There's not enough rich people to do that in the first place. You will end up taxing the whole middle class, which is effectively what politicians are increasingly doing, which brings everyone down
I’m not sure that’s true. There are more rich people than ever and taxes are at their lowest point since ~1940
There are also more people than ever, in case you haven't noticed
>I’m not sure that’s true. There are more rich people than ever and taxes are at their lowest point since ~1940
There are 2,640 billionaires in the world, 28 fewer than in 2022 (according to Forbes). Their total wealth is $12.2 trillion. Some portion (how much?) could certainly help a sizable number of people, but it is difficult to know how many and for how long.
> but it is difficult to know how many and for how long.
Permanently? Finding out how many is the job of the IRS after the top marginal tax rates are increased by an extra 10-20%. The top capital gains tax rate is also much too low.
Globalization and the removal of capital control resulted in a race to the bottom between countries offering ever lower tax rates. That’s a huge problem, it’s something only rich people can utilize and leads to continually increasing inequality.
According to the Distribution of Wealth page on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth), millionaires (> US $1M, i.e. incl. billionaires) own 46% of property, while the middle class (US $100 - $1M) own 39%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#/media/...
Excluding primary residences would likely significantly shift this figure, but the figures seem reasonable..
A lot of people can become a millionaire throughout their lifetime just by having a normal job or small business. That's nowhere the level where I would describe as "rich".
We just need to enforce the tax laws we already have on the books.
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/20/hunter-biden-to-plead-guilty...
Alternatively, make the Government waste WAY LESS money is a better answer. have you ever seen a mafia going bankrupt every year despite collecting protection money from everyone? only the government is so utterly incapable.
> Globally, we counted 2,640 ten-figure fortunes, down from 2,668 last year. Altogether, the planet’s billionaires are now worth $12.2 trillion, a drop of $500 billion from $12.7 trillion in March 2022.
For comparison (via various wikipedia pages reachable from[1]), the US federal government budget in 2022 was $6.3 trillion (against an income of $4.9 trillion).
If 100% of the $12.2 trillion owned by billionaires was seized and annually disbursed at 3% annually for social programs, this would provide $366 billion dollars annually. In 2022, the US spent $747 billion on Medicare alone.
Increasing the Medicare budget by %50 seems nice, but it also doesn't seem like it would be a transformational change to society. It may be a better idea to spend a large chunk of the $12.2 trillion immediately on high-upfront-cost things, but I don't have the imagination to come up with good ideas.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
Bezos himself could personally pay to educate a generation of US citizens. Most of us can’t process the amount of wealth that one individual has, let alone that whole demographic of people.
There’s also a question of what fair taxation even looks like when you have such a small number of people in the US economy controlling the lion’s share of the capitol.
Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that the capitol isn’t there. It most definitely is.
Let’s assume there’s a little over 3 generations in the US at any given time. Call it 100M people per generation.
Bezos has around $150B.
$150B divided equally across 100M people, there would be $1500 per person for all of their education. I think that’s obviously not enough to cover the education of an entire generation.
> Most of us can’t process the amount of wealth that one individual has
My experience is that many also can’t comprehend just how many people there are out there and how quickly program costs multiply out as a result.
It doesn't have anything to do with how many there are, but how much wealth they hold. And the 0.1% hold an enormous amount of wealth which absolutely would help fund effective services for the poor.
You could have one guy with a hundred trillion dollars and the fact that he's just one guy would be irrelevant.