[minikites]

Imagine if we taxed the enormous wealth of billionaires and used it for the good of many in society instead of inflating the ego of a single person. Our society is sick and I don't think people will stand for this level of inequality much longer.

[missedthecue]

World governments spent $35 trillion last year. That's annual spend. Why do people on the internet act like all of our social ails could be resolved if only we could tax Bezos and spend $35.01 trillion instead?

It's seems governments have a budgeting problem, not a funding problem.

[ithkuil]

Inequality is a strong psychological issue. No amount of correct math and logic can offset that. We're wired to despise those who have more than others, especially when others are struggling and especially when those who have show off.

You can point out objective things like that contemporary billionaires are nothing like super-rich monarchy or noblemen in the past, who literally didn't have to work one day of their lives and could dispose of people around them as they pleased, quite literally. There was no me too, no rape allegations, they just did whatever they pleased with minimal consequences.

You can point out all that, but it's irrelevant. Many humans just don't tolerate "rich entitled jerks who show off". Other humans don't tolerate other kind behaviours; humanity is clearly not a uniform bunch.

[crummybowley]

I think math can help.

Even if we stole 10B from Bezos and gave it out equally to every US citizen... Its ~$30. Is this life changing for anybody in the US? If so what percent. Most beggars on the street clear more than $30 a day, some make $30 a hour!

So yeah, common core has failed us, and the inability to understand numbers is a problem.

I do this nearly every time somebody is upset somebody else has money. One time it was some Walmart executive. They got some multi million dollar bonus. I did the math, it would have been something like 2.27 a week more for all the employees.

Edit:

But yet we have folks still going around on twitter saying he could give everybody a million (some even a billion) and still have money left over.

[yellowapple]

> Even if we stole 10B from Bezos and gave it out equally to every US citizen... Its ~$30.

I mean, obviously it's gonna look small if we fixate on Bezos specifically. If we "stole" a flat $1B from every American billionaire and paid it out equally to every US citizen, that stimulus jumps up to $1,996.70. If we "stole" all the money from every billionaire, that'd jump up further to $12,569.61.

We can go further. The top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion. If we "stole" all of that, the resulting stimulus would be a comfy $102,842.28.

> I did the math, it would have been something like 2.27 a week more for all the employees.

$122.58/year could very well make a considerable difference to someone barely scraping by. And again, you're fixating on one Walmart executive; what about the other executives who likely received similar bonuses? VPs? Middle managers?

[crummybowley]

lol.

If you made the top %1 liquidate all their assets to give to others everything would stop working. You would create more problems than ever.

Somebody would have to buy the assets, and because we are doing away with anybody who would have the sort of money to buy the assets, you would likely deadlock long before you would get 34 trillion out of the system. Like its mind boggling what you said. Where would this money come from? Other 1%ers who would then have to sale their assets?

Folks, Net Worth is not tangible, and even less tangible if you required a mass amount of folks to liquidate. It would simply drive prices down to a point where they were no longer in the 1% and then our economy would simply pop.

Every major system that moves money (this is what we want) would grind to a halt, and the folks you want to steal money for would simply have no job and have no cash flow.

But beyond that, stealing money assets, or even in this case "net worth" is immoral.

Bezos was a nobody driving a Honda Civic, folks just mad he drives a rocket now.

[yellowapple]

> Somebody would have to buy the assets

Most of those assets fall into two categories:

1. Real estate, which doesn't need to be liquidated to be put under public ownership

2. Corporate shares, which don't need to be liquidated to be put under public ownership

The thought experiment around liquidating that wealth and cutting everyone a check was purely a response to your own hypothetical of liquidating a fraction of one billionaire's wealth and cutting everyone a check. Specifically, it was to point out that your "argument" misses the bigger picture around how much wealth is locked up in the accounts of even just billionaires, let alone millionaires.

> But beyond that, stealing money assets, or even in this case "net worth" is immoral.

Unless the wealthy do it through rent, lobbying, labor exploitation (including union busting), and monopolization, then it's all hunky-dory, right?

That's why I put "steal" in scare quotes. Retaking wealth already stolen from the working class is the precise opposite of theft, yet here you and others are, white-knighting for the poor millionaires.

Something's gotta give, or else the outcome will inevitably be far worse for that 1% than merely having to liquidate their assets.

[brokenmachine]

>But beyond that, stealing money assets, or even in this case "net worth" is immoral.

100% agree, so lets tax the fucker, and all the other fuckers.

[inglor_cz]

So, you just gave the economy a one-time spending boost while "destroying the billionaires as a class". Let us also say that this action had no effect on purchasing power of the dollar, which is now mostly based on willingness of the rest of the world to trust it. (There are countries where 100 000 units of local currency won't buy you a nice dinner, but the US has never gone down this road, so most Americans just do not take this risk into account when modeling revolutionary changes.)

