| Ray Dalio exactly answers your first question in this video(45m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8 The short answer is war, likely with China. The long answer is civil unrest. Billionaires who feel threatened by people who want to re-distribute wealth (tax the wealthy), use their wealth to put "strongmen" into power to defend their interest. Strongmen destroy innovation which weakens the military, which invites enemies to challenge your strength. If the world feels that the value of your currency is under threat (and if you are at risk of losing a war, it is under threat), you lose reserve currency status, which means all of a sudden you can no longer import the goods your economy needs to function, then your economy and/or currency collapses. > What should the layperson (US & non-US residents) do to safeguard against it? The only way out of this is to produce more value than we spend and to tax billionaires (not for the money, but to decrease their ability to buy government influence). We are pretty doomed until our aristocracy decides to start being responsible instead of greedy, which is unlikely. You could also move to New Zealand. That's the plan that many of our greedy billionaires have when the consequences of their greed are fully realized... Just like a "senior" engineer writing really complex code might leave to another company when it's time to pay the maintenance cost for that complexity. |
Might work for a short while, but in NZ we have our own deficit problem partly due to an aging population and when a lefty government is in they will want to take your wealth away.
And be careful what you wish for: a lot of people wanting the wealthy to be taxed seem to forget how wealthy they are compared to the majority of the world.
Governments tell you to save for your retirement but then want to take your savings (whether you are ultra-wealthy or just a careful saver)