Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale
dreamagainusa.org
dreamagainusa.org
Increase wages.
If you "fool" a hundred thousand individuals to work for a company on a wage and through their work the company ends up been valued at a billion, you become a billionaire. Wouldn't they deserve a bigger cut of the fruit of their labor?
The fastest way to distribute wealth isn't taxes on wealth, it's a better distribution of the wealth generated by labor on the contract that the employee signs.
A rich person can afford to split their wealth 10-ways, meaning they get a 20% ROI every year.
9/10 workers don't get shit, while one does.
What we want instead is everyone benefiting.
This is how taxes work. I'm not sure why you jumped from one extreme of the US to the other extreme of Cambodia, ignoring the quite normal end successful middle.
If government subsidies are the only reason Tesla exists, why did Aptera (v1) and Fisker fail? If SpaceX only exists because of government subsidies, why are Boeing and Lockheed Martin (owners of ULA) worth so much less than SpaceX?
Could also take dividends, that would be more of a tax on the company itself which is what people usually object to in this discussion. Now the company basically can't grow as fast because it has to satisfy the tax burden for the owner. But that's a choice the owner makes.
That probably seemed more coherent before you put it into words.
It'd be interesting to do the same graph by real consumption. I bet it'd be much more equal - most of the wealth is tied up in systems that keep the country ticking over and are only providing paper benefits to the owner. Which is why I say "transparency" - once you track what happens in real terms, "taxing the rich" almost certainly becomes "everyone ends up with less". If you take real resources away from the person who owns the McDonald's ice cream machine in real terms I have a hard time seeing how it won't come out of the lifestyle of the dude buying icecream. The person getting the money wasn't consuming anything real.
Reality would like a word with you...
Tell me you've never met a modern Republican without telling me you've never met a Republican.
And it's not like taxes destroy wealth. Distributing from the person who owns the ice cream machine to the person buying ice cream puts the money in the hands of the person far more likely to spend it quickly. On ice cream, making the business case for owning ice cream machines better, not worse.
I mean, sure. The follow up thought is after that power has been taxed away then someone else is going to need to be taxed for the raw resources that are needed. If welfare checks start being paid out with intangible benefits it'll lead to loud complaints. That gets to the heart of the problem with taxing the people with truly enormous amounts of wealth, they mostly have power, which isn't much use to someone who needs food and shelter. The tax burden has fall somewhere in the logistics chain that produces the houses and the food (although maybe a long way upstream).
> Distributing from the person who owns the ice cream machine to the person buying ice cream puts the money in the hands of the person far more likely to spend it quickly
I'm not going to disagree with that, but I will point out that this is why they couldn't afford the ice cream machine in the first place. Consuming the seed corn is a road to eventually having no corn.
There is an economic optimum amount of ice cream production and there isn't any reason to believe it isn't being hit under the current system. It isn't obvious if the need is for more or less ice cream machines. Moving ownership of the machine around doesn't obviously change the amount of ice cream produced; and its owner isn't consuming the machine. But a wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy is pulling all those levers on the assumption that making random changes in ownership has to help. It probably won't.
The modern capitalistic system has devised many fabulous ways of enabling people to buy ice cream machines and seed corn without being able to afford it individually. Equity and loans are the two most obvious, there are many more.
That is the main reason that American capitalism has thrived. Because you don't have to be rich to buy ice cream machines.
The concentrated ownership results in graphs a lot like the one in the linked article.
Exactly. We should be taxing profit less and wealth more.
That's what it means to be poor. You have to eat first. You don't have the choice to not eat so you can save the cost for something else.
What you're describing is called "Trickle Down Economics", and has led to 50 years of economic failure.
If we're talking globally, Asia ain't failing. They're big on producing lots of real stuff. Minted a lot of new billionaires.
2. Your complaint seems to be "X is a bigger problem than Y, so Y is ignorable." Real life is not that binary. Both problems are significant.
Rough estimates for federal taxes
Top 0.1% Share of federal taxes ~10–12% Approx ~$550–650B
Bottom 50% Share of federal taxes ~10–13% Approx ~$520–680B
source : quick claude query
The top 1% pay about 38%. The top 0.1% is simply not a lot of people and not helpful for thinking about how much you can juice them in absolute dollar amounts.
So let's say you start taxing the ultra-wealthy based on their assets. They then have the option of:
1) Make the company pay out dividends, so that owners can afford to pay their wealth tax. Not ideal, because what happens during bad years where there's no dividends to be paid out? Or if companies want to re-invest in the company?
2) Sell stocks. Again, not ideal. This would mean that you lose some ownership year by year.
3) Take up personal loans to cover taxes.
etc.
Note, I'm NOT saying that we shouldn't do anything. But this is just the consequence of such assets (stocks) being the dominant asset among the wealthy.
Having hordes of people in poverty while we bend over backwards to not inconvenience the rich with "selling stocks" to pay taxes".
Wealth taxation cannot redistribute the kind of wealth we care about most. At least not by itself.
You need someone to buy the stocks in exchange for labor. So you need to keep the stocks themselves valuable.
As an extreme example, if you'd just take away all the SpaceX and Tesla stock from all shareholders and redistribute them, they would probably be near worthless because you just demonstrated that their value is more or less random.
I think that wealth taxation will only work if you give ironclad guarantees that people that are merely rich or middle-class will never be subject to it. If you can show that a stock is more valuable to, say, a medical doctor, then to the CEO of a hyperscaler, you might have a working system.
If large fortunes keep doing 5-7% per year compounding, outpacing the avg. growth rate of economy, wages etc. then we keep ending up with Musk-like figures with such outsized amounts of power and influence that it basically destabilizes democracy altogether.
You can't get rid of these people because they just have too much influence -- i mean, literally buying entire social media platforms. C'mon.
Its really just a question about whether you want society to continue functioning with some semblance of fairness and stability.
Edit: Again, stocks are not financial Assets.
Work hard, so that the government can redistribute your success?
Or you have the problem of businesses slowly losing their owners, who then stop caring about their clients or community.
What is the result of these taxes? Where does the money go? Does it lead to more economic activity or less?
You understand that billionaires don't make money from labor right? They get their money from rents and the return on capital. Roughly 5-7% per year, compounding, risk free, for perpetuity.
Why take on a job when you have to pay income tax? Because you'll still have much more left over than if you didn't. And this answers your question: because you'll still have much more left over than if you didn't start a business.
I'm on disability, and if I make over $1000 a month, anything over $1000 gets taxed at 75%.
Do you think I work enough to make over $1000 a month? Do you think I'd scrub toilets for $20 per hour and take home only $5?
Hint: after $1000, I either get paid cash or don't work
Amazingly, people still start businesses.
