The World Could Get Its First Trillionaire Within 10 Years (apnews.com) 287
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The world could have its first trillionaire within a decade, anti-poverty organization Oxfam International said Monday in its annual assessment of global inequalities timed to the gathering of political and business elites at the Swiss ski resort of Davos. Oxfam, which for years has been trying to highlight the growing disparities between the super-rich and the bulk of the global population during the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, reckons the gap has been "supercharged" since the coronavirus pandemic.
The group said the fortunes of the five richest men -- Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault and his family of luxury company LVMH, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and investment guru Warren Buffett -- have spiked by 114% in real terms since 2020, when the world was reeling from the pandemic. Oxfam's interim executive director said the report showed that the world is entering a "decade of division." "We have the top five billionaires, they have doubled their wealth. On the other hand, almost 5 billion people have become poorer," Amitabh Behar said in an interview in Davos, Switzerland, where the forum's annual meeting takes place this week.
"Very soon, Oxfam predicts that we will have a trillionaire within a decade," Behar said, referring to a person who has a thousand billion dollars. "Whereas to fight poverty, we need more than 200 years." If someone does reach that trillion-dollar milestone -- and it could be someone not even on any list of richest people right now -- he or she would have the same value as oil-rich Saudi Arabia. [...] To calculate the top five richest billionaires, Oxfam used figures from Forbes as of November 2023. Their total wealth then was $869 billion, up from $340 billion in March 2020, a nominal increase of 155%. For the bottom 60% of the global population, Oxfam used figures from the UBS Global Wealth Report 2023 and from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2019. Both used the same methodology. Some of the measures Oxfam said should be considered to reduce global inequality include the permanent taxation of the wealthiest in every country, more effective taxation of big corporations and a renewed drive against tax avoidance. "To end extreme inequality, governments must radically redistribute the power of billionaires and corporations back to ordinary people," reports Oxfam. "A more equal world is possible if governments effectively regulate and reimagine the private sector."
The group said the fortunes of the five richest men -- Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault and his family of luxury company LVMH, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and investment guru Warren Buffett -- have spiked by 114% in real terms since 2020, when the world was reeling from the pandemic. Oxfam's interim executive director said the report showed that the world is entering a "decade of division." "We have the top five billionaires, they have doubled their wealth. On the other hand, almost 5 billion people have become poorer," Amitabh Behar said in an interview in Davos, Switzerland, where the forum's annual meeting takes place this week.
"Very soon, Oxfam predicts that we will have a trillionaire within a decade," Behar said, referring to a person who has a thousand billion dollars. "Whereas to fight poverty, we need more than 200 years." If someone does reach that trillion-dollar milestone -- and it could be someone not even on any list of richest people right now -- he or she would have the same value as oil-rich Saudi Arabia. [...] To calculate the top five richest billionaires, Oxfam used figures from Forbes as of November 2023. Their total wealth then was $869 billion, up from $340 billion in March 2020, a nominal increase of 155%. For the bottom 60% of the global population, Oxfam used figures from the UBS Global Wealth Report 2023 and from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2019. Both used the same methodology. Some of the measures Oxfam said should be considered to reduce global inequality include the permanent taxation of the wealthiest in every country, more effective taxation of big corporations and a renewed drive against tax avoidance. "To end extreme inequality, governments must radically redistribute the power of billionaires and corporations back to ordinary people," reports Oxfam. "A more equal world is possible if governments effectively regulate and reimagine the private sector."
Yep, that's the great thing about... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Yep, that's the great thing about... (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was in college I read an article from a journalist in central or South America, sorry can't recall where exactly, but he was talking about the effect of hyperinflation in his home country.
He described his morning in story format to make his point, which included having breakfast, buying a cup of coffee and then making his way to the bank where he paid off his mortgage for less than the cost of the coffee.
