[nr2x]

Many people have more than a billion, and I can't really think of any sort of luxury you get with 10 billion you can't easily have with 1B. Above the 1B mark you are solely holding wealth to further manipulation of macro-level power structures to your advantage. UBI is a means to forcibly redistribute anything above a certain "unlimited life of luxury" threshold to keep it below oligarchy.

Also, I want fun, cool, tech and if the masses are being put out of work by fun, cool, tech we will have problems, and thereby see far less fun, cool, tech.

[nradov]

There are under 3000 billionaires worldwide. In order to generate enough revenue for any sort of meaningful UBI the government would have to raise taxes on more than just billionaires.

[colechristensen]

Many of the 1B+ people out there aren’t in it for the cash but the B comes from valuation of things that they own, those things usually being big chunks of corporations, and what they own isn’t stuff but power and influence in that entity.

You do away with those people and that power leaving gl everything else the same, what you are doing is giving more power to the other existing social structures and ensuring no single person outside them can check their power.

So? More outsized government official power and more power to faceless corporations no longer under individual control but an entity up for its own best interests at the whim of a complex social structure bound by law to do the best for that entity which often ends up very bad for the interests of individual freedom.

You want to take away multibillionaires you have to start with structural changes to prevent mergers and pseudomonopolies, you need ten companies fighting for what two or three have now.

If you don’t you end up further encouraging next quarter profitability targets and megacorp best interests.

in other words there is probably something to fix, but you can’t just target a few of the symptoms or trying to make things better you drive us further into dystopia

[ralph84]

These ideas always start out targeting the “rich”, then end up falling squarely on the middle class who can’t afford tax advisors.

[zozbot234]

Wealth is not income; one is a stock, the other is a flow. This is not even Econ 101, it's grade-school level knowledge. You can't have a policy of draining "wealth" to fund an income subsidy without very severe side effects.

[andyana]

You don't need to ridicule. Can you explain why such a policy doesn't work? I must have skipped that day at school.

[zozbot234]

There was no intent to ridicule. The answer is that the policy is (1) unsustainable, not unlike a Ponzi scheme, and also (2) even prior to its inevitable collapse, such a policy distorts investment choices and thus makes society as a whole increasingly poorer. Note that there are similar policies that can be more sensible. For example, you can tax wealth and use the proceeds to gradually pay off some of the national debt. (Note that even these policies are typically only resorted to during emergencies, such as war.)

[andyana]

Its not like a Ponzi scheme, though. Nobody is getting rich from such a policy.

[rad_gruchalski]

> Many people have more than a billion

Yes, exactly 2755. I’m having two and a half men flashbacks.