US Billionaire Wealth Surges to $8.1 Trillion as Affordability Crisis Hammers Working Class
"Billionaires are raking in staggering profits off the backs of ordinary workers," said Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies.
You're viewing a single thread.
People don't like to hear it, but if you took the money from every single US billionaire and distributed it equally it would only be a bit over $20,000 per person, one time only.
That's really not a lot when the median annual income is more than three times that.
We don't need billionaires, but they are not a significant part of the cost of living crisis.
So you're telling me we get 1 less Elon and 20,000 more dollars? You sure make a compelling argument.
That's quite a lot of money for some of us. Imagine how transformative it would be for those who desperately need it.
Most people who desperately need $20k would not handle it effectively if given a lump sum. That's been proven repeatedly.
It would do more good giving it to a social program.
Do you have a source for that?
There are multiple situations that apply, you can look up studies on smaller lottery winners.
Also, inheritance spending.
The median inheritance is much larger than the $20k, but that study shows about half the inheritance money is spent or lost almost immediately.
I'm not saying it wouldn't benefit anyone, it definitely would, but getting rid of billionaires will not fix any long standing issues with society because they aren't the primary cause of those issues.
getting rid of billionaires will not fix any long standing issues with society because they aren’t the primary cause of those issues
How are you so confident that this is the case?
Because the money they have is absolutely tiny compared to other groups of people.
Trillions sounds like a lot, until you start talking about real estate or corporate spending.
They're just easier to pick on/scapegoat, which is why they're being targeted.
Irresponsibly spending their own money is their right, tho. Besides, that's still trillions of dollars injected into the economy, which will have long-lasting positive effects.
And if you took one dollar from each of those people, you could use the money to buy dozens of politicians. 20,000 times that, and you can buy almost all of the politicians for many lifetimes. It's not just a transformative amount of money for the people who are too cash-poor to risk searching for better employment, it's an ungodly amount of money that can easily sway power to support the cost of living crisis.
Another way to look at it: when the forecast says .5 inches of rain predicted, that seems like nothing across your entire city. Now imagine all of that landing inside your house, instead. Congratulations, you're now the billionaire of drowning in your living room.
In your example where the money is literally taken & handed out, it'd result in short-term price surges, and probably have very little re-distributive effect (the money would end up flowing back up rapidly, and flow back down at the same rate as before).
But that's not the only possibility. It should be possible to perform land & capital reform: altering the ownership & organisational structure of companies, causing them to allocate resources differently, causing the prices of goods (and of labour) to change relative to each other, and this can increase equality & overall standards of living. For instance, elite populations tend to hoard land & buildings, leaving them idle to fulfil their higher-level psychological needs (i.e. a big private estate) whereas that land could house a factory that contributes to lowering the prices of goods (or, I'm sure you can think of some other uses). They also tend to order the overproduction of prestige goods, when the effort that went into producing those could have went into producing goods that more effectively increase living standards. The relative price of bread & champagne isn't fixed and when the gap is small, it contributes to inequality, but measuring how much is difficult.
Of course, actually figuring out how to do this is the hard part, but it has been done historically. Usually, the longer it lies, the bolder elites get with misallocations of capital, and the easier it is to come up with good suggestions. You are here (cough, datacenters, cough).
CoL crisis is more so the fact we've built our entire civilization around ratfucking and incentivizing gambling. combined the two essentially guarantees that actually spending $ is bad, you can make far more just playing with it on the stock/futures markets.
especially funny/sad is the multiple tax-breaks we have designed specifically to allow rent-seeking parasites to safely maximize their rents.
That's a pretty singular way of looking at it. Sure, everyone would only get $20k, but there's more to the cost of living crisis than just money.
Billionaires are absolutely a significant part of the cost of living crisis, and an additional result of redistributing their wealth is no more billionaires. This alone would do more for the average person than anything else.
And yet if you took all the residential real estate in the country and redistributed it. Every single person would have enough for a home, $200,000+
The US residential real estate market is over 60 trillion, making the billionaires look poor by comparison.
Its almost like you're being lied to about the billionaires being the problem, when really its boomer house owners that hold the majority of the wealth.
There's more than one contributing factor for the cost of living crisis. Billionaires need to be eliminated, as long as they exist the rich/poor gap will always leave a living (not just cost of living) crisis for the majority. Eliminating billionaires won't fix everything, sure, but it will cut out the cancer that infects the rest of society. The sickness of such wealth accumulation directly contributes, enables, and increases the current state of wealth inequality.
Its almost like you’re being lied to about the billionaires being the problem, when really its boomer house owners that hold the majority of the wealth.
"Boomer house owners" will never redistribute their wealth as long as the concept of billionaires exists. Again, there are many contributing factors. I agree that billionaires are not the problem, but they certainly are a problem, a problem that needs eliminating for the betterment of society.
The real question is how.
Does any business that becomes successful just immediately turn itself over to the government to be sold off to small investors?
Because the top billionaires today all have almost all their value in single companies that they either started directly or built up themselves.
Combination of 95% personal tax rate over x amount, say 10 million, and if any company is deemed important enough to be necessary to run the country/society (airlines, power companies, telecom, banks, grocery, apparently AI garbage), should those companies require gov't subsidies or bailouts they immediately become nationalised. No bailouts for private companies.
So elon is completely untouched because none of his companies are vital and he has no "income" because it's all capital appreciation?
Jeff bezos also untouched....
This is the kind of stupid knee jerk thinking that makes all of this discussion irrelevant.
You don't even know how to reach the goal you want, you just feel like it should be something.
Well yeah, it should be something. I'm no economist, why are you acting like it's on me to figure out? I'll leave the how up to people much smarter than me. The fact is the system as it is is incredibly predatory on the majority, and billionaires are absolutely a big part of why. They need to be eliminated, I don't really care how.
I am in fact educated in economics, and smarter people than you disagree on taxing billionaires like that.
That's what you aren't getting.
What about the glad handing and lobbying oligarchs? Did you conveniently forget about those?
Plenty of non-billionaires play that game.
And even if you removed billionaires, corporations would continue exist and keep spending on politicians anyways.
Getting rid of billionaires doesn't fix any of that.
Changing the rules around finances in politics does.
We need to remove billionaires and corporations influence on politics.
The problem is the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, so that sounds fine to me if the your hypothetical came true and we all gained $20,000. And that's ignoring all the other positive externalities that may occur with this redistribution of wealth, such as societal change.
$20,000 would go a long way for a lot of people, too. So yes, I do like to hear it. Very much indeed.
How dare you be reasonable!?
