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It sounds plausible: all the benefits have gone to the rich. So, I set out to see what a world would be like if we "redistributed" all those "benefits". So, s

It sounds plausible: all the benefits have gone to the rich. So, I set out to see what a world would be like if we "redistributed" all those "benefits". So, simply take the entire wealth of every billionaire in the US and divide it by the number of citizens and number of years required to acquire that wealth. It's a relatively simply equation: Billionaire wealth / Citizens / 30 Years = Yearly Redistribution 4T / 300 M/ 30 = 500$ per year (not exactly life changing wealth) So, if you stole every last dollar from every last billionaire in the US and redistributed it for the last 30 years, each person would only get 500$ per year. I have a different theorey. The US and other developed countries have been loosing ever greater amounts of wealth. Wealth per capita has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years. The causes are too numerous to go into, but there are MANY. *https://ips-dc.org/u-s-billionaire-wealth-surges-past-1-trillion-since-beginning-of-pandemic/ https://ips-dc.org/u-s-billionaire-wealth-surges-past-1-tril... At the end of the day, humans want simple solutions to simple problems and the "wealth going to the top" theorey is super easy to understand and super easy to solve. There's only one problem: it's not true. it's debunked now. The real problem of decreasing wealth is much harder to solve and has many causes

mbrameld 4y ago
> it's not true. it's debunked now Where has it been debunked?
dahart 4y ago
> So, if you stole every last dollar from every last billionaire in the US and redistributed it for the last 30 years, each person would only get 500$ per year. Loaded use of the world “stole” there. This is a faulty analysis. It’s well studied and well known, for example, that the top 10% of people income wise have ~70% of the wealth in the US. Similar patterns exist globally. This has been reproduced many ways by many people and squarely contradicts your calculation.
- throw8383833jj 4y ago
  "stole" or redistribute. the math works out the same in the end. the reason I used "stole" is because if you "redistribute" every ounce of someone's wealth, I imagine you might get some push back. You can re-apply this formula to various top N% but you get similar numbers: both for income redistribution and wealth redistribution. The reason all those articles of top 10% have 70% of the wealth seem so impressive is not because the top 10% have so much, it's because the rest of the 90% has so little. and so even a modest amount in the top 10% is much greater than the tiny bit the bottom 90 has.
  - dahart 4y ago
    Let’s frame it differently. If you redistributed all wealth from just the top 1% today to all us citizens, each person would get 40T / 300M = $133K, which would make a real (and massive) difference in most people’s lives. Redistribute the top 10%, and everyone gets $320k in savings. This would be an average of 30x more savings for the bottom half than they’d have otherwise. The biggest problem with your calculation is the arbitrary line of billionaires, which leaves out all the millionaires. The top 1% have wealth exceeding 40T, while the bottom 50% have sum total wealth less than the 4T you used for billionaires. Another problem is dividing by 30, that’s not well justified. Half of all us wealth was gained in the last 10 years. Your calculation implicitly assumes you would redistribute slowly, but since you’re using a hypothetical, why would you do that? Why not redistribute all of it today and see if the sum is meaningful? It doesn’t make sense to redistribute slowly, regardless of how long it took to accumulate. A third problem is leaving out income from the summary, since wealth is savings and the lower class has little. You conclude that $500/year sounds small but glossed over the fact that it represent savings not income, and that it would add up to a lot even in your setup.
    - throw8383833jj 4y ago
      Ok, if you disagree with the number 30 as the number of years needed to acquire that wealth, just use yearly income figures. Assuming 60K is the average. So, top 10% at 173K means 113K more than the median houshold. 113/10 = 11.3K extra. So, redistributing top 10% would mean 11.3K extra for 60K average. It's something but not life changing. Considering that more than 70% of million dollar lotto winner loses almost everything within a few years, I'd say an additional 11K wouldn't help people a huge amount. And, you have to remember, this is an excerise for learning how much wealth is distributed per capita in the top. if you actually instituted anything close to these policies, total, average wages would decrease dramatically as the reduced incentive to earn more prevents people from earning more.
