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> If we wanted to forcefully distribute the money while leaving the people at the top intact (let's call this "blunt force redistribution") such that the curren

> If we wanted to forcefully distribute the money while leaving the people at the top intact (let's call this "blunt force redistribution") such that the current top 10% has 10% of the wealth, then each person in the bottom 90% would receive $208,000 on average. They would receive assets valued at 208,000$ at current (arguably inflated) prices, most of it not being cash. You might expect the biggest expropriation in US history to be somewhat upsetting to the markets. Now that we've established an upper bound, maybe we can talk about what percentage of that money can realistically be taken and what problems it could actually solve.

uoaei 9y ago
>They would receive assets valued at 208,000$ at current (arguably inflated) prices, most of it not being cash. You might expect the biggest expropriation in US history to be somewhat upsetting to the markets. Technically true, but the path of this redistribution would be in the form of taxation and offered public services, which is extracted purely as cash. According to the Obamacare website, poverty levels are around $11,000 per person, scaling sublinearly with the number of people in a single household. If we use that as a baseline, we'd need to tax the top 10% about 5% more per year and redistribute that in cash or an equivalent value of provided services (education, healthcare, etc.) to create a buffer that effectively nullifies the concept of a poverty level. In reality this would likely be applied more as a progressive tax, so the top earners would be taxed more and more benefits would go to the people who are actually poor.