If you tax stocks, the rich will have no incentive to keep their money locked-in. They will encash and exit to a jurisdiction that allows them to invest their proceeds into stocks again. Lets assume a hypothetical scenario where all jurisdictions impose a tax on stocks. Then they'll retire by investing in assets or heck just keep it in their banks.
What you are asking for won't work in a capitalist society (which is pretty much every society on Earth). The only way out is UBI.
We cannot claim to live in a democracy while Elon Musk gets to decide whether our allies can use communications or close down entire branches of government.
There's many other solutions you gloss over, from capital controls for the more near-term issue to moving past capitalism for the more long-term systemic fix.
You dont need incentives for the rich. You can just pass laws limiting their options.
> We cannot claim to live in a democracy while Elon Musk gets to decide whether our allies can use communications or close down entire branches of government.
This can be fixed with laws around lobbying.
> capital controls for the more near-term issue
Capital controls won't solve much because it is a one time exit tax that stakeholders have to pay to move out of the jurisdiction taxing stocks. Those who cannot move will shutdown their companies and invest those proceeds into assets, typically immovable (like land/houses etc), which will drive housing prices up. It has cascading effects that affect the economy in a different way.
This causes displacement of those who cannot afford housing, which will incentivize the rich outside the jurisdiction to buy up assets and then that causes a change in voting structures. The rich can then vote their candidate who will reverse capital controls. Or maybe they won't and keep it that way so they have their own gated society so to speak with no entry for those who cannot afford to be there. You can already see it happening in few places in the World where such controls exist.
> You dont need incentives for the rich. You can just pass laws limiting their options.
You are missing the point. The incentives are for everyone who want to give it a shot at trying to take their idea, implement a vision and then execute on it. Does not mean they will succeed. The tiny percentage who do succeed end up becoming rich. See the number of startups that succeed vs those that failed. You are not disincentivizing the rich by imposing wealth tax. You are disincentivizing the average Joe who wants a shot at making it.
> This can be fixed with laws around lobbying.
No it can't, and lobbying has nothing to do with the problem of one guy being the petty autocrat on top of his empire rivaling democratic states.
> Capital controls won't solve much because it is a one time exit tax that stakeholders have to pay to move out of the jurisdiction taxing stocks.
Who said that? You've defined your own narrow version of capital controls to then argue against. States could just ban moving capital out of the country. Countries can just pass laws! They don't need to do whatever makes rich people happy.
> You are missing the point. The incentives are for everyone who want to give it a shot at trying to take their idea, implement a vision and then execute on it.
You are missing the point. People do all sorts of stuff for all sorts of reasons. Many companies are founded because somebody saw a real issue and wanted to fix it. Others are founded because somebody found a loophole or a way to extract capital by moving some numbers around or monopolizing something others need.
I would posit that if the only reason somebody opens a company is greed, then maybe that company would be a net-negative for society anyways?
If capital cannot be taken out of country then it can be put in assets mate. I have explained that scenario already.
> If a few dudes control most productive forces, that is inherently antidemocratic. No amount of trying to pay off the public with some elaborate scheme that doesn't remove their control will fix that.
Then have more dudes controlling most productive forces. You have anti-monopoly and antitrust laws for that exact reason.
> If the only reason somebody opens a company is greed, then maybe that company would be a net-negative for society anyways?
It is not greed. Money is a by-product of success and follows success wherever it goes. You cannot dissociate the two.
> Of course UBI is an allowance. You can't just say it isn't without making an argument
It really isn't. It is the same argument as utilities. You individually haven't paid the full amount for construction of road network, bridges, electric grid yet you don't consider it an "allowance" do you? You believe you have contributed your fair share. Yet you still enjoy these utilities wherever you are and for life by only paying for how much you use it. UBI is the exact same thing. Instead of giving you in the form of utilities, you are getting money which you will reinvest back into the economy by choosing what and from whom to buy. Both are assets being dispersed by the Government.
What untaxed assets would those be? Are you saying the bank interest would be higher than other investments minus tax?
I am having trouble following your argument to your last conclusion.
> Are you saying the bank interest would be higher than other investments minus tax?
It absolutely will. When you tax stocks, you are eroding its value. Why would anyone want to continue to keep their wealth in stocks when they could just cash out and not lose any of that value?
> And I don't have the option to sell partial shares of it
Sure. But you can always rent it out and move to a smaller rental. And it is a good thing you cannot sell partial shares of it. You shouldn't. Imagine selling partial shares/stocks every time you have to pay tax on stocks. You will end up with nothing in a few years.
This is not a universal truth.
> Rent collected can easily be used to offset property tax on the asset. Now you cannot collect rent on stocks
You actually can, it's called securities lending.
> So the only way to pay tax on stock value (which is assessed by a valuer at that particular point in time) is by either paying it out of personal pocket, taking a loan or selling the stock. None of those options are feasible.
1) Why not. 2) Sounds like someone needs an income (which is already taxed and would have solved much of the tax avoidance).
> It absolutely will. When you tax stocks, you are eroding its value. Why would anyone want to continue to keep their wealth in stocks when they could just cash out and not lose any of that value?
A lesser gain is not a loss.
You cannot do that with private companies. It is only restricted to public securities. And even these are not owner/investor stocks (which are locked for a certain period after company goes public via IPO). These are typically fresh stocks issued before company goes public.
> This is not a universal truth.
What is the evidence for it working otherwise? Every Country that has tried Wealth Tax has rolled it back.
> A lesser gain is not a loss.
It is not a capital gains tax (which already exists). Wealth tax is a tax on unrealized gains. It definitely leads to erosion of stock value.
> 1) Why not. 2) Sounds like someone needs an income (which is already taxed and would have solved much of the tax avoidance).
You have just encountered a classic Catch-22 here. Without income, you cannot pay tax. Without paying tax, you have no revenue and hence no income.
If you impose a wealth tax on this, which side are you imposing it on? Company or individual investor in the company? You cannot impose a tax on what is technically a liability on the company's books. So you would have to impose on the individual investor. Lets try with an example: assume the wealth tax is 10%. Lets also assume I hold 5 million common stock, pre-seed, in a startup I founded (45% equity). How would the stock be valued? It should be zero. So I pay zero wealth tax. Then I get an investor onboard, who invests say $1 million at 10%, valuing the company at $10 million. Lets assume, because of this capital infusion, my equity gets diluted to 40%. That means I am on paper worth $4 million. I immediately owe 10% of it or $400,000 to tax authorities. Without having made a single cent in revenue. My co-founder would also owe $400,000. We have no money of our own except to use the investment money to pay the taxes. That is $400,000 + $400,000 = $800,000. We are left with only $200,000 in the bank. Before we even started the company.
You might say 10% is too much. Lets reduce the wealth tax to say 1%. Or even 0.1%. Then the entire idea becomes meaningless. Might as well just charge extra corporate tax.