jayd16 4y ago
I would argue it's still a worthy goal if only to redistribute the influence that wealth brings.
nebula8804 4y ago
>The US and other developed countries have been loosing ever greater amounts of wealth. Wealth per capita has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years. The causes are too numerous to go into, but there are MANY. Don't leave us hanging throw8383833jj, where did the wealth go?
- throw8383833jj 4y ago
  The biggest drop in wealth is Shelter and Medical. 50 years ago land was much cheaper. A 300K house (non-land cost) costs 310K (maybe 10k for the land). Whereas today, in states where much job creation happens (i won't name names), a 300K house costs 600K or more. You could say, the previous land owner made all that money and it's true. But, it's just a one time wealth transfer from the latest generation to previous generations of land owners. The problem is, going forward from here, there are no more winners in this game. By, charging vast amounts of money for land that should cost very little, we're simply depriving human being of wealth. Even CA, has more acres than people and yet, even in the country side where there is miles of empty land in every direction, we see houses huddled together, a mere few feet apart like some kind of nazi concentration camp. going forward, this is a game with no winners. the wealth is simply denied. conversely, by denying ourselves this wealth, we can create the wealth out of thin air by allowing the land to be developed OR simply by moving jobs (where jobs go, people follow) to areas where there is sufficient developable land (politically achievable). Also, there's a huge laundry list of regulation, and zoning that impact numerous industries like housing and transportation that make these things more expensive than they need to be and pass those costs onto consumers. Just for comparison, i once, calculated that in my area, it takes roughly 80,000 man hours to afford the cheapest house in my suburban neighborhood in the bay area. And yet, in thailand (Jon Jai a humble farmer with no education and no construction training and youtuber), has demonstrated that he could build a modest home with just 200 man hours! He'll tell you, that despite the fact that he lives in country where economists say his per capita income is more than 20 tiems lower than US, he's easily able to afford a house, 1 acre of land and enough food for his family of six and only works 15 min a day (2 months full time out of the year). too much to explain here, but you can visit his channel on youtube for details. I was blown away. and of course, he has the freedom to do so, because less regulations and zoning to get in the way. Sure, he doesn't have many gadgets or cars and even a rice cooker would be hard to acquire but he has the essentials of life: shelter, food and water in abundance: and that's what freedom is largely about.
confidantlake 4y ago
Stole is pretty loaded language. Also where are you pulling the number 30 from? Seems arbitrary to me. 500 per year for every man women and child for 30 years is a lot of money. That would be equivalent to a one time payment of $60,000 dollars to every family of 4. Sounds like a lot of money to me.
- debdut 4y ago
  If 60K is lot, how about giving each person 15K and stopping all taxes and redistribution from there on?
- throw8383833jj 4y ago
  30 is my estimation as to the number of years it takes for the average billionaire to achieve their wealth. most billionaires are pretty old, so I'd say 30 is conservative. so, 2K per family/year in a country where the median houshold income is 60K, that's about 3.3% of their income.
  - dahart 4y ago
    It’s irrelevant how long it took to accumulate. If you’re hypothetically redistributing wealth, then the hypothetical side assumption should be that it took the same amount of time to accumulate the “redistributed” wealth. You should be comparing saved wealth in the real world to saved wealth in the hypothetical world, not using a strange misleading wealth per year metric.
Enginerrrd 4y ago
