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They would still have all the advantages of the business connections they made as a billionaire, and would still have a massive advantage over everyone else.
Run the experiment.
But many of their connections would be poor as well. Do you think people actually care what Elon or Bezos think? They’re not geniuses, they just have money. Compare them to Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett, who actually knew what they were doing.
No one seriously asks Bezos or Elon for advice because they were just lucky. Their companies succeed despite them, not because of them. Like the guy who started Uber (forgot his name). Nobody listens to them.
Compare them to Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett, who actually knew what they were doing.
Steve Jobs, the man who thought he could beat pancreatic cancer with a juice cleanse?
Well, being super smart in one field doesn’t necessarily mean you have common sense. You could be the greatest physicist in the world but still think lizard people control everything.
TBF Woz was the brains behind Apple. Jobs was just a good salesperson.
So maybe Woz would get rich again? There have to be a few others…
Except Elon is stupid in all fields.
He’s great at hustling though.
Tesla has literally an unrealistic valuation based on Elon fanboys
Steve Jobs was a grade A cunt with the rest of them. Don’t give him a pass for his high charisma score. Dude walked into Atari with no fucken shoes on back in the 70s trying to get a job. I used to work with a 72 year old dude who was a head repairman there working on the consoles. Its all confidence, smoke, and mirrors. Skills are secondary to spewing bullshit and making people feel excited.
If he wasn’t integral to Apple’s success, then why did they fail after he left, and then succeed after he returned? What innovative products has Tim Apple created? Air Pods? The Apple Watch?
Why do we have party faces in tabletops? Why focus our skillsets on salesmenship while others become engineers? He was a great ringleader, he could probably sell people a wet banana peel like it was life changing. Maybe the products themselves aren’t as stellar as Jobs made them out to be. Maybe a phone is just a phone and when Merlin isn’t there blowing smoke up your ass you can finally see that.
Or would their connections who weren’t billionaires just exploit them so they could take the top spot?
Only one way to find out
Well, if you remove from ALL billionaires, they won’t be much different from me or my neighbor
They would still have all the advantages of the business connections they made as a billionaire
Business connections to other people who also had their money stripped away.
I mean, we’ll never run the experiment because the folks in charge of the Laboratory of Democracy all sit on the boards of Microsoft, Boeing, and Berkshire Hathaway. But Bill Gates doesn’t benefit by hobnobbing with Warren Buffet when neither of them have any money.
We would need to remove all the effects of the birth lottery as well
It’s also not one or two billion, it’s multiple hundreds of billion owned by one person. I don’t think you can overstress the difference in scale between millions, hundred millions, billions, and hundred billions.
There used to be taxes assessed by total asset valuation that focused more on wealthy individuals because they don’t earn as much from income it’s mostly assets increasing in value like property or ownership shares, that was stopped when they introduced the income tax that mostly targets low and middle class people who almost exclusively earn by income.
Loopholes like offshore accounts used to dodge income taxes by higher earners should be illegal, but the whole system is backwards forcing the least prosperous to shoulder the largest tax burden instead of the wealthiest who benefit from society the most.
What’s stopping the wealthy from just up and leaving? They could liquidate their assets and invest in somewhere with tax laws more favourable to them.
Liquidate to who? Are those assets things they can take with them, or are they things like buildings that stay right where they are?
Anyone who would buy. Unless you’re sentimentally attached to something then I doubt you’d have a difficult time selling it. Billionaires own property as investment, not for use. Just sell it to another billionaire and buy property in a country more favourable to you. As for things like cars, collections, yachts, and other such mobile assets, just stick them on a container ship and unpack at your destination.
But then there has to be at least one billionaire who is staying right there, and can be taxed.
Yeah that sounds awesome let’s divide those 200 billions into 333 million people and let’s get a whooping one time only 600 USD extra for the month. Then let’s repeat it again.
It sure will last foreverrrrrrrrr
The money itself is not the only reason. Eliminating their undue influence is.