In some edge cases hyperinflation can be good for certain people but it leads to a chaotic financial environment where no one wants to hire, work, buy, sell, sign a contract, etc, because by the time they get paid the value of that payment is worthless. It's an economy killer. I don't know if it's still happening today but I know years ago when Israel had very high inflation, Thursday afternoon became a default national holiday. Why? Because paychecks went out every Thursday at noon, so people spent their check immediately doing all their shopping the rest of the day because by Friday prices would have gone up. Healthy economies don't look like that.
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Might I interest you in a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar bill?
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I think I have a roll of them in my bathroom.
Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Insightful)
“Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.”
Enough is enough, literally. Tax these rich motherfuckers until they're only mega-millionaires again, and give the money to WIC, to schools, to roads and bridges, and to paying down the debt. I don't give a damn anymore about people saying that "it's not enough" or "each program would only get a few thousand dollars" or whatever other lame excuse you care to give about why these people deserve to hoard it all for themselves. It's not helping society, so let's put an end to it.
Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not via hoarding that most people are or become billionaires, but by the envy of people who want what they built. For example, the value of a company like SpaceX is entirely because OTHER people are willing to pay for a chunk of it. It's like this, if you make a great painting .. and someone wants to pay you a million dollars for it .. is that considered hoarding to not sell it to them? To give up control of where to display and what to do with your own creation?
Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Insightful)
There's the rub and complexity.
*Technically*, I have doubts about whatever "in real terms" means what is implied. To measure the wealth of people largely rooted in stock in "real terms" is a daunting exercise, since most of the value is extrapolated from a subset of activity. An example to illustrate that there's obviously a disconnect in this strategy is that the combined market cap of the s&p 500 is over twice the M2 money supply. The valuation of just the stock in those 500 companies is more than twice as much as money that "exists". If those 5 folks decided to liquidate all their assets all of a sudden, you wouldn't find $869 billion willing to be forked over for those assets.
However, practically speaking, perception is reality and economy is about psychology. So while one may delve into the nitty gritty and say "there's some challenges with that simplistic evaluation", ultimately it's something we've numerically described in a way to explicit invite direct comparisons. Also, for many intents and purposes, their extrapolated, yet unrealistic wealth value is used to have an amazingly wealthy lifestyle in reality. The quantitative evaluation may be wonky, but it's close enough to drive sentiment, and that sentiment is real and risky.
Of course, the bad news, even if you wave a wand and reallocate things so they are "mega millionaires", it probably won't help. You'll tank a lot of correlated retirement portfolios of middle class folk, if there's more cash flow then inflation will rise to soak up the difference dragging things back down to a roughly equivalent standard of living for the same rough amount of work. As audacious as the lifestyles of the mega rich are, I don't think in terms of real resources they require enough to even notice if they all stopped. A supercar might cost the same as 20 Honda Civics, but skipping building the supercar wouldn't free up resources up to the task of building 20 Honda Civics.
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This pretending that we somehow can't know the wealth of people whose wealth is in assets, or that it "doesn't count" or "only theoretical", is the most basic nonsense. We routinely tax assets that have much less straightforward values in the form of pro
Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody is asking for people to give up control and to call it "envy" is extremely reductive.
I sorta like how Liz Warren put her spin on the "you didn't build that" idea
I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.' No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:4, Informative)
Who is saying not to charge for those? Every transaction is taxed, is it not? Every building somebody builds results in taxation. Every employee hired results in taxes being paid. Taxes are being paid whenever a business operates. My issue is that you want to tax somebody based on other people wanting what they have.
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My issue is that you want to tax somebody based on other people wanting what they have.
No, that is you putting emotion and trying to apply normativity to something i never did. It's kinda dishonest argumentation, you're not arguing against what I said and rather trying to paint my intentions into something you find unreasonable.
Raising taxes on the wealthiest among us can be made from a purely utilitarian point of view, it's pretty well studies the negative outcomes form massive income inequality, from reduced economic growth, societal corrosion, increased crime rates, there is lots of info
Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Informative)
Norway has a much stronger economy than the U.S. per capita. How? They flattened the discrepancy between the highest paying jobs and the lowest paying jobs, via unionizing everyone. They proved that more equality (less inequality) is a competitive advantage for a whole country in an economical sense. They pay grocery clerks a living wage. A lawyer or a doctor doesn't make 30x a cashier at a coffee shop; they make MORE than a cashier, but not 30-50-100x more.