I'll get hate from some corners on this, but I'm coming to see the wisdom in not significantly increasing the tax rate on the rich, but instead broadening the tax base. For example, count tricks like borrow, spend, die as cash; make stock buybacks illegal; treat compensation in the form of assets as cash income at the valuation price when the transfer happens; count inheritances above $X million as income, cash income.
Wealth concentration is a problem because wealth concentration is power concentration.
Why should a few dudes have autocratic control of entire industries?
If you force them to sell off their stakes over time through a wealth tax, you make the economy more democratic.
"Taxing the rich" is literally solving the thing that is a problem today.
What's the problem? It's not like you'll have to sell over 50%. Even then the are schemes for non-voting shares. But when close to 1% of population works for Amazon, maybe forced sharing of ownership isn't a bad idea.
Isn't that exactly what we are trying to achieve by re-distributing the wealth, and avoiding that few people have such huge ownership that they have more power than governments ?
We are still living in a middle-age system, where the lords don't own lands but stocks and companies, but they still dictate the laws.
Besides any argument about fairness, wealth inequality is highly destabilizing and historically has only been corrected by revolutions, wars, crises etc.
If a few billionaires need to sell stocks to avoid such an outcome, that seems quite desirable to me.
What I like about it is that it doesn’t penalize people who already pay taxes. It’s a lower bound, not an extra.
What makes me weary about any such tax is that in practice, it seems to target the broad middle class - people who have enough assets to be interesting to the tax man, but who don’t have enough to hide it or avoid taxes.
If you're talking about the "Zucman tax" it explicitely targets the ultra-high-net-worth individuals because that's the population that manages to avoid income tax and thus pay a lower effective tax rate than the rest of the population.
Still my concern would be that the other Zuck would show he has no income and no assets, while a doctor or coder would end up paying extra tax on their retirement savings.
I think there’s really only a few solutions to it which all involve some kind of divestiture, it just depends on if you want to target corporations or individuals:
1) a new wave of anti-trust ala Lina Khan and breaking up most major tech companies.
2) passing laws limiting the behavior of, and allowing for the punishment of corporations and group agents as a whole. There’s a lot of philosophical work about how to hold a group accountable for their actions, try searching List and Pettit Group Agency. There’s been a lot of development since then but I’m less aware of it.
3. Caps on decision making power (potentially measured via some weighted stock ownership, or wealth more generally) like suggested above. I agree there would be a lot of second order effects here which are beyond the scope of this comment but I think we’ve clearly gone too far in one direction where single individuals are now essentially funding national party midterms, have increasing power over real world conflicts, and any other of the myriad of corruption issues you can find out in the wild.
Honestly, there isn't a clean solution to this problem- or at least none that doesn't come with unpredictable consequences. I think everyone can agree that companies growing too large inevitably become harmful for the society they're enabled by, but there are no previously established solution we can reach for... And every decision you can make will have trade-offs. Also, were pretty late game into free market capitalism. Any changes to the status quo will dis-/advantage someone, and they will utilize the tools available to them to stop you. So such deep cutting changes are beyond unlikely without first descending into complete chaos. Which would likely be worse for the majority of people...
In reality majority of billionaires are in industries and companies that does not even remotely have the same benefits or power.
Why is it normal that regular people would have to sell their homes just to have a prayer of paying their minimum nut but its aways "muh unrealized stocks" when it comes to billiionaires?
Why should they be exempt from a propoetionate burden to pay the societys on a from whom they are fundamentally predicated to be feasible?
Because that is not normal and shouldn't happen either. And I dont understand why this is used as an example.
I dont expect normal people to have to sell their stock. Nor do I believe in tax on asset for anyone. Capital Gain Tax should just be Income tax.
How is that not the obvious comeback to the argument "wealth is stocks so we can't tax it"? Is there an obvious downside?
The first option guaranties that you don't pay more in taxes than you earn on the stocks, and the later has higher risk vs reward. For some reasons, the later seems to be the most popular choice, despite the risk that the owner need to cover the cost of taxes regardless of what happens in the stock market.
Why couldn't there a wealth ceiling? Let's take $1B per person, everything above that is taxed at 100%. Would it destroy the capitalist dream and people would lose motivation to grow their wealth, or would it stimulate cooperation and wealth distribution?
But yes. Something like that.
Because while some can be transferred into something that is partially worker-owned, not all workers are suited to be given that sort of leverage.
So that might be worth pondering to come up with a solution that makes stuff not collapse. Because the reality of human resources is that the quality is underwhelming.
Frankly, I can't think of a fairer way for a company to be guided. If we choose, we can vote to hire (shudder) Elon Musk to run our company - or someone actually competent and trustworthy, from outside the employee pool.
By our charter, no one may own more than 1% of our total stock. Our collective decisions - effectively democratic representation, like the US - help decide our success. Demogoguery is almost impossible (unlike the US). Every worker is vested to some degree in our success, thanks to stock gift policies (and of course we can choose to buy more stock than that low level).
But, to put my previous point more bluntly, if you do this, you cannot hire idiots, because they otherwise start ruining everything.
Someone needs to hire idiots though, which is why this concept cannot work for all.
The alternative to that is idiot removal, however, that has proven to be a rather complex ethics problem where we've collectively rightfully decided that it is so radioactive, we will no longer entertain such thoughts.
My point is that with such a wealth cap, we will get some co-ops, but we also will have to get something else. And I have not yet found an idea what that could be
In the US, the top federal rate was around 90% through the 1940s and early 1960s, then 70% through the 1970s.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-federal-inc...
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich...
I found this footnote particularly interesting:
It is worth noting that, per the Piketty, Saez, and Zucman data, the tax rates of the top 0.1 and 0.01 percent of taxpayers have dropped substantially since the 1950s. The average tax rate on the 0.1 percent highest-income Americans was 50.6 percent in the 1950s, compared to 39.8 percent today. The average tax rate on the top 0.01 percent was 55.3 percent in the 1950s, compared to 40.8 percent today.
Note that those percentages include Federal, state, and local taxes.
It is no surprise to me that an organization originally founded by the chairman of General Motors, the president of Standard Oil and their like [0] is able to conclude:
>"The top 1 percent of Americans today do not face an unusually low tax burden, by historical standards."
Which is a wild claim to make.
Nice that you find the somewhat honest footnote, but you're citing what is essentially an opinion piece from a conservative think tank.
And no, you didn't specifically say effective tax rate, but you did say that western countries effectively had a cap on how much you could earn (presumably that's what you meant, even though we're talking about a wealth tax here, not an income tax, but I digress), given a top marginal rate near 100%, but that's simply false, given that the effective tax rate even for the absolute most wealthy Americans was closer to 50%.
It's a little like complaining that university has gotten so expensive by just looking at the sticker price, while ignoring the fact that few people actually pay that, and the median price actually paid is much lower. That doesn't mean the effective price is where it should be either, but you do your position no favors with falsehoods.
