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If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and dist

If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500. In the US - Billionaires have $1.3T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ That's ~$3880 per US person. Globally, there's a lot more people, and countries aren't as rich as the US. Even if you count their entire change in net wealth in good years as income - their best year ever - during the pandemic - Billionaire wealth increased $240B. That's not even $900 per person in the US. Median salary was almost $43k: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Census%20Bureau%20estimated,full%2Dtime%2C%20year%20round https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_Unite.... That's ~2%. This is counting billionaire income and realized and unrealized capital gains - cherry picked to the best year ever. It's a massive overstatement. Even if you cherry pick the best 11-year bull run ever - from 2010-2021 - Billionaire wealth increased $2.57T. That's $697 per year per person. Barely a 1.5% increase. Even if you try to get exclusionary - let's only include workers - not children, retirees, or the disabled or the poor - you get ~$1400 per person per year - a ~3.3% increase. And it's a ridiculous idea. If you took all their capital gains starting in 2010 - they wouldn't have compounded. Most of the gains wouldn't have occurred. You'd end up with an even smaller number less than 1% for everyone, less than 2% for workers. It's not the reason people who work at Google and Intel aren't mega rich. And even in the US, Billionaires are definitely not the reason that people who work minimum wage or don't work at all are poor. Billionaires are concentrated disproportionately in rich places like the US and the EU. Globally the true picture disputes this article much more. There's 5x more people on the planet than in just the US and the EU - but the billionaires there have almost 70% of billionaire wealth. Do billionaires have enough money that it's creating systematic problems and we should do something about it? That's a different question. They don't have so much money that they're causing everyone else to be poor.

