[rco8786]

My friend, nobody is talking about taxing wealth at a rate higher than that wealth grows.

As a random example, Elon Musk was worth roughly $50B 10 years ago, vs about $500B today. That's a $450B gain in wealth, the vast, vast majority of which was untaxed in any way.

We're not talking about taxing $450B from Elon. We're talking about taxing a small percentage of that.

[lupusreal]

> My friend, nobody is talking about taxing wealth at a rate higher than that wealth grows.

Then I don't understand why most of the rhetoric behind this idea focuses on reducing inequality. If Elon Musk was now worth $100B instead of $500B, how does that make any practical difference?

[rco8786]

You don’t think $400B could make a practical difference for people in need?

I’m genuinely confused.

No one is advocating for pure wealth equality or communism. Just making the very obvious assertion that wealth has been concentrating more and more into the hands of a few and that we’re out of balance.

[lupusreal]

$400B compared to the federal budget is negligible. $100B compared to working class people struggling paycheck to paycheck might as well be a trillion. If it's not about knocking Musk down to a mere millionaire, then I genuinely don't get the point.

[rco8786]

400B is like 8% of the federal budget. Or more than $1,000 per citizen. In what world is that negligible?

And again that’s just a number you tossed out for a single person. Literally one single person who would still be worth $100,000,000,000.00. One hundred billion dollars...the amount that Jeff Bezos was worth as the wealthiest person on the planet in 2017, just 8 years ago.

The simple reality is that wealth is more consolidated now than at any point in the US’s history. The wealthy are allowed to amass billions and billions of dollars without paying taxes on it, while the rest of us shoulder the burden.

Something has to change.

[lupusreal]

In the world that you can only get anything remotely that close to that much from Musk once. You cannot seriously plan to fund federal programs like this to any substantial degree, either those programs need to be sustainable after the wealth taxes are spent, or you need to keep dropping the wealth threshold year after year to keep the wealth tax money flowing.

[rco8786]

Oi vey. I used the example number that you gave. My sincerest apologies.

Bluntly, you’re misunderstanding the basic math of a wealth tax.

Consider that we already tax unrealized gains on real estate as an annually paid tax. The suggestion is to do the exact same thing for other types of assets. That’s it. It’s very simple, and we’re not talking about making billionaires poor. Just trying to make it so that people can't go from $1B to $100B net worth and pay no taxes, while the rest of us fork over 25%+ of our measly 6-figure incomes every year.