You called the fact I raised a "tired talking point" and referenced a contentious source. While they do cite serious academics, they seem to draw their own conclusions in the text; unburdened by their references.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2025/12/29/do...
A better way to look at this data is the sum of wealth for each percentile (https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...) The top 10% (90-99%, ~$67T, >= ~$2M in net worth) owns more than the top 1% (99%+, ~$60T, >= ~$15M in net worth). The top 0.1% own ~$27T.
Any yearly tax that exceeds the "4% rule" will essentially be confiscatory, so let's say that a tax of 1% won't bring out the pitchforks (is that tiny?) On the top 0.1%, that generates about $0.27 T compared to 2026 Federal collection of about $5.2T (on a deficit of about ~$2T) https://www.us-debt-clock.com/data/deficit-by-year
As I pointed out in a comment about solar power in another thread, if that money was spent on installing solar+battery, in about 5-10 years we could have more or less converted the US grid with a 1% wealth tax on the 0.1%. Of course, we could also reverse the recent (2016 and beyond) tax cuts as well, which would help fix the giant gaping hole in the US budget. The stock market would probably take a hit, reducing the wealth of the top whatever by far more than a small tax would.
Many will say that the purpose of this tax isn't just to raise revenue for the US government, but to reduce power of the most wealthy. I personally think that taxing wealth is not going to be effective for doing this, without passing laws that limit the effect of wealth in US politics.
If someone is just rich on paper no point in taxing it.
Tax when they spend.
Another thing is to force the wealthy to diversify into low return assets. They perhaps will figure out how to make it high returns and grow the overall wealth of the society.
That or just raise interest rates to force these people to sell more equity
Can you explain why would we be better off when the rich flee? I see this "we gonna be better off without them" sentiment quite often, but never an explanation how would we be better off? What metrics have you used?
For example, New York’s Health Act failed because teachers unions opposed it on the grounds of “protecting the hard fought contract benefits”. In other words, union leadership realized that with this bill becoming a law unions would be less needed, so they fought for their interests while disregarding interests of others.
So, unions should go as well?
Allowing people to nominate representatives to argue policy is the foundation of representative democracy.
Well, in this case, how come preventing access to healthcare to NYS residents is in the interest of the teachers? And, why would teachers think that they are the only ones who deserve good health care?
Unless… the unions have no feedback mechanism to ensure that they operate the way you think they operate, and they do what any other politician does — they want to stay in power I exchange for keeping just enough of the voting base like you more than the next guy. So, in this case, it’s perfectly reasonable for a union leadership to fight this law — it simply a preservation of power thing.
I am not familiar with the particulars, but I am sure there is information published by the union explaining their position in more detail.
I reject your suggestion that I am ignorant how unions operate. I have been a member of a union for many years. Larger decisions are decided by voting.
Like democracy, unions are not perfect. But historically unions have been effective at negotiating rights for workers (weekends, 8hour workdays etc.)
I would argue they are one of the few ways labour has been able to impact policy and law.
I was a member of a union as well.
> Larger decisions are decided by voting.
After they went through the filter of the leadership, either via the “bargaining committee” or any other form of delegation, selection to which can be based on votes or appointments.
You can Google yourself how teacher unions opposed NYS health care bill, and why they deemed it necessary to justify their position with “protecting the fought for benefits” among other things.
I care about outcomes, and I do not give unions any more slack or good will just because they are “troops of people”. They do shitty things too, and the results are bad for everyone involved. So, what’s the difference? There is none.
They may end up doing shitty things but the group has buy in from a lot more people than one asshole deciding how we get to live our life.
This is a false dichotomy.
> They may end up doing shitty things but the group has buy in from a lot more people than one asshole deciding how we get to live our life.
Well, a group of teachers in a union decided for the whole state that they (the teachers) deserve health insurance more than the rest of the state.
I understand that for some people it's fine because their team wins. I am not one of those, I am for outcomes that benefit the most, and not select few that managed to sway power just because they are teachers.
> This is a false dichotomy.
no, its my fucking opinion. I didnt say it was fact. You see the word "believe" in that text?
So, how would it work here? Why eliminating the rich (whatever is the definition) would achieve a different outcome than that of communist regimes of the past?
Anyway what little meager juice that these ideological labels had after the cold war is now gone with china as king of the hill. We can all agree private investment = rapid growth, and state intervention both in terms of social safety nets and actively ensuring fair competition (where that is necessary—banking, anti-trust, food/med production, etc) = stabler economies (or we agreed on this for a few decades after the great depression anyway). It's what the point of the economy is—to serve the disproportionate interests of rich or the collective (one might even say... democratic) interests of people—where there remains substantive disagreement. I hope we can leave this farce behind that how we talk about ideology has any relation to how the terms were actually defined in lieu or acknowledging material reality for a change.
It makes perfect sense. Citizens of USSR were poorer than their counterparts in the west, didn’t have access to the same variety of food, cloth, etc.
I do remember all these things from my childhood, and my parents made more money than the average because they worked for the oil and gas industry that paid extra. So, when people are trying to sell me the whole “collectivism” and anti-rich sentiment, I am a bit wary because no one can explain how “this time” is going to be different — it seems none of the activists/advocates actually lived in such systems, so they have no clue. I lived the consequences, and I do not want it for myself or anyone else.
I would say the point of the economy is to ensure that both the rich get what they want, but also to ensure that others are not poor and left behind. This is not the case today, and thus a series of reforms is needed. But it’s doesn’t make a believer for the “let’s abolish the rich” thing.
Well that's because we're a bunch of greedy bitches who never learned how to play nice with the other kids—capitalism. It would take a hell of a lot more wealth generation for humanity to justify this kind of economic dysfunction.
Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it
Also, you are strongly implying the USSR taxed the wealthy disproportionately. They did not, so your entire argument is silly.
They absolutely did. The tax was 100% and then camps for the whole family.
My argument is not silly, in fact I did not make any. I asked how exactly we are going to be better off without the rich, and what kind of metrics were used to make the analysis. So far there was no answer.
Saying someone’s argument is silly and then walking off is silly.
For the record, I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea of taxation on the wealthy, but I want to understand why having no rich is better for everyone.
Extraordinary claims, etc
I'd also note that I would prefer to adjust tax/accounting laws to prevent the accumulation in the first place, not just roll out a blanket "take everything over a billion-ish law" as that feels more like a band-aid than a fix.
Yes, I agree with this one. Some sort of reform on estate and inheritance is long overdue.
1) Endowments, Trusts, and nonprofits
2) The Estate TaxIt seems to obvious to me, like just start it at something like $5M. Nobody will be affected who can't afford it. It's like they're trying to implement it in a way that makes people hate it.
That’s why it is extremely difficult to make even modest improvements in a dug-in system.
In practice its basically an additional 2% "drag" on market returns as its a yearly tax; not capital gains on sale.
