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Why's this downvoted?

• aaron-santos 6y ago
  The poster confuses billionaires with 1%. Maybe this was a casual comment, but when we're in this part of the wealth distribution tiny changes in percents reflect enormous changes in wealth. In fact billionaires are the top ~0.000625% of households w.r.t wealth(800/128M households*100). Whereas the threshold for 1% of wealth is ~$11M. Something to ask oneself is how much wealth is held by the 1% who are also not billionaires and how many days of funding the government does this represent?
  • maerF0x0 6y ago
    Yes this is a good point. As i recall (more than a decade ago!) the wealth taxes suggested during occupy wallstreet were mostly proposed for "Billionaires" and even "0.1%" was thrown around. It amplifies my point though if we go up to a number that seems unfathomable (such as billionaire) the slice of people is so minuscule that even 100% taxation (effective, not marginal) dissipates into nearly effectively nothing per person across the remainder. For example America's billionaires have about $4T of wealth[1]. If we taxed 100% of it out of their hands we'd only get 2-3 of the recent bailout bills passed, and there would be approximately 0 billionaires to tax the next time around. [1]: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/issue/net-worth-u-s-billionaires-soared-1-trillion-total-4-trillion-since-pandemic-began/ https://americansfortaxfairness.org/issue/net-worth-u-s-bill...