>I have a different theorey. The US and other developed countries have been loosing ever greater amounts of wealth. Wealth per capita has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years. The causes are too numerous to go into, but there are MANY. I find this hypothesis very intriguing. I too have found it troubling that the narrative against billionaires doesn't quite seem to line up with the envelope math. That said, I wonder about the optimal parameters of the inevitable pareto distribution of wealth. I think the effect on money velocity and total wealth generation among other things is worth considering. In history, it does seem generally like conditions have been good when inequality is relatively low. (At least within a window of time next to that time.) However, I'm really hoping you could elaborate more on what you're calling an apparent loss of wealth since I'm very much curious. What information is that conclusion based on? Without delving into a description that is TOO laborious, could you give a 100,000ft summary or list of things you think that have contributed to that or where you think the wealth has gone?
- throw8383833jj 4y ago
  as a starting point for figuring out the drop in wealth, I think we should calculate things in terms of number of man hours worked to achieve a given objective: shelter, food, water. Using dollars and CPI numbers is fraught with problems due to problems in their methodologies, which are quite numerous. The most important aspects of wealth are the basic needs of human beings: shelter, food, water and by extension transportation (because it's required to earn "money"), healthcare (because if you have an accident they can come after your shelter), and education (because it's a requirement for earning money"). Now we have a framework for identifying drops in wealth. I think the biggest drops in wealth have occurred in shelter, medical and a little bit in transportation. if you dive into those with the methodology of number of man hours worked to achieve them, you'll see what i'm talking about. Sometimes it's not obvious. Cost per mile in transportation can decrease (progress) and you can still get a decrease in wealth, if for instance the average commute distance increases faster than the drop in cost per mile. Just an example, of where increasing capabilities over time, don't necessarily translate to greater wealth. Generally speaking don't just calculate the increase in capability/man hour but also the amount of capability required to achieve the objective. Growing Govt: over the last 100 years we've seen countries grow govt spend as percent of GDP from low single digits to 40 to 50%. You may be in favor of all this spending but I strongly suspect that the total amount you get back from govt, is less than what went in. example: "this is especially apparent when someone needs to pay 5K for a lawyer, just to apply for medicaid." alot of wealth can be lost in this way. solution: society needs much more efficient means of wealth transfer mechanisms. Hypothesis: exponential Growing human population on a finite planet with finite resources (finite amount of developal land), ore, oil, commodities, will lead to or has led to decreases in wealth which show up as paying more and more for things.
FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
Both can be true: a.) A tiny number of billionaires have reorganized society in ways that cause benefits to accrue to themselves. b.) The net size of those benefits, distributed equally over all people, is tiny. All this means is that people are being used in absurdly inefficient ways, because that benefits whoever is in charge. For example, plantations are arguably like this. They are less productive, per acre, than smallholdings. But they scale: A single owner can make the plantation arbitrarily large. "Who cares if the country grows half as much per acre as it could, if I get to control 10x the acres? That's still 5x the wealth for me!" Surely we in software, home of the Mythical Man Month, know all about this? It doesn't matter if the microserfs are less productive, if you can have all of them to yourself.
tomatotomato37 4y ago
I'm reality it would be even less than that since the wealth of most billionaires is in the form of speculative wealth such as company stock. If tomorrow everyones wealth was liquidated through a magical oracle that could know the true economic value of any given asset you'd find there would be a lot less billionaires in the world
- rendang 4y ago
  "True economic value" will vary depending on how much the owner discounts future vs present value produced by the asset (e.g. dividends or imputed rent)