Sole reason we turned down a job there. I don't hate the idea of a wealth tax, but having it kick in at €120,000 is nuts. IMO it's not even functioning as a wealth tax, its a barrier to the middle class accumulating even meager non-property wealth.
(I'm sure I have some details wrong, but broad-strokes this is what I remember from when we turned it down a few months ago)
However, I don't think wealth tax is a good tax. You'd be taxing something you want citizens to have: wealth. It seems that wealth tax is often used as an easy fix to "we can't somehow tax the income of high-earning wealthy people because they arrange the legal ownership of their wealth so that it's hard so let's tax their wealth". What should be fixed instead is profits slipping out of the taxable base. In general, a lower but wider tax base is always better than higher spot taxes that encourage people to optimize. Wealth tax is just a slap-on solution that mostly just encourages tax planning.
The inequality of the distribution is the true issue, and indeed not taxing the wealthy enough does accumulates that. A country should be proud to tax widely and moderately, even the highest earning people and businesses. A country can't compete with a tax haven but a tax haven can't compete with a functioning state and society. Working to tax wealthy people more in par to what ordinary people are taxed would work towards a more equal society. Some of the wealthy people would move away but the country should recognize and maintain that it has other factors of appeal than the tax rate.
The point of wealth tax, to me, is to tax the obscenely wealthy people. Those few who are worth more than the entire rest of the population combined, while also basically not paying any tax at all despite their fortunes growing by millions or billions every year.
I actually think it would be reasonable to essentially put a "soft cap" on wealth. Like if you're worth several hundred million dollars you literally can't grow your fortune any more because you're just gaining as much as you pay in tax. Instead of one guy owning multiple companies worth billions of dollars he would have to sell shares to pay his taxes, and now many people own the companies instead. This prevents one person from amassing too much wealth and power.
Income is far more important to people than wealth is. Income is what let's you buy food. Yet we tax income at quite a high rate. Far better to have a mix of both than the current system of having a lot of one and basically none of the other.
Disagree with the premise. I want people with less than $50m to have more wealth, and people with more than $50m to have less wealth.
Farmers—as in, the land-owning famers—are generally wealthy people.
That said, if you have $5M invested in a business that makes you $65k a year you're being stupid. Sell the farm, put the money in some safe 5%ish interest vessel like a CD, now you're making $250k doing nothing.
But, let's say, they do. And they also have to stay out. Wouldn't that be.. kinda nice actually?
Your taxes would stay the same either way. Yes, of course, there would be less luxury spending, but the millions of normal people still exist. And they spend and they produce.
Why not let the ultra wealthy just leave and idk go to mars or something? Kick them out, seize their assets, run society without them if they do not want to be part of it anyway.
I found a study saying the effect was minuscule in Norway, Sweden and Denmark https://taxjustice.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Taxing-ext...
The “they’ll just leave” argument doesn’t really hold up in this case.
Top salary earners, who do manage to save somewhat for retirement end up getting punished by these wealth taxes as well, especially since, generally, you need money in order to be able to move money around, in order to be able to save money on these sorts of taxes.
They literally get to eat their cake and have it too.
I'd suggest some controls or limits to it, but the lenders assume the risk ( except for all the times the public has had to bail them out) and they're grown up corporations who can decide for themselves.
I should add, that the money they borrow does get taxed when it is spent on the indulgences you make reference to.
IE, every dollar I earn gets taxed twice - as income, then as sales tax. Rich guy only pays the sales tax.
And there's a fundamental difference between "borrow to keep the business running smoothly" and "borrow to buy a mega-yacht". Legally, not so much, as you say, but hell's bells, the super yacht market really shouldn't exist.
Regardless, if that's the actual anti-social behavior we should change that tax treatment specifically, versus a broad paper wealth tax with unintended consequences.
Capital gains: this should just be income.
Unrealized gains: The argument against wealth taxes are often related to unrealized gains needing to sell blah blah. If you get a loan on your stock value, at that moment the gains should be considered realized and you should be taxed via capital gains (which would be at the level of income tax). Ultra-wealthy use loans against their portfolio to avoid realizing their gains. Make that not possible.
Let's take a personal anecdote for an example: I joined a startup when it was early-stage, stayed for a few years, and exercised my stock options when I left. The startup is now "successful", but still private; my shares have also surely been heavily diluted. I have no idea when I'll be able to sell those shares or how much they're really worth. I have no way of turning those shares into quality-of-life improvements for any foreseeable future. Do they make me "wealthy"?
I don't think most Americans have a problem with rich people buying nice houses and nice cars, and using their wealth to pay for private staff. I think the real problem is how much of the wealth is allowed to stay off public markets. Cargill is worth more than $50 billion and its stock is not available on public markets. The growth in wealth of most AI companies - Anthropic, OpenAI - happened off of public markets, and so none of it trickled into the American middle class by their retirement accounts. Venture capital is keeping companies private for longer because, quite simply, none of the investors need the cash to pay for their cost of living, so they're quite happy to let paper gains continue to live on paper.
If your company has revenues of $X million a year or more, you should be forced to make public financial reports (effectively forcing you to list stock on a public market). Period. I think economists will naturally disagree on how much X should be, and that's fine, but I have little doubt that there should be a line like that, somewhere. Concerns about public markets forcing short-term thinking are a different problem, one addressed by mission-lock implements (Eric Ries's recent book Incorruptible is great here). Public markets ensure that gains in wealth are shared more broadly across the economy and increase tax collection by incentivizing more frequent buying and selling of the underlying stock, since those are taxable events.
You also have this with houses in California (and more and more, the entire country) - a family in a house that they pay $x per month on is not likely to really feel different if you tell them the house is worth $250k or $500k or $5m - because the price will likely be "in line" with those around them and so actually getting access to the "wealth" is difficult - the only real way is to move far away.
I feel a big part of the problem is we've made the world great for those who know how to navigate it, but horrible for those who don't (or can't). If you are disciplined from the beginning, always save 10% of what you make into retirement 410(k)s, 10% into rainy-day funds, spend less than 30% on housing, you're going to do quite well - but that's a small portion. Seventy years ago you could be a near literal moron, work at the factory, and live a good life - because the company handled your pension and healthcare without asking you to make decisions that frankly most people aren't capable of making - and it was difficult to leverage yourself to death.
Most people don't give a shit about wealth inequality if they can live a good if humble life without undue stress.
Elon Musk existing doesn't bother me as long as I can provide for my family and feel I'm getting a "decent deal". But if I'm overworked, underpaid, drowning in debt, and prices are rising, his existence is going to be a lot more annoying.
(One of the problems of publicly-traded companies is manager's capitalism - https://ia601506.us.archive.org/26/items/bogle-managerial-ca... - both really come down to nobody actually owning something in the meaning of taking responsibility to the thing, because ownership is so diluted it basically has no meaning.)
reverse mortgages are not hard to get
They're still wrong, but your argument is a non-sequitur.
