18 ms·

Five richest men double their money as poorest get poorer

182 points by ciconia 3y ago

ciconia 3y ago
The Oxfam report can be found here: https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/inequality-inc-how-corporate-power-divides-our-world-and-the-need-for-a-new-era-621583/ https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/inequality-inc-h...
lnxg33k1 3y ago
Think about the fact that in italy we still have people saying that neoliberalism is the way to go, that we need to lower taxes and workers rights because wealth will trickle down, that we need a modern economic framework to facilitate investment
- dariosalvi78 3y ago
  I don't know why you are being downvoted, but, for what it is worth, neoliberal policies are at the core of the European Union and the West in general. Everybody is aware of their failure, at least since 2007/2008, though nobody is able to propose any alternative, except populistic fluff...
  - lnxg33k1 3y ago
    I liked Bernie economic ideas about redistribution of economic power, didn’t seem populistic, and if things change in US they can change worldwide
    - dariosalvi78 3y ago
      In US politics, I like also many of the proposals from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. There are some radical-enough but still doable proposals, but what is fashionable everywhere nowadays is to just throw the blame all problems to "the foreigner" or "the immigrant". I really don't see any way out of the current mess (climate change above all) rather than a world war. I hope I'm wrong.
sorenjan 3y ago
Looking at the top 10 list it's dominated by American tech billionaires. Weirdly Steve Ballmer is #10, even though he was "only" CEO of Microsoft, not the founder. So much for the argument that the wealth comes from innovation and risk taking that I sometimes hear. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/article/the-top-ten-richest-people-in-the-world/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/article/the-to...
- the-rc 3y ago
  We can dunk on Ballmer all we want, but he was an early employee and he did negotiate for 10% of equity and profits, at a time when software was not an industry. If that's not taking risks...
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Also he kept his bids on casino table... Not like it was ever going to go to zero... But still, he was taking a risk.
TrackerFF 3y ago
I don't know what the specific solution is, but it is a polarizing topic. I've read a lot of conservative opinions on this, from scholars to your average forum users, and have spoken with people IRL about this topic - and one thing that pops up again and again, is that many conservatives don't see wealth inequality as a problem. The main argument is that the poor today have it better than N years ago, so the system must be working. And taxing the rich just stems from jealousy. Sprinkled in with just-world hypothesis. EDIT: My observation is that poor people have easier access to debt today, compared to 30+ year ago. When I grew up - if you were broke, you were broke. You called family or friends, went to the pawn shop, or whatever - banks wouldn't issue you a credit card. When I went to college, banks were literally throwing credit cards at everyone and their dog. I had zero income, but still got a CC with $5k limit. Never actually used it, but they it took 2 minutes to fill out the form (at the airport), and I got one in the mail a couple of weeks later. If it was that easy to get a CC, then I guess poor people must have managed to bankroll themselves through bad times, as long as they managed to meet the minimum payments, or get new cards to cover the old ones. Just an anecdote, of course.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  The problem with the poor surviving entirely on debt is that it creates the illusion of stability, so if a stranger looks at their life from the outside they go 'well, Bob's doing fine, he has a car and an apartment and can eat 2-3 times a day.' But then Bob gets sick just enough exactly once, and he gets fired because his employer isn't legally mandated to give him enough sick days or keep him around, and then he gets evicted because he has no savings, and then his car gets repossessed because he can't make the payments without a job, and then he can't get a new job because he needs a car to drive to work from the homeless shelter. And Bob still has 4-5 digits in credit card debt. Even worse still if he ends up sick enough to be hospitalized. Then he's probably got 5-7 digits worth of medical debts on top of being homeless and jobless. The problem isn't (IMO) the standard of living for america's poor, it's the precarity. At any moment even a small accident could ruin your life if you're poor in this country.
- tgv 3y ago
  > many conservatives don't see wealth inequality as a problem Conservatives have never been known for sympathy with the poor. It's basically their schtick: away with this democratic nonsense. That only gives power to the rabble. Back to the glory days of (fighting) the empire! What I don't get is your debt/CC anecdote. If you cover old debts by getting new ones, you're enlarging your debt (I don't think there's ever been a negative interest on personal debt in the period/society you refer to). That doesn't end well, until the system, which usually involves the government, as the market doesn't give a damn, manages to change your fortunes.
tetris11 3y ago
I hate this world. I hate that this is what all this has led up to. We've accomplished at lot of science, empowering tech, and social justice through collective effort, but it hasn't been enough. I hope for a new destabilizing tech that happens so fast and so rapidly, that those at the top will have no idea how to corner the markets emerging from it, and that the tech is so groundbreaking that it makes the existence of these vampires wholly irrelevant.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  This is not a matter of technology. Any new technology will just get coopted by the rich and powerful. That plucky little startup tasked with making the world a better place will get bought, merged, hedged, stripped, and morphed until it is just (part of) another megacorp. This is a social issue.
- sprash 3y ago
  Don't hate this world, simply hate central banks. Fiat money is the primary reason the rich get richer and poor get poorer.
  - wildrhythms 3y ago
    Why just fiat money? Money as a concept is yet another vehicle of inequality.