A year passes. Now what? No more billionaires to fleece, but the population demands some more, because spending windfall money is such a fun. So the next move is to fleece the millionaires...

Already the Ancient Greeks knew quite a lot about populist rule and its consequences. And the 20th century definitely tried it out in much larger dimensions, to much worse outcomes.

[missedthecue]

I understand what you're saying, but I don't see why it should be an excuse. After all, xenophobia and racism are natural human behaviours as well, (and not just human behaviour) but they shouldn't be tolerated, and we shouldn't promote policies that encourage them.

[ithkuil]

it's not an excuse; as with xenophobia and racism, these are phenomena which have to be understood and not dismissed. You cannot solve racism by just stating "races don't exist, here's the DNA evidence etc etc" perhaps implying that you're just an ignorant redneck if you don't understand science. Even if said science is solid, some people will not be moved by it because their bias doesn't stem from a misunderstanding of science (or math) but from somewhere deeper, and you don't have to excuse it in order to understanding and use that understanding to counter it.

[nullsense]

>humanity is clearly not a uniform bunch

Humanity is not normal, but it is normally distributed!

[alexanderdmitri]

Assuming the figure is well-sourced, and given the time since the spending occurred, I'd be interested to know where this $35 trillion has ended up (not necessarily just who it directly went to, but where it's parked now and how it got there).

I know that's a tall order, but I think governments should be accountable to how they've invested their citizen's money and how those investments are doing.

Also should be pointed out many countries greatly expanded their deficit as part of Covid measures.

[missedthecue]

I got the figure off of Wikipedia. They list every nation's government expenditures and the total sum is at the bottom of the table. $35.6 trillion. You're correct that covid stimulus had ballooned this figure, but even in "normal" years, it is still between $25 and $30 trillion which doesn't materially change the thrust of my argument.

I'm not even saying Bezos is appropriately taxed. I don't really care how high his tax bill is, but my main point is that the existence of world hunger and poverty isn't his fault even though many people online blame him for it, and secondly, taxing him at 100% wouldn't seem to solve the problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governm...

[alexanderdmitri]

I agree w/everything you're saying. I'm questioning the ethics of raising taxes if the extra money gets mismanaged and ends up wasted or doubled back to the wealthiest individuals. The people who would be managing this money are the exact ones whose legislation has created this environment.

Raising the deficit and inflating the currency for blind and reckless cash give-aways (imo), only makes it worse and all the more reprehensible and should have everyone questioning why we're not overthrowing the existing parties by rallying around new ones and collectively agreeing to stop voting Dem or Rep altogether. Because if we traced the government (tax) money spent over the past year to where it is now, I bet we'd see it directly widening the wealth gap no matter the party or rhetoric used while misappropriating it.

Anyway, I think the real solutions (to hunger, education, healthcare, &c) would involve breaking down the issues causing the inequality and really working to solve them one by one in good faith with a common vision. Small groups of people can achieve this. It's unfortunate that the idea of that happening on the scale we're discussing is laughably absurd.

[Traster]

I don't think it's productive to talk about tax. Our economy should be designed in a way that workers capture a good proportion of their work. The problem at the moment is that when there are successful companies, a handful of investors and senior management capture practically all the gains. Amazon is an incredible company, and it's even more incredible that practically no one working at Amazon benefits from that.

Just letting that system persist and then hamfistedly grabbing the gains at the end and redistributing them is difficult for a huge number of reasons including both fairness and regulatory capture.

[toomuchtodo]

What you describe is equity distribution. It is a tax, but simply implemented as inherent ownership through citizenship or similar constraints.

https://blog.samaltman.com/american-equity

[Traster]

I think shared equity is one way of solving that problem, but if you look at other social democracies, regulatory regimes that favour workers and collective action can have similar effects.

[toomuchtodo]

I would agree. There is no silver bullet, but various levers that can be actuated in a manner that arrives at the desired socioeconomic equilibrium.

[heliodor]

People complain about the the many ways Amazon is crossing moral lines. Instead of asking to tax rich people, how about fixing the inadequacies of the government so that Amazon can't transgress moral lines as often and make as much profit?

Saying "tax the rich" as a fix to a problem shows a lack of critical thought.

[brokenmachine]

>I don't think people will stand for this level of inequality much longer.

At the moment it seems like every government in the world is being held hostage by the obscenely rich, while workers with multiple jobs are struggling to even afford rent.

Please give me some hope and tell me how the change might come about? What signs have you seen out there that things are changing?

Because everything I see is just more and more wealth inequality, expanding year over year. Meanwhile the media, also in the obscenely rich's pocket, reports on these billionaire space assholes as if they've achieved something worthwhile, which is sickening to me.