Foreverrrrrrrrr
First of all 200 billion is chump change compared to how much the wealthy have. Second, spreading money would do far more to stimulate the economy than wealthy people buying yachts, flying into space, and visiting the Titanic.
I am sure if you removed your mouth from the wealthy’s cocks for a moment you would realize how fucked up the situation is. But I know you will just suck it foreverrrrrrrrrrr hoping they will gild you into their club.
Stimulate the economy LMAO 🤣
Bro just admit you don’t know shit about how money works and leave it at that haha
If that were to happen, my cream would rise to the top.
Who do I vote for to make this happen?
Or is that French shortening device the only way at this point?Vote in favor of the union at your workplace
Alternatively just take their shit because billionaires shouldn’t exist.
A millionaire tried doing this and gave up
I guess it only works for billionaires. Millionaires can’t do it: https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/04/29/millionaire-made-himself-homeless/
Ha. Millionaires are like 1000x lamer than billionaires though!
And do what with it? Just, like, fund society and shit? how are we going to grow extra assholes doing that?
100% It will work.
I say tax rates should be decided based on wealth shares.
Break it down like this, brackets set at the 20th, 40th, 60th, 80th, 95th, and 99th percentiles of household incomes.
People in the 20th 40th and 60th percentile brackets pay a tax rate equal to how much wealth is controlled by households in each of those brackets.
People in the 80 and 95 brackets pay twice the share they control.
People in the 99 bracket pay three times, and also can’t hold public office for ten years after the last time they peak this bracket because, objectively, they are doing just fine for themselves and don’t need to be going ahead of others who have actual problems a nation should be focused on addressing.
Also, with very few exceptions like a mortgage on a primary residence or a car loan for a primary vehicle, loans collateralized on capital assets are treated as income for tax purposes.
The central problem of a wealth tax is defining wealth. Real estate is relatively simple and well-tried, there’s an appraisal process. But securities can fluctuate a lot. A billionaire CEO might turn into a millionaire after a bad earnings report, and end up paying taxes on wealth he was never able to actually have.
Then there’s the whole infinite banking, living off loans secured with investments thing.
Not saying it’s impossible, just difficult and complicated.
I said in the thing, loans collateralized on capital assets are treated as income under this model
It’s not a wealth tax, it’s a tax on trying to avoid using that wealth through the bank shit.
So if you get a loan for 100k, and pay back 100k + interest, what are you taxed on?
The 100k loan
As income? It would have to be a much much lower rate than that. And how would you make sure this doesn’t harm middle and lower class borrowers? Mortgages, car financing, home improvement, debt consolidation loans, etc? Normal people get loans too. It would make homeownership completely impossible for anyone not a multimillionaire.
I literally said in the thing that primary residence mortgages and primary vehicle car loans would be exempt.
Are you actually reading anything I posted here or are you just trying to sealion for the billionaires?
I’m trying to say that it would be very difficult to just have a ton of little carve-outs for specific loan types that primarily non rich people use. You’ll have things like people getting a $100k loan secured by a way overvalued car. Ok so you introduce regulations to appraisals, that would require a massive new government bureaucracy. Now everything that secures a loan requires an appraisal, so that raises the cost. You have a carve out for credit cards, so rich people invent a “credit card” that only has a 3% interest rate that you can only get approved for if you have a certain amount of assets. So now you set more regulations for credit cards and unsecured debt. And on and on.
It would be even more byzantine and difficult than existing tax laws. Income is a relatively straightforward concept. Unrealized income (aka wealth) is not.
loans collateralized on capital assets are treated as income under this model
As soon as someone unironically suggests that loans should be considered income, under any circumstances, you can safely stop listening to their economics takes, lol.
Billionaires ruined it for everyone else by actually using it as their real income.
Blame them for playing games.
Billionaires do nothing different than anyone who takes out a HELOC on a house that appreciates in value at a rate higher than the LOC.