uejfiweun 4y ago
It's not that I advocate for wealth redistribution, quite the opposite in fact. But I certainly wish that these leaders would just, y'know, RAISE WAGES. Rent is skyrocketing, housing is skyrocketing, medical expenses are skyrocketing, car prices are skyrocketing, and after 40 years of this, it's finally just now that wages are starting to catch up a tiny bit. Meanwhile, CEO pay has risen >30% since the pandemic alone: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2022/05/23/ceo-worker-pay-gap-widens-and-employees-arent-happy-about-it/?sh=2707ef5c142c https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2022/05/23/ceo-worker...
- throw8383833jj 4y ago
  Right, rising wages is what most people demand of politicians. But, there's two ways to get more of what you want: 1) rising wages 2) lowering costs. #1 -> it would be nice but you can only squeeze so much blood from a turnip. #2 has gotten far too little attention and has a lot of potential to do good, if we start pursuing it in a way that increases overall prosperity, not decreasing propsperity
- xmprt 4y ago
  I don't know if raising wages alone will help. Increased wages will just make cost of production more expensive and raise prices or allow landlords to charge more for rent. What's more important is solving housing, transportation, and healthcare issues so people can satisfy those needs cheaply. Build more houses, improve urban planning and public transit, and create national healthcare.
titzer 4y ago
It'd be a lot more effective to redistribute that wealth, first, not over 30 years, and second, not to 100% of the population, but to the bottom income brackets, so the smallest quintile or even decile. So a one-time payout to the bottom 10% would be $150,000. For 20% or 30% of the population, that kind of money could absolutely and instantly lift them out of poverty. Moreover, you needn't take every last cent from these billionaires. Just leave them with a mere $100 million each and they still have more money than they could reasonably spend in a lifetime.
- wincy 4y ago
  Seems immoral to give it to the bottom 10% of people in the US, who are relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the world. Why not give $15,000 each to the 300 million poorest people in the world, or $5000 to the 1 billion poorest?
  - honkler 4y ago
    there are oligarchs in every country, just like the united states. Could drain the swamp and give people back their money.
  - lovich 4y ago
    I see this come up as a gotcha every time redistribution of wealth is ever discussed, but surprisingly the left can be just a nationally minded as anyone else. I’d be concerned with involving those people in the calculation when we’re under the same political body. As long as we’re in separate nation states that’s kind of an in house issue they need to decide on how they want to deal with it
    - Jensson 4y ago
      But the billionaires in USA are international, they "stole" wealth from workers all over the world, your solution to give that to Americans still results in those workers having their labour stolen by Americans. Constantly stealing labour from workers all over the world and giving it to American workers seems just as unethical as giving it to American billionaires, both situations results in a small number of people hording all the wealth. And then if you distribute it fairly among all the workers who actually did the work to amass that wealth, then there is very little left per worker. And you do it so the poorer gets more since they got less initially, then the American workers wont get a single cent since they are all rich and most of the labour is done in China and India.
humbleMouse 4y ago
hnthrowawy 4y ago
your "simple equation" is completely inadequate. When a company improves their efficiency they don't just cut a check "to the billionaires" If it is causing share price increases, every shareholder benefits. Why are you excluding millionaires? > 5,671,005 US households have a net worth of $3 million or more There's another 16T right there, minimum. The companies in S&P 500 hold another 1.5T in cash Presumably there are workers at these companies being rewarded handsomely for these productivity gains, how do you account for that wealth? The housing market in California grew 1.4T last year, now sitting at over 9T total "value". This is just first thoughts for my envelope math. Looking at "billionaires" is overly simplistic