  - yetihehe 3y ago
    It's a tool, not a reason. If there were no fiat money, there would be other tools. Greed is the reason. If you somehow removed all currently rich people, in 20-30 years you would have another batch of super rich.
    - mlrtime 3y ago
      Greed is just a proxy word for human nature. Humans are the reason. Now you might read this and think "This isn't true, I'm not greedy". I'm guessing 99.99% of people reading this thread have more money and food than the average human on earth. Statistically if you reading this you are greedy relative to the average human. This isn't an excuse to not try better.
Dah00n 3y ago
A lot of people will complain after reading articles like this one. It is quite hopeless to even try to get a discussion going about what could be a better system. As long as even small tweaks are out of the question, I guess it will only get worse in the future.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  What do you mean, there are systems out there which effectively deal with any and all complaints common folks have against the rich, ie Switzerland and its wealth tax. Not too much to force everybody to avoid it, not too little to not matter when big sums come into play. Now why this well known approach haven't been implemented in your own country is a question for your own politicians and their donors. Yet rich still come here to live or retire, despite lacking any serious personal tax-haven lure (in some places in some cases taxes are lower than average here, but for real tax havens just within Europe see Channel islands, Luxembourg, Malta, Cyprus, Netherland etc plus everything gets reported back to home countries in case of EU or US).
  - dr_dshiv 3y ago
    The Dutch have a wealth tax too. Actually, it is treated as an income tax: they say that all wealth will produces a typical “fictitious” gain of x% (I think 6%). So, they tax the fictitious gains at 30%. So, that leads to a 2% overall wealth tax. So, if you have $1m in assets, they assume this money makes 6% a year (60k). On the fictitious gains of 60k, they then charge 30% tax (20k). I haven’t checked the specific numbers above, but that’s the gist of it. It seems fair on principle, though I haven’t thought about it too much. Would that be a possibility in the states?
    - tetromino_ 3y ago
      How does this fictitious gain tax interact with the non-fictitious capital gains tax? In other words, if I were a rich man, and invested my assets gaining 5% as opposed to keeping them in a Scrooge McDuck vault, would I be taxed at 30% of fictitious 6% + 30% of real 5% i.e. effectively at 66% of my capital gains, or only at the "fictitious" income, or only at the real capital gains?
itchycoo-park 3y ago
Here's a fun exercise: Take a look at the Forbes Rich List for 2020-2021, and find me a billionare who lost wealth. What we did over those years will be recorded as one of the single biggest wealth transfers in history.
- throw123123123 3y ago
  Why not creation of wealth?
- lifestyleguru 3y ago
  The wealth finally trickled. The rest is an adverb.
  - TrackerFF 3y ago
    Evaporated straight up to the top.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  Only "one of the" biggest? What are the other contenders?
- dtnewman 3y ago
  Sam Bankman Fried? Possibly wasn’t a billionaire at that point yet, but either, it’s the exception that proves the rule.
- zpeti 3y ago
  Here's a fun exercise: start at January 2022. Massive amounts of wealth were "lost" Of course they weren't actually lost, it's just that the fed started increasing interest rates and the stock market tanked. Did wealth transfer to the poor? No. So did these people "transfer wealth" from the poor from 2020 to 2022?
  - makomk 3y ago
    Yeah, the big headline claim of Forbes' billionaires list from 2023 at https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ is that half the billionaires on the list lost wealth over the previous year and that in total they were worth less than a year ago. I don't think that's adjusted for inflation either, unlike claims about workers' pay getting worse. There was also a drop off in billionaires' wealth in 2020, which coincidentally is where a lot of claims about the rich getting richer from organisations like Oxfam and publications like the Guardian start measuring from.
anovikov 3y ago
Never understood why inequality is a problem. At least as long as people can move geographically and/or law enforcement does a good job. There is a problem of rich not spending enough, but it is a consequence of "fighting inequality" which results in them being shy of spending, and while it is indeed dangerous long-term, that is a purely social/psychological problem which can be solved without any "physical" economic changes.
- gxyt6gfy5t 3y ago
  The problem is the asset bubble and inflation eroding normal people’s savings and wages. Leading to wealth transfer. Inequality isn’t a problem in itself is zero sum thinking
  - anovikov 3y ago
    Inequality decreases inflation because rich don't spend much of their earnings, unlike middle class and especially poor. See: decade of QE -> no inflation; some modest amounts of cash given to the poor as covid checks -> massive inflation. THAT is the only problem with inequality i can see: it reduces economic growth because it decreases spending in the economy. If we can somehow trick the rich into spending same proportion of their income as the middle class does (that is, simply explain them that there's nothing shameful about megayachts/private jets/private armies in the 3rd world/crazy longshot startups/islands full of hookers), things will get back in balance.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  Unless you live in a fortress you should be afraid of inequality worsening, no matter which side of it you're on. Rising inequality leads to societal tension and human misery.
