Additionally they wealth already taxed in a previous era, and is currently taxed in this era any time they spend it via sales tax.
If of course you are spending all your money on personal groceries as a billionaire, then I’m 100% fine with not taxing you.
Please look up "rent", "dividend" and "capital gains".
Let's say life is a computer game, and once you max out at $1bn in earned wealth (presumably this includes liquid and illiquid assets such as properties, cars etc), you cannot accumulate more wealth.
How does a government enforce this stance? You cannot stop say Bill Gates shorting Tesla and earning millions from the trade, can you?
Can you stop a landlord renting out their properties to block further income from them?
What about interest generated from bonds or savings accounts?
Do you simply tax the shit out of people if they have over £1bn in wealth?
The big challenge I see for all of this is that rich people have the best (and most expensive) accountants/lawyers money can buy. If you try to tax the shit out of them, their accountants and lawyers will find a way around it.
Also, if one government is too heavy handed, they'll just move assets to another more lenient government.
With regard to the first part, the normal examples I give of this are road traffic offences (which if fully enforced would mean the only people allowed to drive would be those who didn't); and drug laws — ignore weed for now, nobody defends heroin, full enforcement of UK heroin laws would treble the UK prison population all by itself, while enforcing the laws on cocaine would more than double the US prison population and increase the British one by a factor of 20.
With regard to the second, look at how confused people get about copyright, trademarks, how they work, what the penalties are for violating them, what counts as "fair use", and so on.
Seems like the obvious answer, though you're probably right in that people will move assets around and do elaborate things to avoid the tax but they already do that now.
Make a hard cap wealth cap at $1B. Oh you made a great investment that made you $400M dollars? oops looks like you're $200M over the cap. You now owe the government $200M. But good news you hit the $1B cap. You "win" capitalism. Have a nice medal maybe.
Seems reasonable to me.
I suppose the argument against it is that you'd be dissuading near billionaires from investing their money in things (eg. starting new companies) though I'm not entirely sure if money is a real motivator for people who have ~$900M. Is it? I don't know any 900 millionaires to ask.
OK, but does that include Rowling's Harry Potter sales, or Persson selling Minecraft to Microsoft?
> There's no conceivable reason
How about "someone is offering me a billion to take over the company I founded regardless of if I actually agree to sell"? Or worse, "someone wants to offer me a million for 0.1% of my shares, but if I sold all my shares the market price would crash by 95%, therefore I get all the blame for being rich with only a handful of the benefits"?
I appreciate there are other economic systems besides one-dollar-one-vote, and we may wish to make mega corporations more democratic and less plutocratic-authoritarian, but that kind of change deserves a book rather than a single comment.