vladharbuz 4y ago
This is true, but I have a slightly different question to ask. Imagine you work at, say, a game development company, along with 99 other developers. The only other member of the company is a CEO and shareholder, who decides how much to keep for himself and how much to pay the employees, but, importantly, does none of the actual work himself. Let's say the game is wildly successful and the employees are collectively paid 60% of the profit, with the remaining 40% going to the sole shareholder. This is not an uncommon arrangement, and it is allowed and encouraged, culturally and legally. Morally and practically speaking, not legally speaking, does this not amount to wage theft?
- interfaced 4y ago
  If the game fails are those 99 employees ready to give their salary back? I imagine many places would allow their employees to buy options or stock.
  - vladharbuz 4y ago
    Great question! Maybe they are, maybe they're not, and you're right that this should influence how the company is structured. But our current system goes quite a bit past simply "solving" this problem with investor shareholders, because that sole shareholder is entitled to any future profits the company makes, regardless of whether it makes a completely different game, and regardless of the massive contributions future employees may have made in the meantime. What do you think? I discuss this in more detail in this essay: https://vladh.net/alternatives-to-wage-labour https://vladh.net/alternatives-to-wage-labour
    - matwood 4y ago
      It's the same argument if someone should take options in lieu of salary in a startup, and the answer is almost always no. Options tend to end up worthless as most startups fail. IMO, a better question is to ask what allowed the single investor to become an investor to begin with. The nature of investing means the investor must be able to also lose all their capital. What can we do as a society to make easier for the 99 other employees to 'invest'. For me this means having social safety nets like healthcare and UBI so that people can take less salary or risk what little they have in a venture like you originally described.
      - interfaced 4y ago
        The challenge is that the company you work for is almost never the best investment on its own. That's why retirement funds are diversified. I would worry about giving everyone the ability to bet 99% of their wealth on a single company. The reason there are investors is because they've previously invested their money in a risk appropriate way. Now there's a whole argument around intergenerational family wealth which skews everyone's starting point, but it's probably better than concentrating that wealth in a single point of failure (the state who gives you UBI). Probably the right approach to wealth inequality is more tax on non-beneficial uses of money(yachts), and more incentives for mutually beneficial pursuits (cheaper energy).
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
The thought that 'billionaires' are the problem is missing the point. There are folks worth the better part of $1T. They are a bigger part of the problem, by several orders of magnitude. The systematic problems are, that the system is rigged so a tiny few skim from everything, leaving the absolute minimum they can get away with for the rest of us.
- lr4444lr 4y ago
  What's "everything"? Wealth isn't fixed.
- sparrish 4y ago
  So stop giving the Trillionaires your money. They have that trillion because we buy things from them... from Amazon, from Tesla, etc. You don't like those things exist? Stop exchanging your money for their goods/services.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    That is a problem when Amazon buys up everything that moves and integrates it into their product line. At some point it becomes impossible to avoid. Most of the snack and soft drink industry is owned by like what, 3 megacorps? You don't like existing? Just die. Nobody's stopping you.
    - saiya-jin 4y ago
      You really picked up the worst possible examples. Solution #1 - don't buy properly crap food that is literally slowly killing you and making/keeping you addicted, while you pay the money to said corporations. A generally smart move. Yes they also own normal food(TM) brands, but here in Europe there are tons of alternatives on shelves, ie 1 cocoa powder from nestle, other 5 from small often fair trade producers. Maybe in US Amazon owns everything, although I doubt it. But US is what, 5% of the world? In most of the world, Amazon is OK but nothing big. In Switzerland for example, there is no Amazon and its non-trivial to order anything from other countries, many sellers simply do not ship here. Stuff comes via Swiss post/small companies, from local eshops. So yeah not giving much to Bezos even if I wanted to. Now what did I solve though? Nothing apart from good feeling (and paying more for postal serviecs and eating more healthily)
VictorPath 4y ago
This is a strawman argument. It is a diversion. It is not about billionaires and their wealth. It is about the expropriation of a worker's surplus labor time by the heirs. It is about control of all the worker's work time (surplus and non-surplus) by the heirs.
croon 4y ago
> In the US - Billionaires have $1.4T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ Correction: It says 4.2T on the site you linked when I clicked through to the google doc [0]. [0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q1iNtDEDsm_tMQhRSmE97H3NpiK5096lS1n_jQFDUw4/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q1iNtDEDsm_tMQhRSmE9...
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Thanks. That was $1.3T they made in the best 11-month period (which they have since lost $622B). They had $4.2T at their all-time high, and are now at $3.6T.
thesausageking 4y ago
This is misunderstanding how billionaires get their wealth. It's mainly from investments and equity, not income. Share of wealth is a better number to look at. The top 1% now own close to double what they did in 1980: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/top-1-share-of-net-personal-wealth-wid-2018?tab=chart&country=USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/top-1-share-of-net-person... The numbers for 0.1% and 0.001% are even more extreme: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/never-mind-1-percent-lets-talk-about-001-percent https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/never-mind-1-percent-let...