"I don't think most Americans have a problem with rich people buying nice houses and nice cars, and using their wealth to pay for private staff. I think the real problem is how much of the wealth is allowed to stay off public markets. Cargill is worth more than $50 billion and its stock is not available on public markets. The growth in wealth of most AI companies - Anthropic, OpenAI - happened off of public markets, and so none of it trickled into the American middle class by their retirement accounts."
Think again. The demand from rich to park wealth in X, Y, Z makes prices go up. Just imagine that the RAM prices fueled by AI spending is a housing market. More money rich have, less affordable the life for the rest is.
And don't forget that speed of their wealth growth is way faster than anyone who sells their labour.
Ah. And we did not even talk about "hidden" wealth thingy... All these numbers are official ones.
Not usually a fan of messing with scroll, but what a cool visualization use case for breaking that norm. Taxes and politics aside, kudos to whoever made that design choice.
Since most people’s income comes from salary, it is very easy to read this graph wrong and it is a bit misleading. Say you are some dev who makes $500k per year, but likes to rent, doesn’t drive and is not very bothered with stocks. Their Net Worth - unless I understand this wrong, if I do please correct me - the would around zero, maybe less with student loans, so they would be amongst the poor. Ok, they probably would have a lot of savings in this scenario, but maybe they like to ride on a horse with no name and spend most of their income. Still I would not call them poor.
Does it change the picture? Not really, because Musk et al. are so way beyond everyone else that the graph is extremely top heavy. It is a nice data visualisation regardless.
How about removing property tax, and instead taxing land at a higher rate? The wealthy (top 0.1%) are continuously buying up as much land as they can. If we tax land based on it's value more appropriately, we will see more land being sold, more land being invested in (because property would be taxed less, and land more), and then more productive land as a result.
This would be politically unpopular amongst the rent seekers of our society, and likely have huge ad campaigns against it as a result. But the downsides compared to upsides see negligible for the public. More productive land, and more tax revenue from the owners of the land.
Must have interfered with SV reality distortion field.
@dang: care to explain what this is about?
> “What we think” and “Ideal”
> In 2011, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was split between the five fifths of households, and how they would ideally split it. The Companion spreads those five shares across all 100 percentiles of the 2026 wealth total in a smooth curve (Appendix 3). Many different curves fit five numbers, so these two shapes are only illustrations. The actual bars come from percentile-level data. These two curves do not.
So the median household in the US has 3 working adults? Is $211k household according to that page.
There is a nonzero aim to cause outrage by the distribution chart & even more by the explanatory video. Perhaps we should defuse this as first angle of response.
Not all inequality is good/bad and not all is undeserved. And not all inequality is correctly described by net wealth alone with no additional measures or dimensions.
We don't have enough tags to distinguish a 28-year old NYC lawyer earning (or soon-to-be) $200k with $200k in student loan and negative equity RIGHT NOW from a 55y old working 2 minimum wage jobs at Amazon, sleeping in a trailer park.
In 10-15y one of them will be a millionaire and the other will be a poverty line retire without a pension.
And does the wealth include the pension pot? If you don't do anything silly, by the time you're nearing retirement you're sitting on a 500k home equity (split with the wife) + 500k each in retirement plans. So if you + the mrs both work a median job you end up with $1-2m family wealth.
Capitalism in EU works with different constraints and frictions so that we get less millionaires and also less people with negative wealth but the median family wealth (near retirement) in US is much higher than in EU.
Well, fortunately, the graph makes at plain as a clear blue sky that neither of those hypothetical individuals are anywhere near the demographic that ought to be targeted by a wealth tax. When people say "eat the rich," they're not referring to late-career millionaire lawyers or doctors; those people work for a living just like the vast majority of us.
Fix the money, fix the world. IYKYK
So maybe we should take into account the liquidity of the assets held by these Billionaires. Also, as we've seen with Steve Jobs that if you get cancer it doesn't really matter how much you have in the bank. You'll die the same just like everyone else. All that money won't buy you extra time.
Wealth being the integration of gains - consumption over time makes it a poor metric for looking at society as a whole.
Something like 50% of Americans will be millionaires at some point in their lives—upper quintile per this chart, typically later in their earnings years. Almost all of them started “poor” as young adults, per this chart’s definition.
Look at that last bar; consider just the annual yield or interest payment on that wealth; soon, it's going to be more than all other bars combined. If people understood the situation, they would all stop working and start making lists of who these people are and work for them. That's the only logical (legal) thing to do. Every other job or career is a waste of time.
Given that the Shiller P/E ratio is now 40 (under 3% of the value of the assets), the yield is actually a pretty small fraction of that last bar... but even then, I'm saying one year's yield could exceed the worth of all the others if things continue.
But IMO, it's already the case that the economy is centered around the free money/proceeds received by top 0.1%. This is why we saw all that nonsense with COVID, DEI, Wokeism, etc... This is what happens when a small number of elites decide to spend a bit of 'spare change' on politics and social activism. Imagine how bad it's going to get after that wealth has compounded in 10 years...
Clearly, the money printers. How else could there be such an enormous gap between those last two bars?
That being said, one accident or illness that strips away that doctor's ability to earn, leaving them in a soul crushing amount of debt that can't be discharged via bankruptcy. Their debt obligations are real.
Every year there are fewer povvos in the world, and we're just getting started.
Wealth inequality is a completely pointless metric that tells us nothing about individual quality of life, and is being pushed by the left wing ideologies to serve their agendas.
For example, you could propel yourself into the top quintile by just packing up and moving to Liberia, but that would not increase your quality of life now, would it?
Suffering as a Feature
So I oppose taxing that secret sauce away.
Taxing the transfer of great wealth to next generations seems a better thing. Allow the transfer of some degree of wealth, but not all of it. Make the future generations earn their huge wealth, as their ancestors did. Keep the competitive spirit going.
> the great economy.
Great for who exactly? Certainly less great for the people who have no opportunity to gain wealth, because the currently wealthy don't contribute their fair share, or debatably don't contribute at all.
I now have 3 adult children, all seem to be likewise on good paths.
I truly believe the US economy offers an excellent chance to grow wealth, if patience and discipline are used. Even for salaries that are only decent. Plenty of teachers, plumbers, etc. become millionaires by retirement age. You just have to have a little luck ( avoid the rare financial catastrophe) and follow the Bogleheads trail.
About ‘the wealthy’, don’t worry about them. Just manage your own affairs, you’ll be fine.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flame-...
While this one was on page 3-4 and the other post is (stilL) on the first page.
As someone who spends a lot of time reading HN, I would really like an explanation. So if @dang or any other mod reads this…
I think it's an interesting thought, I'm not sure I have a hot take here or anything. The likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are clearly good at amassing wealth (and interested in amassing wealth) but I suspect a lot less is attributable to skill than many would think.
