talking about these handful of insanely wealthy people?

No, usually rather more. (Obviously depends on who is talking, the same word is used with different meanings by different people, sometimes deliberately to confuse the issue).

Both Donand Trump and Hilary Clinton are deeply entrenched in "The Elite"

If you think of that class of people who have a massively outsized say in how power is exercised by virtue of their connections or wealth or lobbying might or anything that isn't a large number of citizens electing them in a fair contest. That class of people is "the elite."

Absolutely this includes idiotic hollywood celebrities and politicians in gerrymandered electorates - unless of course they really are puppets on strings.

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