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Umm, no. Do you fact check at all? There is not even a minimum wage in Norway .. average salary of a physician is the same in the US and Norway. Norway is doing well for the same reason as Dubai .. THEY HAVE OIL. They also have a high level of education so that helps too. How many people are trade union members in Dubai? Furthermore, Norway has more like 20% more billionaires per capita than the US. Cashiers get paid more due to the strong economy the demand is high for people to do that work. China and Vie
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There is not even a minimum wage in Norway
There is not one minimum wage in Norway, but there are minimum wages for some occupations [arbeidstilsynet.no] which were being taken advantage of without a minimum wage law. Your statement is therefore mostly incorrect.
Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well if someone is being “underpaid” then that is a separate issue they can be charged with. I am opposed to employees being underpaid, though frankly that is a bit of a dubious notion .. I am pretty sure most employees of top companies like Apple or Microsoft are smart enough to know their value and none are getting below minimum wage. Furthermore Apple never did anything to put them in that situation of being desperate for work. How is Apple more responsible for it than you?
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"It's not via hoarding that most people are or become billionaires, but by the envy of people who want what they built."
People who build things don't become billionaires. This is a delusion. People become rich off the work of others.
"For example, the value of a company like SpaceX is entirely because OTHER people are willing to pay for a chunk of it."
So the value of SpaceX is not based on the "envy of people who want what [Elon Musk] built" but only why people desire to invest in SpaceX? That's literally
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I am pretty sure SpaceX paid all their employees and purchased every component at the price the vendor agreed to sell it at. What’s the issue? Are you saying SpaceX forced people to work for them?
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SpaceX didn't force people to work for them but (most) people are in fact forced to work, unless of course you inherited a bunch of money.
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Right, isn’t their being forced to work equally your fault as anyone else’s? SpaceX didn’t even exist when my great grandpa ran into financial difficulties. And btw I am sure just about any SpaceX employee can choose to work somewhere other than SpaceX for a lower wage if they are willing to downgrade their vehicle, school district, and vacation. None of those are requirements to live. Forced means doing something where the alternative is extreme duress. Choosing to eat a Kit-Kat bar becau
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What is the point of this, it's a roundabout way of agreeing with me, SpaceX in not special and has nothing particular to do with it.
None of those are requirements to live. Forced means doing something where the alternative is extreme duress
Like living in a capitalist society without a source of income? Therefore you agree in a capitalist society people are in fact forced to sell their labor? (To be clear I am not saying this is "bad", only that it is reality)
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I don't get the argument....life is not free and requires you to work to survive. Always has.
How about caveman days and years after before modern societies?
If you didn't hunt or farm/forage...you died, you didn't survive.
Once you take your first breath of air at birth, your free ride is OVER....and no matter what age it is, you have to work and do something to survive.
Sure, it's easier for some, but again...that's just the nature of the wo
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clearly it is helping society, a wealthy person becomes one by running some business that is helping society as much as possible, that is how society pays back - by buying at scale large enough that there is enough money to make someone wealthy. Obviously no multibillionaire or trillionaire or whatever is sitting on a pile of cash, his company becomes so valuable that his shares are worth that much (*prior* to liquidation) and it is illegal to tax unrealized gains, so no, very unlikely anyone would be taxe
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So Jeffrey Epstein was just "helping society as much as possible".
"a wealthy person becomes one by running some business"
or by stealing it, or by any number of other means. Wealth beyond a certain point, though, occurs only one way...by leveraging other people's efforts, by profiting off of other people's work.
"...and it is illegal to tax unrealized gains..."
LOL
"also, what a tantrum you are throwing here"
Sit down, child.
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Most billionaires got rich by providing something somebody was willing to pay for. Most people get poor by *not* providing anything of value. If we need to get rid of one of them, the rich would not be my first choice.