So, no, I don't think "he doesn't act like he needs it" is at all a good argument for redistribution.
It's not "poorer society with fewer inequalities." That's what they always say. It's never that. A society is not "richer" because the amount of financially backed power is one concentrated set of hands.
That's it. That's the tweet.
No, you don't get it. Read again my post - I've explicately said that EVERY decile is richer.
> Would you rather have richer (in real terms) society (including richer lowest decile) with larger wealth inequality or poorer society with smaller inequalities?
My point is that those are not the only options. You don't make some more people richer such that there's more inequality. That doesn't make sense. You raise everyone up simultaneously by distributing in a rational measured way. I think maybe you're saying "bigger middle class"? If so, then no, I'd rather say, "no classes, what's the point. We know how to distribute and logistically solve these problems."
No, see, that doesn't make sense. If you "distribute in a rational measured way" you have central planning. And central planning indeed reduces inequality but also makes everyone much poorer. Inequalities are natural consequences of free market and meritocracy. Free market and meritocracy is what's best for economic growth. And with economic growth EVERY decile gets richer.
It is not hard to think of how quickly nuance enters this picture. Much of the discussion here is about what exactly the inequality curve should look like. Shaving it down a bit is not the same as saying we should all be equal or whatever.
Who cares about paper millionaires. Just tax consumption not paper wealth.
If one asks "how much, say, Elon Musk, is worth" we see some crazy numbers with kirjillions of zeros. But those are not "his" money, this is how much his companies are estimated to have. Yes, he has large personal fortune, but it is nowhere near those huge billions of billions amounts.
Second, staying with Elon example, his companies are paying people and other companies that pay people, so there is huge army of people who have food in the fridge because of Elon Musk (I've seen some estimates around ~1 million people overall). Again, they are nowhere near to be as wealthy as Elon, but still, they have a decent live thanks to his companies.
There are very solid arguments backing up the same general points that require time to communicate and require good faith attempts to understand from the other party. But you probably don't want those either.
The average person (you and me) are much more productive, but have actually lost our share of wages relative to our productivity compared to our parents and grandparents. That extra production we're doing is almost entirely captured by the top 1% of the population, it's literally been taken away from us.
And contrary to our "billionares create jobs" friends, what billionaires do by and large is hoard wealth and power of a scale most people can't even begin to grasp.
That said, you're right that the gains over the past fifty years have been disproportionately captured by the people at the very top of the distribution, and we should address that with policy changes, including taxation. But we can do so without tossing the facts aside.
has elon musk made it possible for a million people to own houses, cars, and pay tuition? no! does he own multiple houses, cars, private jets, yachts, and other bullshit himself? yes!
he employs maybe 200k people directly? likely a lot less... so we're not even talking quarter of the same economic benefit reach
he also wielded his wealth as power to dismantle government systems single-handedly that lost many people jobs and didn't even scratch the surface of the country's debt
people really need to start thinking critically about billionaires, they are not doing anything for you personally
Most jobs in the US are from small businesses. That means billionaires create fewer jobs than Mom & Pop owners (even owners who may be able to afford really nice cars and houses).
Go back to school.
Not even ‘to have’, just ‘to be worth, if all of their shares could be sold at the price of the recent ones’. It’s a number only loosely (albeit obviously positively) correlated with actual spending power.
The whole point is that he shouldn't be able to exert autocratic control over large swathes of the economy and control that many people's lives.
It’s more hidden now. We all have rights and freedoms and whatnot. But there are still people who “own stuff”, and people who don’t. With shades of gray in between those two extremes. It’s good to be cognizant of the system you inhabit relative to what has existed throughout history so you can make good decisions and position yourself accordingly.
> his companies are paying people and other companies that pay people
Yes, his companies, not him. He's not doing much, except distracting part of his workforce to work on vanity projects such as flying cars or mile-long vaccuum tubes, or spending some of his vast wealth to buy politicians that will further the cause of wealth inequality. Get rid of him, and the system works much better for everyone. Him and others like him.
They're not "value creators". They're human beings that were given immense opportunities, disproportionately available avenues of luck, and happened to be able to find people to do their labor for them on the backs of the needs of the world.
What the ever living hell do you think the "90% of people" are doing? They're feeding each other and selling houses to each other and stocking shelves for each other because they have to because their labor and money is being stolen from them by this stupid abstraction that they are are "value creators".
Ugh.
Isn't it weird that the people that don't create value are also the people with all the money, though?
Outstanding observation.
Those are your choices. Choose freely!
The coordination win that came from “thou shalt not covet” is substantial and we forget it at our own peril.
Retirement age keeps increasing, public healthcare keep getting defunded. My tax money is getting used to enrich war mongers and my cost of life keeps increasing as a result of all of that.
Also my constitutional rights are ignored daily.
You understand why I might not be feeling very happy that YOU are doing great?
But you’re probably one health scare away from it, you just don’t realize it.
1. Outsized political influence (in theory can be mitigated by laws controlling corporate spending, but obviously those laws themselves are subject to manipulation by the rich and powerful)
2. Distortion in who the economy serves. The beauty of capitalism is that it's a problem-detection and problem-solving system. If a narrow set of people have a huge portion of money, the economy becomes unduly optimized toward satisfying their wants and needs.
3. Despite best efforts, we ultimately must share a lot of the same commons. Even being a billionaire in NYC or San Francisco can't really give you a walk to work or your child's school that feels as safe as it does in a more equal society that takes better care of its unwell and poor.
Thank you for sharing your insight.
What is interesting is that this was true centuries ago too. Life as a noble in the middle ages was stressful as hell and you couldn't even decide on your own lovelife. Read Seneca and the first thing he writes is that Augustus (whom he knew personally) was constantly complaining about his busy life and dreaming of a retirement that never arrived.
Rank order of preference to be top 10% in for me: US > Vietnam > South Africa
So your method does not disabuse me of my belief. It’s quite clear that equality has not made Vietnam more desirable than the US. In fact, there are some 400k foreign born in Vietnam (<1%) vs the US having 15% foreign born (a stark enough difference made worse by forcing foreign-born to be from non-neighbors). So I must reasonably conclude that my rank order is likely shared by others and that others too are not, in fact, lured by equality.
There is an old immortal tweet: cars have windows and go; houses have windows and don’t go; so it’s not the windows that make things go.
If inequality were as critical we’d expect a perfect rank ordering of distant migrant population attempts matching it. The numbers are so vastly different that one cannot conclude equality is of great importance to most.
You or the farmer you buy food from competes for farmland with Bil Gates. You or the one providing your house builder with wood competes for lumber forest with Alex Karp.
The list goes on and on.
It appears trough technological innovation the standards of life rise in many ways but trough innequality it can affect the standards/ affordability of our basic needs.