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  I included ALL capital gains - realized and unrealized... Do the math. It's literally division. When you have 335M people in a wealthy nation - that's a large number already. Introduce a small amount of inequality - and the numbers will still be enormous. The US has MASSIVE inequality - the worst in the history of the world - surpassing the Belle Epoch in France before WWI. I'm not pretending the world nor the US is equal. But the inequality is NOT the reason people are poor. And it's not the reason that you're not rich. Is inequality a thing? Yes. Is it causing problems? I think so. I think this is the interesting thing to talk about. Is it the reason you don't have yacht or that we don't live in a utopia where no one has to work? Definitely no. Not worth considering when the smallest amount of math disproves it completely.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    > inequality is NOT the reason people are poor The US has far more poor than other countries with similar or even lower GDP per capita so it must be at least part of the reason many people are poor. Most rich nations produce enough that in principle there need be no genuine poverty (as in, inability to readily access necessities - having to make choices like buying food or obtaining medical care etc.). And one thing nobody's really noted is that a certain amount of poverty itself isn't necessarily a huge problem providing anyone who does find themselves in that situation can readily get out of it. I actually wonder if the world wouldn't be a better place if we all spent some percentage of our lives undergoing a degree of poverty. But financial mobility is at something of an all-time low in the US too as I understand it, meaning a lot of poverty is entrenched and intergenerational.
anm89 4y ago
This has to be downvoted because people aren't writing things like this because they want to do any deep understanding or enact meaningful change, they are doing it because it makes them feel better to complain about how unfair it is.
eternalban 4y ago
> If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500. This is missing the forest for the trees. Immense concentration of wealth affords the power to significantly affect change and mold society. This power in the hands of the few is the actual issue, given that social stratum is strongly correlated with political outlook and mores.
- 3pt14159 4y ago
  Exactly. The vast majority of mom and pop investors don't hold voting shares. They're not connected to the board members. They don't control the corporations their investments are allocated to, other than very tangentially through their ability to exert downward pressure on the stocks. Billionaires are different. They own the controlling shares of a corporation, even to the point where their votes count for more in the case of Facebook. They can take on corporate debt then use that to buy another controlling stake into another corporation. Use that corporations assets for more leverage to take out mortgages, etc. Their ability to then borrow against their own stocks gives them even more working capital without paying any amount of tax while they continue to differ capital gains. I'm not even going into the lobbyists or international tax schemes here. Just the power of layered leverage. I'm not a communist or socialist. I'm usually somewhere near the centre and tilt a bit to the left on most economic issues. I'm not against capital formation. But the economic and social damage that most billionaires exert on people in wealthy societies is a very real thing and it's going to keep getting more severe as computers allow for increasingly more centralization of information and control. "Data is the new oil." And all that. We don't need billionaires (or, soon, trillionaires) to have a well functioning capitalist economy. We could have a ceiling and we could refuse entry families that exceed these limits to our countries. Same thing with open source, etc.
navane 4y ago
You quote sources but you don't seem to use their numbers: US billionaires have 4.18T (not 1.3), divided over 300M gives 14k per person (not 0.5k). You were off by a factor of 28. 14k per person is actually a years worth of minimum wage (7.25x40x50). The average US household is 2.6 ppl, so that would give 36k per household (you know, kids). That is serious money to a lot of people. Another way On top of that, if you include the people worth 100M+ into the pie, the total amount of money goes up a lot, as there are so many more of them. Nevertheless, I agree with your conclusion, just the sheer money they have that others don't is not the problem.
pwinnski 4y ago
The issue is not so much a one-time cash grab, it's that with that concentration of wealth comes a concentration of power that distorts society. Put another way, the primary goal is not to give more money to everybody else, it's to take it away from the few who are abusing the rest of us. It could be set on fire and that would still be a benefit! That would be deflationary and reduce the ability of those people to have an outsized effect on society. BTW, you seem to have misread the site you linked. It says that billionaire wealth grew by $1.3T in 11 months, not that they have $1.3T. It's literally in the first box on the page: "The total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew by $1.3 trillion during the roughly first eleven months of the coronavirus pandemic -- a 44% spike in wealth. This increase in wealth is more than it would cost to send a stimulus check of $3,900 to every one of the roughly 330 million people in America." So that would be a one-time $3,900 check to everyone just for 2020. The second box says "The total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew from $240 billion in 1990 (adjusted for inflation) to $4.18 trillion in March 2021." So you're off by quite a bit, and seem to have misread your source site consistently.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  As an example of the sort of societal distortion I'm talking about, consider Elon Musk, who wanted people to buy his cars rather than take trains, and so lied about a fantastical system of tunnels he would surely build, and... well, the quote is "So the Hyperloop, for example, he admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announced—even though he had no intention of pursuing it—was to try to disrupt the California high-speed rail project and to get in the way of that actually succeeding."[0] That's a recent example of a single person behaving incredibly badly, but a list of people using their wealth to do things like disport beach access, reduce housing options, badly mistreat employees, and so on, it would be endless. 0. https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valleys-transportation-failures-tesla-waymo-bir-1849382788 https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valleys-transportation-failures-...
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    If the California High Speed Rail project was ever going to succeed - it would've went from Los Angeles to San Diego (118 miles almost entirely densely populated). The fact that they planned for it to go from Los Angeles to the Bay (340+ miles almost entirely nothing) is pretty strong evidence that basically everyone involved was only trying to win elections and not really make HSR happen. Los Angeles to San Diego is makes much more sense. Just having a bullet train from the West Side to DTLA to Long Beach to somewhere in OC would've had massively higher ridership and cost less money. Everyone involved just wanted to waste money to win elections (and to no surprise, it worked). I hate Elon as much as anyone. If he even played a small part in this - the much larger blame goes to the politicians.