mbrameld 4y ago

> it's not true. it's debunked now Where has it been debunked?

dahart 4y ago

> So, if you stole every last dollar from every last billionaire in the US and redistributed it for the last 30 years, each person would only get 500$ per year. Loaded use of the world “stole” there. This is a faulty analysis. It’s well studied and well known, for example, that the top 10% of people income wise have ~70% of the wealth in the US. Similar patterns exist globally. This has been reproduced many ways by many people and squarely contradicts your calculation.

throw8383833jj 4y ago
"stole" or redistribute. the math works out the same in the end. the reason I used "stole" is because if you "redistribute" every ounce of someone's wealth, I imagine you might get some push back. You can re-apply this formula to various top N% but you get similar numbers: both for income redistribution and wealth redistribution. The reason all those articles of top 10% have 70% of the wealth seem so impressive is not because the top 10% have so much, it's because the rest of the 90% has so little. and so even a modest amount in the top 10% is much greater than the tiny bit the bottom 90 has.
- dahart 4y ago
  Let’s frame it differently. If you redistributed all wealth from just the top 1% today to all us citizens, each person would get 40T / 300M = $133K, which would make a real (and massive) difference in most people’s lives. Redistribute the top 10%, and everyone gets $320k in savings. This would be an average of 30x more savings for the bottom half than they’d have otherwise. The biggest problem with your calculation is the arbitrary line of billionaires, which leaves out all the millionaires. The top 1% have wealth exceeding 40T, while the bottom 50% have sum total wealth less than the 4T you used for billionaires. Another problem is dividing by 30, that’s not well justified. Half of all us wealth was gained in the last 10 years. Your calculation implicitly assumes you would redistribute slowly, but since you’re using a hypothetical, why would you do that? Why not redistribute all of it today and see if the sum is meaningful? It doesn’t make sense to redistribute slowly, regardless of how long it took to accumulate. A third problem is leaving out income from the summary, since wealth is savings and the lower class has little. You conclude that $500/year sounds small but glossed over the fact that it represent savings not income, and that it would add up to a lot even in your setup.
  - throw8383833jj 4y ago
    Ok, if you disagree with the number 30 as the number of years needed to acquire that wealth, just use yearly income figures. Assuming 60K is the average. So, top 10% at 173K means 113K more than the median houshold. 113/10 = 11.3K extra. So, redistributing top 10% would mean 11.3K extra for 60K average. It's something but not life changing. Considering that more than 70% of million dollar lotto winner loses almost everything within a few years, I'd say an additional 11K wouldn't help people a huge amount. And, you have to remember, this is an excerise for learning how much wealth is distributed per capita in the top. if you actually instituted anything close to these policies, total, average wages would decrease dramatically as the reduced incentive to earn more prevents people from earning more.

jayd16 4y ago

I would argue it's still a worthy goal if only to redistribute the influence that wealth brings.

nebula8804 4y ago

>The US and other developed countries have been loosing ever greater amounts of wealth. Wealth per capita has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years. The causes are too numerous to go into, but there are MANY. Don't leave us hanging throw8383833jj, where did the wealth go?

throw8383833jj 4y ago
The biggest drop in wealth is Shelter and Medical. 50 years ago land was much cheaper. A 300K house (non-land cost) costs 310K (maybe 10k for the land). Whereas today, in states where much job creation happens (i won't name names), a 300K house costs 600K or more. You could say, the previous land owner made all that money and it's true. But, it's just a one time wealth transfer from the latest generation to previous generations of land owners. The problem is, going forward from here, there are no more winners in this game. By, charging vast amounts of money for land that should cost very little, we're simply depriving human being of wealth. Even CA, has more acres than people and yet, even in the country side where there is miles of empty land in every direction, we see houses huddled together, a mere few feet apart like some kind of nazi concentration camp. going forward, this is a game with no winners. the wealth is simply denied. conversely, by denying ourselves this wealth, we can create the wealth out of thin air by allowing the land to be developed OR simply by moving jobs (where jobs go, people follow) to areas where there is sufficient developable land (politically achievable). Also, there's a huge laundry list of regulation, and zoning that impact numerous industries like housing and transportation that make these things more expensive than they need to be and pass those costs onto consumers. Just for comparison, i once, calculated that in my area, it takes roughly 80,000 man hours to afford the cheapest house in my suburban neighborhood in the bay area. And yet, in thailand (Jon Jai a humble farmer with no education and no construction training and youtuber), has demonstrated that he could build a modest home with just 200 man hours! He'll tell you, that despite the fact that he lives in country where economists say his per capita income is more than 20 tiems lower than US, he's easily able to afford a house, 1 acre of land and enough food for his family of six and only works 15 min a day (2 months full time out of the year). too much to explain here, but you can visit his channel on youtube for details. I was blown away. and of course, he has the freedom to do so, because less regulations and zoning to get in the way. Sure, he doesn't have many gadgets or cars and even a rice cooker would be hard to acquire but he has the essentials of life: shelter, food and water in abundance: and that's what freedom is largely about.

confidantlake 4y ago

Stole is pretty loaded language. Also where are you pulling the number 30 from? Seems arbitrary to me. 500 per year for every man women and child for 30 years is a lot of money. That would be equivalent to a one time payment of $60,000 dollars to every family of 4. Sounds like a lot of money to me.