No one “ruined” anything or “played games”, you’re just ignorant of what’s actually being done. If your collateral happens to be something that appreciates in value faster than your loan balance does, you can do the exact same thing.
Small business loans are also all basically predicated on the exact same premise: “loan me this upfront money I need, and I can use it to make enough money to pay you back and then some”. The only difference is that I’m that case, the ‘thing that becomes more valuable’ is being created, it’s not something that exists already that’s growing in value.
Yeah no except they literally did ruin it for everyone else and play games. Billionaires use extremely low interest loans collateralized on capital assets as a means to get free money that allows them to throw their wealth around without ever having to either risk number go down or having to pay their due.
We cannot allow billionaires to keep getting away with dodging what they owe because some people who frankly probably shouldn’t be in the small business gang anyways might have to gasp get a job!
Yeah no except billionaires do exactly the thing you just said, that you already explained anyone can do, proving your point
ok
A billionaire would potentially turn into a multi hundred millionaire. Very unlikely they would lose ~99% of their wealth to “only” become a millionaire.
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars.
Great but that doesn’t change my point. Securities fluctuate, if you don’t sell then how do you value them?
And why shouldn’t they be forced to sell?
If there’s a huge tax penalty to hording company shares, maybe, just maybe, they would be instead incentivised to profit share with their employees. To focus more on retention than to do waves of layoffs to give their massive holdings a bump.
But we can’t have that. We need to incentivize narcissistic mega billionaires to have all the money in the world, and still clutch to every last penny while they work their peasants to death.
Great. But how do you value them. A stock that’s worth $5 one day, $10 the next, and $3 the next. How much do you tax it? How often?
You’re giving high minded speeches and stuff but I’m asking how it would practically work. Because I think it’s way more complicated than you think it is.
Edit: See further down, it could be done by averaging amounts over time.
High minded speeches? Seriously? There are plenty of feasible options.
If it’s a public company, you can take the median price for the quarter. If they’re holding over $500,000 or whatever amount as calculated by the median share price, they’re taxed. You can make it tiered, and tax the shit out of anyone holding over $500m or whatever. If they want to avoid that tax, they can sell, and pay the capital gain.
Or they could tie it to % over median employee shares granted per year. So if you have lopsided profit sharing, tax the fuck out of the greedy C level.
Private is harder since it’s less obvious what the tangible value is. But you could use the % shares granted yearly again. Maybe have it tiered to a companies net worth or whatever other metric that would be most appropriate.
It’s fucking ridiculous that we have articles like “Bezos lost $1 billion after shares took a dive this week” kind of articles. That’s a single person hording billions and billions in shares while the workers doing the actual work get pennies.
Most stocks are in mutual funds and ETFs. So if I have a million dollars, but I only own like $500 worth of any one company…?
Billionaires hold a tiny percentage of their wealth in money, so taking all their money away wouldn’t even make them stop being a billionaire.
Let’s remove their control of all that wealth, then. If they’re so good, they’ll soon be in control of more.
I’ll take some Amazon shares from Bezos.
I would honestly hold them and demand more ethics from the company that I now “own a part of”.
If enough people do this…
In this experiment, you wouldn’t have that power because you would only get a tiny fraction of the shares. The interesting bit would be to see what would happen to the company if everyone had a tiny say in what happens. Judging by the fact that most people are quite selfish, I think it may not be too much better for the workers.
What you’re describing would amount to either eminent domain or civil asset forfeiture, both things that you really shouldn’t be resorting to for money unless you’ve run out of all other options to cover a budget and have a spectacular plan to get the country back onto regular revenue with that money already in place, because that window can only be broken into once.
The purpose is wealth redistribution, not financing the State. Ideally, that money would go to a one time expenditure like a tax rebate for lower earners or a stimulus or something. Revenue neutral for the State.