vladharbuz 4y ago

This is true, but I have a slightly different question to ask. Imagine you work at, say, a game development company, along with 99 other developers. The only other member of the company is a CEO and shareholder, who decides how much to keep for himself and how much to pay the employees, but, importantly, does none of the actual work himself. Let's say the game is wildly successful and the employees are collectively paid 60% of the profit, with the remaining 40% going to the sole shareholder. This is not an uncommon arrangement, and it is allowed and encouraged, culturally and legally. Morally and practically speaking, not legally speaking, does this not amount to wage theft?

interfaced 4y ago
If the game fails are those 99 employees ready to give their salary back? I imagine many places would allow their employees to buy options or stock.
- vladharbuz 4y ago
  Great question! Maybe they are, maybe they're not, and you're right that this should influence how the company is structured. But our current system goes quite a bit past simply "solving" this problem with investor shareholders, because that sole shareholder is entitled to any future profits the company makes, regardless of whether it makes a completely different game, and regardless of the massive contributions future employees may have made in the meantime. What do you think? I discuss this in more detail in this essay: https://vladh.net/alternatives-to-wage-labour https://vladh.net/alternatives-to-wage-labour
  - matwood 4y ago
    It's the same argument if someone should take options in lieu of salary in a startup, and the answer is almost always no. Options tend to end up worthless as most startups fail. IMO, a better question is to ask what allowed the single investor to become an investor to begin with. The nature of investing means the investor must be able to also lose all their capital. What can we do as a society to make easier for the 99 other employees to 'invest'. For me this means having social safety nets like healthcare and UBI so that people can take less salary or risk what little they have in a venture like you originally described.
    - interfaced 4y ago
      The challenge is that the company you work for is almost never the best investment on its own. That's why retirement funds are diversified. I would worry about giving everyone the ability to bet 99% of their wealth on a single company. The reason there are investors is because they've previously invested their money in a risk appropriate way. Now there's a whole argument around intergenerational family wealth which skews everyone's starting point, but it's probably better than concentrating that wealth in a single point of failure (the state who gives you UBI). Probably the right approach to wealth inequality is more tax on non-beneficial uses of money(yachts), and more incentives for mutually beneficial pursuits (cheaper energy).

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

The thought that 'billionaires' are the problem is missing the point. There are folks worth the better part of $1T. They are a bigger part of the problem, by several orders of magnitude. The systematic problems are, that the system is rigged so a tiny few skim from everything, leaving the absolute minimum they can get away with for the rest of us.