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To an extent, but after that first 50 million, do you really think the rich get richer by anything but leveraging their wealth?
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You mean like everyone does?
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Not unless everyone has $50M.
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Most people who are poor were born poor. "Not" providing anything of value is meaningless if you have no mean of which to acquire said value to provide.
Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Insightful)
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Most billionaires got rich by providing something somebody was willing to pay for. Most people get poor by *not* providing anything of value. If we need to get rid of one of them, the rich would not be my first choice.
And that mystery thing, is money. Most billionaires got rich by being born, and all of them got richer by using money to make money. The poor provided labor without which the economy would collapse, but that labor has a low price. Similar to how water is more valuable than gold, but priced less -- because all life depends on water, but any particular gallon is easily replaced. Infinite value, easily replaced, zero price.
Yes a lot of billionaires did "provide something of value" but be honest: each of them c
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We all get 168 hours a week.
There is no universe where a single person can extoll enough labor to earn a billion dollars, it's just too much, that billion came on the backs of hundreds to thousands of people.
Let's say they earn $1B a year. What did that single person do to earn $4,000,000 in 24 hours?
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In relative terms, if posting to slashdot, they are probably wealthy compared to anyone with a genuine reason to bemoan the current state of things. They may not be in the top 5, but it's probable that they are well enough off that messing with the status quo is all risk with little to no potential upside.
Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Insightful)
How does that help society?
Let's say we did what you want. We scape up a few trillion dollars from these billionaires.
How exactly does that work? Most of their money is in stock, land, and other non-liquid holdings. Do we force a stock sale? That would crash stock values. When stocks crash, 401k and pension funds will also crash, wiping out many people's retirement. And a one time 2 trillion dollar distribution won't do much of anything to help people. We already saw what hap-end during Covid when we hand out trillions in free cash: inflation. Everyone is far worse off now with the inflation caused by that then if they were just allowed to work normally.
Are you actually trying to help people or just angry and bitter that some people "have too much"?
They're not swimming in cash and jewels like Scrooge McDuck.
Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy:
1: Raise tax brackets to pre-1980 levels
2: Raise capital gains to a more progressive system closer to matching income levels.
3: Raise inheritance tax to 50%
Then just give it time.
Billionaires are policy failures, what important here is velocity of money and proper tax policy means you are encourages to "use it or lose it" rather than in fact hoard it, whether that be in stocks or cash or whatever.
They're not swimming in cash and jewels like Scrooge McDuck.
What's your basis for that? Have you seen how most of the wealthiest people live? To call it excessive sometimes. If this was about climate change how many people would be talking about the hypocrisy of private jets?
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> 3: Raise inheritance tax to 50%
Inheritance is already taxed money. Why do you want to double dip and grab someone's savings ?
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I mean I would raise it 100% if I thought it was feasible.
Which is it? Are millionaires and billionaires sitting on unrealized gains that haven't been taxes yet and that's why they are wealthy? In that case all that income is still untaxed.
Or are they sitting on tons of liquid cash and therefore our tax policy isn't effective on it?
Also if these people are wealthy because of their grit, smart thinking and moxie why do their kids need such an excessive leg up? If hard works always pays off they should have n
Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Interesting)
All money is already taxed money. My employer pays me with money they paid tax on when the earned it, and I pay income tax on it. The money I buy groceries with I paid income tax on, and now I pay sales tax to buy groceries. The money I bought my house with I paid tax on, on now the asset that taxed income bought me is taxed again with property taxes.
All money is already taxed, with the possible exception of gambling winnings (and even then, casinos pay income tax, and lottery tickets are bought with taxed income, so...). Your argument doesn't hold up.
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All your money is being taxed. You don't get paid in stocks and borrow with stocks as collateral to avoid ever paying capital gains taxes on them.
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> My employer pays me with money they paid tax on when the earned it, and I pay income tax on it.