I feel like that almost makes it worse
Even assuming we could just get all the money with no complications, every billion seized this way would redistribute something like 3 dollars to the average american, because there’s a fokkin’ lot of us.
What’d be better would be to turn that money into a sovereign wealth fund that can be tapped for crisis moments or unexpected budget deficits. Basically as a “fuck you we don’t need austerity” piggy bank whenever economic downturn prompts the right wing nutcases to start complaining how things like a functioning government are a waste of money.
Why piggy bank it when there are things right now that could, and would, use the money?
Crumbling road infrastructure, social programs, implementation of better public transit, EV rebates, homelessness programs, library attorney’s fees, replacing lead pipes for water delivery systems, forest fire management, employment insurance, boosting food and cash aid for the needy, etc.
Because we currently have money for those things and just aren’t spending it on them.
Building up an actual lean time fund for actual lean times instead of engineered poverty that can and should be addressed with what’s already there is just good policy, growth is not infinite, and having an emergency fund available to make up differences can significantly smooth over bust times for the working class.
This is a silly thought experiment to point out that billionaires do not earn their own wealth, and you treat it like it’s proposed as an actual economic plan for the whole country?
… rofl
Why not? What about it being a silly thought experiment invalidates wanting to look closer at it?
Because it is specifically NOT an economic plan. At all. It’s a basic concept that would have to be fleshed out in order to even have an actual mechanism to test. Eminent domain is silly, because very, very few people want billionaires’ wealth going to the government.
Billionaires do not earn their wealth. That’s the through line.
That would be fascinating to find out. It would be such a badass move, too, if one of them were to give everything away to show they could do it again. I think it actually would be fine for quite a few of them. Their reputation would get them in so many doors and get them so many investors for whatever they get into after the big giveaway. To really do this experiment well, they would need to get plastic surgery and change their identity so they can really have a fresh start.
It would also be interesting to see the effect it would have on whatever they were doing before their exit. I guess it really depends on who gets their shares/power. If it goes to the government, then in most cases, things would probably get worse, I’d imagine. If it somehow gets evenly distributed amongst the world’s population, that could be interesting. How would amazon fair if we all got 1/8B of Bezos shares? That would be quite interesting.
You’re a little biased against public sector, and seem to be in favor or privatization. I assume your incorrect understanding of public versus private sector efficiency is based on the cliche that public workers are so lazy or whatever.
But here’s an interesting article discussing the issue. I myself am biased against private sector in favor of the benefits of public sector efficiencies (no profit motive for example). But it’s an interesting article.
What did I say that made you think I have an “incorrect understanding of public versus private sector”?
Do you mean that because I think the government wouldn’t be good at running a business that I misunderstood something? The us government is famously bad about spending outrageous amounts for simple things. Cups that cost over $1,000, toilet seats for over $10,000… there’s tons of things like this. That may be fine when you don’t have to worry about being profitable, but it won’t fly when trying to run a business.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/opinion/pentagon-budget-military-spending-waste.html
I’m not sure the United States military is the example you think it is
You’re so cryptic. I don’t know if it is intentional or not, but you really don’t answer clearly or explain your reasoning.
I mean, I guess the us military is the largest military in the world apparently even if you added up all the other militaries together.
So by your logic there is no other private or public military that is better than the United States, but their goal is being the best, so but, and
If you are suggesting that the military of a government can be better run by a private organization, such as a corporation…. I mean, I guess you are saying that oligarchy and corporate rule is better than democracy?
To start with such a large organization won’t benefit your argument in any way
, and I suppose the service of the military is being the best?
IIRC the reason military spending is so extreme is because the US military is required by law to have the paperwork to prove their entire supply chain is domestic, as part of a worst case readiness thing. Could be wrong though, not like I’ve really looked into it all that much.
The US military gets so much stuff from other countries. There was a “Buy American Act” about 100 years ago, which still stands, but it allows for so many exceptions that get used very often. There have been a few other similar acts since then, but they all include well-used exceptions.