lr4444lr 4y ago
What's "everything"? Wealth isn't fixed.
sparrish 4y ago
So stop giving the Trillionaires your money. They have that trillion because we buy things from them... from Amazon, from Tesla, etc. You don't like those things exist? Stop exchanging your money for their goods/services.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  That is a problem when Amazon buys up everything that moves and integrates it into their product line. At some point it becomes impossible to avoid. Most of the snack and soft drink industry is owned by like what, 3 megacorps? You don't like existing? Just die. Nobody's stopping you.
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    You really picked up the worst possible examples. Solution #1 - don't buy properly crap food that is literally slowly killing you and making/keeping you addicted, while you pay the money to said corporations. A generally smart move. Yes they also own normal food(TM) brands, but here in Europe there are tons of alternatives on shelves, ie 1 cocoa powder from nestle, other 5 from small often fair trade producers. Maybe in US Amazon owns everything, although I doubt it. But US is what, 5% of the world? In most of the world, Amazon is OK but nothing big. In Switzerland for example, there is no Amazon and its non-trivial to order anything from other countries, many sellers simply do not ship here. Stuff comes via Swiss post/small companies, from local eshops. So yeah not giving much to Bezos even if I wanted to. Now what did I solve though? Nothing apart from good feeling (and paying more for postal serviecs and eating more healthily)

VictorPath 4y ago

This is a strawman argument. It is a diversion. It is not about billionaires and their wealth. It is about the expropriation of a worker's surplus labor time by the heirs. It is about control of all the worker's work time (surplus and non-surplus) by the heirs.

croon 4y ago

> In the US - Billionaires have $1.4T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ Correction: It says 4.2T on the site you linked when I clicked through to the google doc [0]. [0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q1iNtDEDsm_tMQhRSmE97H3NpiK5096lS1n_jQFDUw4/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q1iNtDEDsm_tMQhRSmE9...

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Thanks. That was $1.3T they made in the best 11-month period (which they have since lost $622B). They had $4.2T at their all-time high, and are now at $3.6T.

thesausageking 4y ago

This is misunderstanding how billionaires get their wealth. It's mainly from investments and equity, not income. Share of wealth is a better number to look at. The top 1% now own close to double what they did in 1980: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/top-1-share-of-net-personal-wealth-wid-2018?tab=chart&country=USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/top-1-share-of-net-person... The numbers for 0.1% and 0.001% are even more extreme: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/never-mind-1-percent-lets-talk-about-001-percent https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/never-mind-1-percent-let...

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
I included ALL capital gains - realized and unrealized... Do the math. It's literally division. When you have 335M people in a wealthy nation - that's a large number already. Introduce a small amount of inequality - and the numbers will still be enormous. The US has MASSIVE inequality - the worst in the history of the world - surpassing the Belle Epoch in France before WWI. I'm not pretending the world nor the US is equal. But the inequality is NOT the reason people are poor. And it's not the reason that you're not rich. Is inequality a thing? Yes. Is it causing problems? I think so. I think this is the interesting thing to talk about. Is it the reason you don't have yacht or that we don't live in a utopia where no one has to work? Definitely no. Not worth considering when the smallest amount of math disproves it completely.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  > inequality is NOT the reason people are poor The US has far more poor than other countries with similar or even lower GDP per capita so it must be at least part of the reason many people are poor. Most rich nations produce enough that in principle there need be no genuine poverty (as in, inability to readily access necessities - having to make choices like buying food or obtaining medical care etc.). And one thing nobody's really noted is that a certain amount of poverty itself isn't necessarily a huge problem providing anyone who does find themselves in that situation can readily get out of it. I actually wonder if the world wouldn't be a better place if we all spent some percentage of our lives undergoing a degree of poverty. But financial mobility is at something of an all-time low in the US too as I understand it, meaning a lot of poverty is entrenched and intergenerational.

anm89 4y ago

This has to be downvoted because people aren't writing things like this because they want to do any deep understanding or enact meaningful change, they are doing it because it makes them feel better to complain about how unfair it is.

eternalban 4y ago

> If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500. This is missing the forest for the trees. Immense concentration of wealth affords the power to significantly affect change and mold society. This power in the hands of the few is the actual issue, given that social stratum is strongly correlated with political outlook and mores.