Your employer actually has multiple deductions on his corporate taxes that account for purchases, sales tax exemptions, and yes, employee benefits and salaries.
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The "have too much" is a likely target when people are worried about those that "have too little".
Admittedly, the nuance and specifics of the numeric description of "wealth" is weird and problematic, but the reality remains that we have set up this whole framework to declare there is an absolute numeric means of comparing the value of people and that one person is valued more than entire towns of people.
So while you may have a grasp on the nuance and unintended consequences of likely attempts at correction
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How does that help society?
Let's say we did what you want. We scape up a few trillion dollars from these billionaires.
How exactly does that work? Most of their money is in stock, land, and other non-liquid holdings. Do we force a stock sale? That would crash stock values. When stocks crash, 401k and pension funds will also crash, wiping out many people's retirement. And a one time 2 trillion dollar distribution won't do much of anything to help people. We already saw what hap-end during Covid when we hand out trillions in free cash: inflation. Everyone is far worse off now with the inflation caused by that then if they were just allowed to work normally.
Are you actually trying to help people or just angry and bitter that some people "have too much"?
They're not swimming in cash and jewels like Scrooge McDuck.
You could take every dime from Musk and Bezos and the USA would spend it in a few weeks
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That's not the point, it's establishing a framework where the people earning those massive sums of cash are given the incentive to re-invest it, raise wages, do more research, open new businesses, get the money moving in the economy.
When we had top brackets of 70-90% a few decades ago the retort is always "nobody actually paid those rates" which is correct! The idea was "spend that money or we take it".
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That's not the point, it's establishing a framework where the people earning those massive sums of cash are given the incentive to re-invest it, raise wages, do more research, open new businesses, get the money moving in the economy.
When we had top brackets of 70-90% a few decades ago the retort is always "nobody actually paid those rates" which is correct! The idea was "spend that money or we take it".
Those high rates were on income, not capital gains. https://taxfoundation.org/data... [taxfoundation.org]
When we talk about these billionaires we are talking about their assets. Owning big chunks of Amazon, Tesla, Starlink, SpaceX, is investing. Amazon alone employs 1.5 million people, is a huge economic engine, and spent $73 billion on R&D in 2022 https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com] . What more do you want?
Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Informative)
Most of these people do not have income like you or I. They have investments which is where their wealth comes from. Look at Warren Buffett. You think he's getting a multi million dollar salary each year? His salary has been $100K for the past 25 years [marketwatch.com].
His wealth comes from shares in the companies he owns and runs. He gets taxed when he sells stock which is at a lower rate than against his salary.
Jamie Dimon, on the other hand, does receive a multi million dollar salary each year, plus bonuses. He can be taxed accordingly. But I'm sure that socialist will come up with some excuse why the rich paying a higher tax on their salary is a bad thing.
Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Insightful)
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You are talking like only income is taxed. We pay tax on a roll of toilet paper while Buffet can buy entire companies tax free (if not get some tax rebate). We pay tax on the market value of our home so we don't die of exposure while there is no tax on the market value of what Buffet owns (again he is probably getting some deductions). And when he does get cash from dividends or selling something the rate is much lower than the income tax on people who work just to live.
There is no federal tax on buying a business but there are state and local taxes. Same for toilet paper.
Any company Buffet owns that has real estate is paying real estate tax too.
Unqualified dividends are taxed as regular income
When it comes to capital gains the government is your business partner and shares in the profits.
They do not however share in your losses other than to the extent they offset the profits.
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Re:Found this quote just the other day (Score:5, Insightful)
Tax them for what ?
They're all paper rich. They mostly don't have that much liquidity. It's all unrealised gains, meaning they own paper, and that paper has a speculative value based on what others would pay right now to own said paper.
You can't wealth tax without creating a massive decrease in speculative value as the market gets flooded with sells because people need to convert their unrealised gains to liquidity to pay off any sort of tax scheme you can cook up.
Stop listening to dumb politicians.
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I agree, taxing unrealized gains is kind of unworkable.