debdut 4y ago
If 60K is lot, how about giving each person 15K and stopping all taxes and redistribution from there on?
throw8383833jj 4y ago
30 is my estimation as to the number of years it takes for the average billionaire to achieve their wealth. most billionaires are pretty old, so I'd say 30 is conservative. so, 2K per family/year in a country where the median houshold income is 60K, that's about 3.3% of their income.
- dahart 4y ago
  It’s irrelevant how long it took to accumulate. If you’re hypothetically redistributing wealth, then the hypothetical side assumption should be that it took the same amount of time to accumulate the “redistributed” wealth. You should be comparing saved wealth in the real world to saved wealth in the hypothetical world, not using a strange misleading wealth per year metric.

Enginerrrd 4y ago

>I have a different theorey. The US and other developed countries have been loosing ever greater amounts of wealth. Wealth per capita has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years. The causes are too numerous to go into, but there are MANY. I find this hypothesis very intriguing. I too have found it troubling that the narrative against billionaires doesn't quite seem to line up with the envelope math. That said, I wonder about the optimal parameters of the inevitable pareto distribution of wealth. I think the effect on money velocity and total wealth generation among other things is worth considering. In history, it does seem generally like conditions have been good when inequality is relatively low. (At least within a window of time next to that time.) However, I'm really hoping you could elaborate more on what you're calling an apparent loss of wealth since I'm very much curious. What information is that conclusion based on? Without delving into a description that is TOO laborious, could you give a 100,000ft summary or list of things you think that have contributed to that or where you think the wealth has gone?

throw8383833jj 4y ago
as a starting point for figuring out the drop in wealth, I think we should calculate things in terms of number of man hours worked to achieve a given objective: shelter, food, water. Using dollars and CPI numbers is fraught with problems due to problems in their methodologies, which are quite numerous. The most important aspects of wealth are the basic needs of human beings: shelter, food, water and by extension transportation (because it's required to earn "money"), healthcare (because if you have an accident they can come after your shelter), and education (because it's a requirement for earning money"). Now we have a framework for identifying drops in wealth. I think the biggest drops in wealth have occurred in shelter, medical and a little bit in transportation. if you dive into those with the methodology of number of man hours worked to achieve them, you'll see what i'm talking about. Sometimes it's not obvious. Cost per mile in transportation can decrease (progress) and you can still get a decrease in wealth, if for instance the average commute distance increases faster than the drop in cost per mile. Just an example, of where increasing capabilities over time, don't necessarily translate to greater wealth. Generally speaking don't just calculate the increase in capability/man hour but also the amount of capability required to achieve the objective. Growing Govt: over the last 100 years we've seen countries grow govt spend as percent of GDP from low single digits to 40 to 50%. You may be in favor of all this spending but I strongly suspect that the total amount you get back from govt, is less than what went in. example: "this is especially apparent when someone needs to pay 5K for a lawyer, just to apply for medicaid." alot of wealth can be lost in this way. solution: society needs much more efficient means of wealth transfer mechanisms. Hypothesis: exponential Growing human population on a finite planet with finite resources (finite amount of developal land), ore, oil, commodities, will lead to or has led to decreases in wealth which show up as paying more and more for things.

FooBarBizBazz 4y ago

Both can be true: a.) A tiny number of billionaires have reorganized society in ways that cause benefits to accrue to themselves. b.) The net size of those benefits, distributed equally over all people, is tiny. All this means is that people are being used in absurdly inefficient ways, because that benefits whoever is in charge. For example, plantations are arguably like this. They are less productive, per acre, than smallholdings. But they scale: A single owner can make the plantation arbitrarily large. "Who cares if the country grows half as much per acre as it could, if I get to control 10x the acres? That's still 5x the wealth for me!" Surely we in software, home of the Mythical Man Month, know all about this? It doesn't matter if the microserfs are less productive, if you can have all of them to yourself.

