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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 di

> 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.

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.