What we can do is tax those gains at a higher level. Higher income taxes, way, way higher capital gains rates and a much higher inheritance tax when they die with their unrealized hoard and it has to be realized at time of death before it can be handed off (no handing off of unrealized gains without taxation).
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Jop, accurate. Even in the most expensive countries on the planet, $10M sets you up comfortably for life. Anybody that desires much more is basically just a leech, nothing else. Nobody can provide more than, say, $100M to society over their full lifetime so the only way to get more is to take it from others.
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Just crack the pinata and hand out the sweets. Why bother with petty bullshit?
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Yes, I'm an asshole
No you are just blinded and somewhat ignorant.
What's your public policy to stop "irresponsible people" from having kids? Can you give me a method of policy that isn't monstrous or gigantic levels of government overreach?
Or maybe, just maybe, we should understand (amazed that you don't? or is this intentional obtuseness?) that children don't choose their parents or the circumstances they are born into. That's why part of this money can go into improving education so even the poor kid who didn't choose to be
Cherry picking data points⦠(Score:5, Insightful)
Up from $340b since March 2020? March 2020 when the global economy was just gripped by the start of covid panic.
If just using arbitrary dates, why not talk about when billionaire wealth dropped 30% from Dec 2021 to Dec 2022?
Useful research requires unbiased data, unbiased researchers, presenting unbiased results.
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Perhaps because that calamity (C19 in March 2020) hit everyone across the world so it's about an even starting point as you'll find.
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my immediate reaction when this first came out was that it was an odd time choice.
I went back to my records, and found that my accounts were up 63% from the end of 2019 to the end of 2023.
And counting from the end of March, 2020, to the end of 2023, I'm up 103%. That is, I more than doubled, too; it wasn't about being rich.
Heck, let's go full cherry pick, and measure from March 23, 2020 to the end of 2023. At that point, I find myself up 133%.
I'm certainly not wealthy, but there's enough in my these accou
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Because when the critical mass of people can't pay the 11 bucks, you won't get the 99 cents either. They'll sell the right to assrape you for 99 cents instead.
Concentration of power (Score:3)
Do we really need such an immense concentration of power? The only legit way to ensure power isn't concentrated in the hands of the few is to ensure competition can emerge easily.
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We do not need them for anything. But they are a massive threat to society and to capitalism. Capitalism stops working with such concentrations of money and power.
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We do not need them for anything.
This is not quite true. While I agree it is net negative at the later stages, Robber Barons and now SV technocrats have made significant contribution to society on the way up.
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Sure. Some "way up" is ok and can be beneficial. But somewhere at $100M ...$1B (maybe even earlier) that stops.
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Competition for what?
Competition relies on scarcity, scarcity is essential to concentrate wealth and power. Scarcity is threatened by technology. Billionaires strive to be Immortan Joes.
The rich can only exist if there are also poor, yet your "only legit way" is to play the rich man's game, to grant scarcity as a ground rule. That game, BTW, starts with "the rich make the rules". They taught that in high school in the 70s.
The age of Robber barons (Score:3)
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How are they losing their fortunes right now?
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Not yet. It will work as long as enough people buy into the bullshit story of them having a chance to also be on the "winning" team.
The problem starts when the majority of people is convinced that they're on the losing side of things and decide to just take what they think should be theirs.
That's not a problem when like 0.1% of the people think so. You just gun them down or lock them up and be done with that. It is a problem when about 50% of the people think so. Because then they gun you down and lock you
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Confused... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is getting into a depth of economics I don't fully understand. I'm not going to argue with Oxfam, but...
Those 5 billionaires have mostly doubled their wealth because they own significant fractions of companies that have increased their share price. Whilst I'm sure they have a bank balance which shows more than mine, and that same bank account shows more income and outgoings than mine does in a year, but how does their doubling of wealth actually cause problems for poor people (besides the on-paper disp
Not a sane outcome, there have to be limits. (Score:5, Insightful)
There have to be limits to the power private wealth can accumulate. All the progress we made in the last centuries came from the rise of public power, and they're going to undo all of that. Democracy, free markets, and the rule of law, they're going to dismantle every last bit of it to compete in ways that serve no productive purpose.