tomatotomato37 4y ago

I'm reality it would be even less than that since the wealth of most billionaires is in the form of speculative wealth such as company stock. If tomorrow everyones wealth was liquidated through a magical oracle that could know the true economic value of any given asset you'd find there would be a lot less billionaires in the world

rendang 4y ago
"True economic value" will vary depending on how much the owner discounts future vs present value produced by the asset (e.g. dividends or imputed rent)

uejfiweun 4y ago

It's not that I advocate for wealth redistribution, quite the opposite in fact. But I certainly wish that these leaders would just, y'know, RAISE WAGES. Rent is skyrocketing, housing is skyrocketing, medical expenses are skyrocketing, car prices are skyrocketing, and after 40 years of this, it's finally just now that wages are starting to catch up a tiny bit. Meanwhile, CEO pay has risen >30% since the pandemic alone: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2022/05/23/ceo-worker-pay-gap-widens-and-employees-arent-happy-about-it/?sh=2707ef5c142c https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2022/05/23/ceo-worker...

throw8383833jj 4y ago
Right, rising wages is what most people demand of politicians. But, there's two ways to get more of what you want: 1) rising wages 2) lowering costs. #1 -> it would be nice but you can only squeeze so much blood from a turnip. #2 has gotten far too little attention and has a lot of potential to do good, if we start pursuing it in a way that increases overall prosperity, not decreasing propsperity
xmprt 4y ago
I don't know if raising wages alone will help. Increased wages will just make cost of production more expensive and raise prices or allow landlords to charge more for rent. What's more important is solving housing, transportation, and healthcare issues so people can satisfy those needs cheaply. Build more houses, improve urban planning and public transit, and create national healthcare.

titzer 4y ago

It'd be a lot more effective to redistribute that wealth, first, not over 30 years, and second, not to 100% of the population, but to the bottom income brackets, so the smallest quintile or even decile. So a one-time payout to the bottom 10% would be $150,000. For 20% or 30% of the population, that kind of money could absolutely and instantly lift them out of poverty. Moreover, you needn't take every last cent from these billionaires. Just leave them with a mere $100 million each and they still have more money than they could reasonably spend in a lifetime.

wincy 4y ago
Seems immoral to give it to the bottom 10% of people in the US, who are relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the world. Why not give $15,000 each to the 300 million poorest people in the world, or $5000 to the 1 billion poorest?
- honkler 4y ago
  there are oligarchs in every country, just like the united states. Could drain the swamp and give people back their money.
- lovich 4y ago
  I see this come up as a gotcha every time redistribution of wealth is ever discussed, but surprisingly the left can be just a nationally minded as anyone else. I’d be concerned with involving those people in the calculation when we’re under the same political body. As long as we’re in separate nation states that’s kind of an in house issue they need to decide on how they want to deal with it
  - Jensson 4y ago
    But the billionaires in USA are international, they "stole" wealth from workers all over the world, your solution to give that to Americans still results in those workers having their labour stolen by Americans. Constantly stealing labour from workers all over the world and giving it to American workers seems just as unethical as giving it to American billionaires, both situations results in a small number of people hording all the wealth. And then if you distribute it fairly among all the workers who actually did the work to amass that wealth, then there is very little left per worker. And you do it so the poorer gets more since they got less initially, then the American workers wont get a single cent since they are all rich and most of the labour is done in China and India.

humbleMouse 4y ago

hnthrowawy 4y ago

your "simple equation" is completely inadequate. When a company improves their efficiency they don't just cut a check "to the billionaires" If it is causing share price increases, every shareholder benefits. Why are you excluding millionaires? > 5,671,005 US households have a net worth of $3 million or more There's another 16T right there, minimum. The companies in S&P 500 hold another 1.5T in cash Presumably there are workers at these companies being rewarded handsomely for these productivity gains, how do you account for that wealth? The housing market in California grew 1.4T last year, now sitting at over 9T total "value". This is just first thoughts for my envelope math. Looking at "billionaires" is overly simplistic