What does this have to do with comparing the public us military to a similar private organization?
When the service provided is influencing world politics and securing our country, I don’t think efficiency means the same thing. I also don’t think there are any other private sector businesses that could compare to us military. And even if there are, I would assume that all of their workers were trained by the us military.
Take their assets.
Give them to who?
The people who built them.
That would be interesting. Anyone who has over a billion dollars is forced to distribute their wealth across anyone who has ever worked for them. Even more interesting than this would be to do it for anyone who has ever worked for anyone else. All boss/employee relationships. I wonder how this would change the world.
This was tested…sort of. He didn’t give away his money he just supposedly didn’t make use of it essentially hitting the road as a fake homeless and making money by selling stuff he bought on facebook market.
The fellow was a millionaire not a billionaire and I think he went from nothing to ~50k in nearly a year. He called it off early because he was basically destroying his health.
Yeah, with friends housing him and hiring him 🤡
Not to mention that actually poor people don’t have a cheat code to get them out when their health suffers. Which then makes them less able to keep working at maximum mental and physical capacity.
So this was nothing but a demonstration that nepotism and money is what one really needs.
He could also take higher risks, since he knew that there was a security net to catch him. Much easier to make high risk/reward decisions, if the risk (e.g. going broke) isn’t actually real. He presumably also had an above average education and many other benefits. This is also why many rich people might end up building successful businesses. The average person might get one shot and either makes it or goes broke. The rich person can roll the dice multiple times (and might have learned something from the last try).
Also disregarding everything even, if he had succeded: That would still only have been a sample size of one. I doubt anyone is saying that you can’t under any circumstances pull yourself out of poverty, but on average the cards are just stacked against you in many ways.
Also i doubt that reselling second hand stuff is a viable business model for a larger group. Like sure in a large city a few people might be able to carve out a niche for themself, but the more people do it or the smaller the market, the less it works.
So you have a link? That sounds interesting as.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13332399/Millionaire-Mike-Black-homeless-broke-purpose-ends-bizarre-social-experiment.html He made 64,000 before he tapped out. His trajectory is also not entirely kosher
Eventually, a man with an RV allowed him to stay for several nights in his van. Black started off small and managed to make his first $300 by selling furniture online.
Nobody lets a homeless stay in their van to bootstrap their buy and sell craigslist furniture business
Three months into the challenge, Black’s entrepreneurial spirit appeared to shine through having set himself up as a social media manager, managing to land clients - while even coming up with his own brand of coffee.
Most people who were homeless 90 days prior is going to be in a position to be appointed someone’s social media manager or else they likely wouldn’t even be homeless in the first place.
Even with obvious cheat codes he couldn’t get more than 64k starting from “zero” wherein zero means being homeless in nice gear with your $1000 phone and unlimited internet plan with a health plan and a GP and specialists
Throughout the entire project, we haven’t shared it with you, but I’ve been in and out of the doctor’s office.’
Not gonna lie, had me in the first half
Not me, but only because I’ve watched his videos on YouTube. The man is a brilliant comedian IMO.
Division of labor would suggest the people that are best at hunting money, hunt the money for the tribe while the others do other stuff.
What’s fun is everytime something like this is tried, it fails spectacularly… and they know that.
When in history did anybody take away billionaires’ money?
There was a recent case of a young billionaire who basically signed over everything to a family member to live on the street to prove he could “Make millions from nothing!” and that the poors “Were just being lazy”
It didn’t end well for him and he begged mommy to give him his wealth back because going too long without his gold-plated jaquzzi was hard
The French revolution and other related uprisings. See: Romanov family vs Bolsheviks.
Edit: it was a joke ffs
They took away power and status, not primarily the money.
Eh, those kids had a lot of diamonds on them.
They killed left and right, we’re talking about like taxing unusable wealth from peop’e who don’t need it (and didn’t earn it in any kind of morally okay way).
You can’t tax wealth.
Not with that attitude.
