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by drannex
1040 days ago
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I'll take your "very rich" and primarily include billionaires and the extremely affluent in my following statement: Billionaires shouldn't exist. They shouldn't. We should re-implement proper progressive tax rates (like the US had in the 50s), and ensure that that type of wealth can never happen again. |
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People have this idea that if we could just harvest all of that money and spread it out, the problem would be solved. Fleece the billionaires. So let's run the numbers.
Currently, there are seven hundred fifty-six billionaires in the United States. I'll do 750 for ease of calculation. Let's say they have three billion each (this is wildly overshooting it, there's some power law and they probably average 1.5 billion, since for every Bezos there are likely fifty people at 1.1 billion). What we get is 2.250 trillion dollars.
We could throw that out to each person (say three hundred million people) for a one-time boon of $7,500. That's it, it's gone. Whoosh. A little more than our COVID payments. Nice to have. Or, you could do about two years of our United States budget deficit. Or you could even knock a little over seven percent off of the $30.93 trillion US debt.
My question is: now that you've harvested the billionaires, what do you do next year? What's the follow-up? Be sure to include the knock-on effects of a lot of slightly less wealthy people hustling their money out of the country.
Billionaires are a glittering distraction to the crabs in the bucket. Hauling them down to your level is satisfying in a monkey way. It isn't much of a solution, though.