3pt14159 4y ago
Exactly. The vast majority of mom and pop investors don't hold voting shares. They're not connected to the board members. They don't control the corporations their investments are allocated to, other than very tangentially through their ability to exert downward pressure on the stocks. Billionaires are different. They own the controlling shares of a corporation, even to the point where their votes count for more in the case of Facebook. They can take on corporate debt then use that to buy another controlling stake into another corporation. Use that corporations assets for more leverage to take out mortgages, etc. Their ability to then borrow against their own stocks gives them even more working capital without paying any amount of tax while they continue to differ capital gains. I'm not even going into the lobbyists or international tax schemes here. Just the power of layered leverage. I'm not a communist or socialist. I'm usually somewhere near the centre and tilt a bit to the left on most economic issues. I'm not against capital formation. But the economic and social damage that most billionaires exert on people in wealthy societies is a very real thing and it's going to keep getting more severe as computers allow for increasingly more centralization of information and control. "Data is the new oil." And all that. We don't need billionaires (or, soon, trillionaires) to have a well functioning capitalist economy. We could have a ceiling and we could refuse entry families that exceed these limits to our countries. Same thing with open source, etc.

navane 4y ago

You quote sources but you don't seem to use their numbers: US billionaires have 4.18T (not 1.3), divided over 300M gives 14k per person (not 0.5k). You were off by a factor of 28. 14k per person is actually a years worth of minimum wage (7.25x40x50). The average US household is 2.6 ppl, so that would give 36k per household (you know, kids). That is serious money to a lot of people. Another way On top of that, if you include the people worth 100M+ into the pie, the total amount of money goes up a lot, as there are so many more of them. Nevertheless, I agree with your conclusion, just the sheer money they have that others don't is not the problem.

pwinnski 4y ago

The issue is not so much a one-time cash grab, it's that with that concentration of wealth comes a concentration of power that distorts society. Put another way, the primary goal is not to give more money to everybody else, it's to take it away from the few who are abusing the rest of us. It could be set on fire and that would still be a benefit! That would be deflationary and reduce the ability of those people to have an outsized effect on society. BTW, you seem to have misread the site you linked. It says that billionaire wealth grew by $1.3T in 11 months, not that they have $1.3T. It's literally in the first box on the page: "The total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew by $1.3 trillion during the roughly first eleven months of the coronavirus pandemic -- a 44% spike in wealth. This increase in wealth is more than it would cost to send a stimulus check of $3,900 to every one of the roughly 330 million people in America." So that would be a one-time $3,900 check to everyone just for 2020. The second box says "The total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew from $240 billion in 1990 (adjusted for inflation) to $4.18 trillion in March 2021." So you're off by quite a bit, and seem to have misread your source site consistently.

pwinnski 4y ago
As an example of the sort of societal distortion I'm talking about, consider Elon Musk, who wanted people to buy his cars rather than take trains, and so lied about a fantastical system of tunnels he would surely build, and... well, the quote is "So the Hyperloop, for example, he admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announced—even though he had no intention of pursuing it—was to try to disrupt the California high-speed rail project and to get in the way of that actually succeeding."[0] That's a recent example of a single person behaving incredibly badly, but a list of people using their wealth to do things like disport beach access, reduce housing options, badly mistreat employees, and so on, it would be endless. 0. https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valleys-transportation-failures-tesla-waymo-bir-1849382788 https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valleys-transportation-failures-...
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  If the California High Speed Rail project was ever going to succeed - it would've went from Los Angeles to San Diego (118 miles almost entirely densely populated). The fact that they planned for it to go from Los Angeles to the Bay (340+ miles almost entirely nothing) is pretty strong evidence that basically everyone involved was only trying to win elections and not really make HSR happen. Los Angeles to San Diego is makes much more sense. Just having a bullet train from the West Side to DTLA to Long Beach to somewhere in OC would've had massively higher ridership and cost less money. Everyone involved just wanted to waste money to win elections (and to no surprise, it worked). I hate Elon as much as anyone. If he even played a small part in this - the much larger blame goes to the politicians.