Trillionaires means the whole world will be the third world.
Re:Not a sane outcome, there have to be limits. (Score:5, Informative)
This is an important point - money isn't just money, it's an abstract representation of power. Nobody should command a billion dollars' worth of power, nevermind a trillion.
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Exactly. This is deeply perverted and a massive threat to society. At the same time, no benefits to society at all. Oh, and it has nothing to do with capitalism anymore, capitalism stops to function under such circumstances.
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Indeed. Monopolies are a severe capitalism failure and _must_ be avoided for a market to stay healthy. Same for large concentrations of power or wealth. This just shows that capitalism has gotten deeply corrupted and will go away unless it gets fixed. And, obviously, it will get replaced by a system were only a few have enough to live comfortably. Not good at all.
My personal proposal: An 100% income tax from a personal fortune of $100M onwards, and add 1% more for every 10M above. Even in the most expensive
Because people don't understand value (Score:3)
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When you look at the current slew of billionaires, you'll notice a trend. All of them started out with a lot of money in their back, and their first big investment struck gold. Anything since, though, is hobbling along, at best, or a total disaster at worst.
What you have here is essentially the rich boy version of playing the lottery. That has nothing to do with being a shrewd businessman or a wise investor. It's simply and plainly luck.
No wonder more and more people realize that the American Dream is over.
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Indeed. As soon as you start rich enough, you have to be really, really dumb to not get richer. Some still manage it, but most do not. The reason is that anybody not completely dumb will _not_ manage their own money and at a certain amount of wealth that management gets pretty reliably good because the rest of the rich notice.
Also, "getting rich" used to be something like, say, getting to $1M in wealth. That used to be in reach of an individual that has skill and dedication. One trillionaire takes that away
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If Musk tried to take a more active role in these, the stock price would go to crap. Twitter nicely shows how incompetent that guy actually is. Must have gotten rich entirely by accident. And that is just a system failure.
Musk sure has a lot of good accidents, right? We should all be so incompetent
And this only shows (Score:3)
that the taxes for some are way too low.
No more! (Score:2)
Not Good (Score:2)
People having significantly more resources than they need is wastage.
Excess resources owned by one person being spent on expensive nonessentials like yachts and hypercars is wastage.
The presence of super rich people is an indication of the inefficiency and failure of society to properly distribute resources,
akin to when a greedy allocation algorithm screws up.
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Some excess is good - trying to get rich motivates a lot of productivity. The issue is we don't have any mechanism for limiting excess.
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When I watch these people, I don't want to get rich anymore. I wouldn't want to be a totally useless sack of shit that only exists to waste more resources than thousands of families put together.
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I think we're working with different definitions for the threshold of 'rich'. I think once you have enough wealth to sustain a median lifestyle for the remainder of your lifespan without working, you're rich.
I think the limit on wealth should be around 2-3 times that. After that, the available option for obtaining more wealth should be lifting the median.
So what do you do? (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is net worth usually is bound very tightly in stock that these people cannot liquidate easily even if they wanted.
Since the wealth is virtual until liquidated, you can't possibly tax that and call it fair. Imagine if you had to sell your control in your own company to pay taxes on money you do not really have.
It is a very weird circumstance where these people could, in liquid cash, be paupers while being worth billions.
They can go to a bank and get enormous loans at negligible or zero interest, living a king's life on borrowed money, which in turn is then tax deductible, offsetting what "regular income" they do have.
But my point is, what the hell do you do about it? Do you honestly think a CEO led company beholden to shareholders like Blackrock is any more ethical than Elon Musk?
Do you start taxing income that doesn't really exist? Imagine you lived in Switzerland and bought a house and every year the state would just tell you how much you'd earn if you rented your property out and even though you do not, they add that money to your taxable income. Would that be fair?