But everyone else can’t afford basic necessities or furniture anymore. And so being a farmer or a woodworker or whatever becomes a less attractive job, less people will do it, and you will have a harder time finding someone fixing your plumbing. Or pay a premium.
Instead, the ultra-wealthy are demanding extreme luxury, and so a would-be farmer is now a hotel page boy carrying around some rich dudes’ luggage, hoping for a tip.
I find a lot of consistency of his audience in hating him for the very reason that he implements his audience's wishes. To this audience, there is no redeeming oneself.
Yes and he was gonna give a vast share of his wealth away for the good of the many over 5 years and then tripled it. woops. Let us not pretend farmland has not been a good investment in those parts. Let us be honest. Almost every such good thing he does is a tax credit which polishes his image and legacy. He was a pretty cutroath businessman and there's no reason for me to now paint him with some saintly image.
>Beef meat causes global warming in a disproportionate way compared to chicken or even disproportionate per euros or per gram of protein compared to lentils.
I can get behind the idea that beef has a bigger carbon footprint due to the fossil fuel fertilisers used to grow their feed as compared to the conversion ratio freaks that modern meat chicken breeds are. The fact that the methane from their farts is somehow the long term issue I however reject. And I'd like to point out that without much of both that excrement and fossil fuel based fertiliser we have a famine on our hands so 'overcrowd the Earth with more equal people' doesn't seem like such a fine coherent goal.
>I find a lot of consistency of his audience in hating him for the very reason that he implements his audience's wishes. To this audience, there is no redeeming oneself
Explain to me why do you presume I am "his audience".
Bill Gates has had a major role in more than 120 million extremely poor children not dying of horrible diseases in some of the most destitute places on earth.
But he bundled a browser with his OS thirty years ago, so fuck all that, right?
BTW just since you use it for the rethoric. Can I also point out how that major role in 120 million children (by their own estimation and 40mil since 2000 on some other own estimation) includes the work of everyone else donating to, remotely involved with or working in line with his organisation. You know including my tax money going to the the vaccination drives of Gavi, the WHO, UNICEF, etc It seems to miss the bit where bill himself attributed the vast majority of such global health and development funding to donor nations.
You think we could get a tax credit for our major role in that?
I'm not going to point at bill gates buying and leasing out loads farmland and attribute to it new corn strains, better pesticides and higher feed conversion chicken breeds.
You may as well be calling for soviet style state controll the way consolidation, top down ownership is and competition mechanics are dismissed or praised depending on the standpoint.
Because most people are (IMO wrongfully) jealous of the rich. They have a problem with the rich even if it's legitimately earned wealth.
I have no desire to be rich, certainly not as rich as the far right 1% column. I find that level of wealth nauseating and embarrassing. But regardless, "legitimately earned wealth" is doing a lot of work in that last sentence. Perhaps (doubtful) it's possible to earn that much while being legally legitimate, although that speaks more to how fucked up our system is than anything else, but certainly not possible to do so in a morally legitimate way.
I'd much rather everyone think deeply about this question than merely hope we all come to the same conclusion.
Would you be ok to live in a democracy where your vote goes into the garbage bin instead of the voting box? Because that's where it goes if you aren't rich.
More money doesn't create more things to buy or more people making things, its just means more money competing for the same things to buy. Other people having more does diminish your share, of the cake. Yes, we can make the cake larger, but the best way to do that is for more people to get more opportunity to fulfil their potential, by getting a reasonable share to do so.
One might work hard and fail or one might work lightly and succeed. Bulletball guy certainly worked a lot harder than many product managers I know.
Now the question of assets of limited supply. That’s sound. But that’s a distribution of assets of limited supply problem. It is entirely possible to have great wealth inequality with low land ownership concentration - in the US 67% of people live in owner-occupied housing. Scotland has much higher land ownership concentration - but lower wealth inequality.
So fixed supply asset concentration can exist without wealth inequality - which, to be clear, is the form of inequality I was talking about considering the original post is about it.
Who do you want to educate from that position? You or others?
- Most of that wealth is tied up in assets offering services for americans (servers / warehouses). It would be much worse if the rich decided to spend all of that on consumption rather than keep reinvesting it in assets. - Even the LHS of that chart Americans are some of the wealthiest in the world. A lot of the middle class from many other countries would love to be on the LHS of that chart. - No one is expected to build wealth on a 40 hour minimum wage job. It is the bare minimum and most people get paid more. - Americans don't want wealth. Our spending habits are abysmal. I suspect if you gave every American $500K the chart would revert back to this in like 12 months
Services that have an incentive to serve said americans, because it is them who own them.
You are completely right that this capital is super useful for society. It would just be infinitely more useful if it was in the hands of society.
Putting it in the "hands of society" is crazy talk. Government / elected officials are awful at allocating capital, negotiating labor, holding people accountable.
So who is right? is it the real person with a real identity attached to it, or is it the 7 month old account pointing nowhere?
I guess we'll never know.
Why would that be worse? What online services are so important that it's better to have them than to lift some people above the poverty line? Rich people spending is the next best thing after taxing them - it distributes their money and provides jobs. It would strictly improve the society if Bezos spent lots of money and folded his servers and warehouses - in so many different ways...
What jobs do you think it creates? You really want all our labor pandering to billionaires? Why would anyone give attention to middle class if the billionaires were forced to spend all their money? How expensive would your life get if the billionaire class redirected all of their wealth toward frivolous consumption.
Whatever jobs are needed to fulfil the spending of billions of dollars. You can't drop that kind of amount of new demand on the existing system without some expansion.
> You really want all our labor pandering to billionaires?
It already is (not all but there's a big impact and political influence), without benefits. Just spending money for products and services would be an improvement.
> Why would anyone give attention to middle class if the billionaires were forced to spend all their money?
Why (for example) Tesla producing both budget 3 and taking millionaires money for Roadster? Because addressing both markets works.
> How expensive would your life get if the billionaire class redirected all of their wealth toward frivolous consumption.
Probably cheaper for higher quality goods and same otherwise. But also nobody is talking about all of their wealth - that's unrealistic. Some more vs hoarding in assets would be still good.
Yeah. Like renting a house for a mother of 2 children who will never get her own by selling her labour, while the renter uses her money to buy more units.
Having two kids on a low income is a bad choice.
She should not be punished. But she also should not be rewarded.
What's the issue?
A large portion of billionaire wealth isn't reinvested in productive assets. It comes from holding onto assets like corporate shares and land that grows in value based on the asset's ability to extract profit or rent. Or from distorted (speculative) demand for that asset that is completely detached from its productive output.
Someone like Bernard Arnault is worth around $160B (wealth from luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany). That paper valuation exceeds the total national wealth of many entire countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_pri...
Yes he is valuable because he makes a product people want. That is how life works. If you want him to be poor, convince people to buy something other than luxury brands.