So I keep hearing "tax the billionaires". I want to know HOW??? These people can buy whole islands anywhere on the planet. If they go to tax havens, how do you legally pick their pockets after that?
An idea I had, which I haven't thought through much, is if we had ONLY VAT and no income or property taxes for private entities but if we taxed corporations... but then we already tax corporations, and they too weasel money past governments... We could forego the concept of headquarters altogether and tax profits per country.
But they already shift profits to tax havens like Ireland, no? Do we just sum up all profits and revenue and then use the same factor from local revenue as part of total revenue to calculate profits?
Most of us are in agreement over the fact that the current systems sucks quite a bit but I have yet to see a sane idea on how it could work better.
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Taxing it is absolutely fair - it's a way to cap on how much power an individual is permitted to acquire in our society.
No unelected person should have a trillion (or even a billion) dollars' worth of power.
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So you're okay with the government taxing your income at 15k above your actual income because you're a homeowner? With all the tax progression that entails?
And if you cannot pay that tax, it would be alright with you to sell your property and go rent again so you could spent what you save on tax to a landlord?
And if that isn't good for the goose, why is it okay for the gander?
You also did not tell me how Musk having to sell off his Tesla stocks, relinquishing a lot of power in the company, possibly being re
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I think someone who owns 10 million homes each worth $100,000 could in fact afford to be taxed more then they earn, and that society might even be better for it if they get taxed so much that in the end they only own 100 homes worth $100,000. (A trillionaire reduced to a mere 10-millionaire). Can't you see the danger in giving one person so much power and control?
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"It is a very weird circumstance where these people could, in liquid cash, be paupers while being worth billions."
It's not weird at all if you are a farmer after a bad harvest. Asset rich and cash poor is a thing. Yes the land will have another crop next year, but until then things are tight. Property taxes still need to be paid, you still need to eat, and you probably don't want to freeze to death if you are up north.
And now you want to add on another tax on the "wealth"?
For that matter I wrote several Ash
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The farmer will not pay income tax, if the harvest fell through, though.
So I'm not sure what it is exactly what you're trying to say. Maybe I'm tired but I find your post a tad incoherent...
Hard work + good decisions = success (Score:2)
These people had the same start like us.
We [b]ALL[/b] come into this world naked.
If you were dealt a bad hand, you can still win.
Luck doesn't exist. Hard work and good decisions do.
Besides, money isn't the only metric for success. Actually, it's a rather poor metric for success.
You can't eat money (well... it's not intended to be eaten), it will never love you, and it will most certainly not help your relations.
Success is best measured by happiness and results, not by money.
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Success is best measured by happiness and results, not by money.
Sure, but in reality having money helps a whole fuckload with all those things. There is a concept called marginal utility of money. [investopedia.com]
We [b]ALL[/b] come into this world naked.
If you were dealt a bad hand, you can still win.
Luck doesn't exist. Hard work and good decisions do.
Another supporter for the 100% inheritance tax. Welcome aboard.
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Bullshit. Only a handful started from nothing. It's a lot easier to turn $1 million into $3 million than $1 into $1 million.
we have failed as a society (Score:3)
Already around (Score:3)
Doesn't matter (Score:3)
There is no difference between the world's richest people having $200 billion or $1000 billion. It's not like they're going to spend more money, so there's zero impact on the economy. Also, much of the increase in assets is due to unrealized stock appreciation, so again there is no effect on the economy due to the transfer of money. There's also no change in public perception, since all those numbers are mind-numbing. It's like how a young child can't tell the difference between $10 and $1000.
Perhaps the only thing that matters is that while the unrealized gains of the super-rich have skyrocketed, the post-inflation assets and income of many people have decreased. There's an obvious difference in the assets and income between these two classes. However, the problem is not that the rich have accumulated more money that they aren't going to use. Rather the problem is that the poor have experienced a decrease in their effective standard of living.
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I say we handle it like the Elk lottery.
We tried that in my state, but hunters found Elk to be too high in fat, Grills were actually catching fire.
Masons, on the other hand, are leaner and have more protein.