- sidlls 3y ago
  I'm American. I've been in two economic classes: dirt poor (as in, more or less homeless, when I was a child, for a bit) and now on the low end of rich (net worth in the mid 7 figure range). I've seen both sides of this inequality, in America, personally. And new social circles that have opened up have given me something of a first-hand view of the "truly" rich as well. I can list numerous ways that it's a problem, if you like. Here's one to start: "as long as people can move geographically" isn't applicable to those on the lower end of the economic scale. Your comment represents something generalizable about the rich, too: they are completely oblivious to just how hard and draining (physically, mentally, and emotionally) it is to be impoverished. I shudder to think what it's like for the poor in poorer countries.
noname120 3y ago
Attentional bias, see [1]. Curious inquisitors can take a look at [2] in addition to [1] for a more in-depth analysis. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-living-in-extreme-poverty-cost-of-basic-needs https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
- jychang 3y ago
  That data stops in 2018. If you read the first line of OP's article, it says "The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes to $869bn (£681.5bn) *since 2020*" (emphasis mine). Last time I checked, there was something big happening globally since 2020. You're not even looking at the right data. This is like if someone posted an article in 1960 about growth of nuclear weapons and you posted a chart showing that there were no nuclear weapons before 1945.
  - noname120 3y ago
    Inequalities are increasing, but absolute poverty is diminishing year-over-year (and not just only extreme poverty). The article almost exclusively talks about inequalities rather than absolute poverty. If you look at page 37 of the report[1] that you can find in the sources of the report that this article uses as a source you will find that global poverty (not just extreme poverty!) has consistently declined year over year except in 2022 where the preliminary estimations show that it possibly declined by 0.9% — which is, by the way, half the 1.8% positive growth of 2021! The article takes an unfounded alarming stance by making it seem like it has been degrading more and more and that the rich always get more rich whereas the poor always get poorer. That's incorrect, and for all I know 2022 is just an exceptionally bad year for non-rich people due to the consequent layoffs in the middle class — there is no reason as far as I see that the trend will stay in this direction. [1] https://researchrepository.ilo.org/view/pdfCoverPage?instCode=41ILO_INST&filePid=13113570100002676&download=true https://researchrepository.ilo.org/view/pdfCoverPage?instCod...
- ajnin 3y ago
  This graph is about "extreme poverty", that is people living with less than $2.15 a day, per UN definition. It's possible to have less "extremely poor" and more "poor" people at the same time.
Xcelerate 3y ago
One thing I’m curious about that these articles never go into: what is the eventual physical utility of all this stored wealth? As an analogy, if money is like potential energy when kept in the form of financial instruments and real estate, what is its first eventual “kinetic” form after belonging to a billionaire? For example, if you were to trace all of Rockefeller’s fortune after his death, I would imagine most of it initially went to his heirs. But eventually, at least part of the wealth diffused out of the bloodline, and if you were to go through and account for the physical utility of that money, what would it look like? Labor to create superyachts and exotic sports cars? New buildings on college campuses? Cancer research? It would be nice if we had a system that quantifies this somehow, because in addition to the problems created by wealth inequality, I would argue that there are sufficiently many inefficiencies in most governmental bureaucracies as to result in a similarly poor usage of money as a billionaire who spends some of their wealth to construct a mansion on a private island. To play devil’s advocate, suppose we have a hypothetical billionaire that never spends any of their money on luxury or excess but rather devotes most of their time to figuring out how to use their wealth in a way that extracts maximum humanitarian value from it. You could argue that what constitutes “humanitarian value” is totally subjective and that decisions concerning such a large amount of money shouldn’t be left to one person. But on the flip side, would you say that most governments succeed at representing the average person’s desire for utilizing tax revenue in a way that optimally benefits society? Do they accomplish this efficiently? I don’t know the answer and don’t really have a strong opinion either way without further research, but sometimes I wonder if despite the problems they cause, billionaires sort of represent the “exploration” part of “exploration vs exploitation” in reinforcement learning, as they slightly destabilize a societal system that might otherwise be stuck in a rut or a local optimum.
- weatherlite 3y ago
  I think your hunch is correct very unequal distribution of money leads to economic inefficiency since the money is hoarded (or put into financial instruments or luxurious real estate) and does not trickle to the rest of the economy. Even if on average things are fine (they're not really), if the average citizen is getting left behind you're slowly eroding the middle class and democracy.
mathverse 3y ago
We need to tackle generational wealth. Not by outright taxing it but force an action on inactive or speculative capital. Democracy is being eroded if an actual power can be obtained through accumulating wealth. I dont want billionaires to change the world. I want elected people to do that.
- rullopat 3y ago
  I don’t see any smart, competent and nice person elected by the the greedy, dumb and dishonest average Joe.
  - eecc 3y ago
    Then invest in raising the average. Did you know there are only about 8 million PhDs in the whole world?
    - rullopat 3y ago
      To be honest I don't such a very big connection between intelligence and education
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  Show me 1 single truly good honest person who managed to get through all the crap of local and state politics to get into party and get elected... if you think you know some, you just don't know them well enough. There are no nice people in politics anywhere near real power, just broken, messed up, sociopaths and so on. Why do you think these folks would do anyhow better than rich when deciding common good? Also, every successful politician has somebody powerful and rich behind them who groomed them into position they have now, its not like they get elected and decide/vote from that point on based on their own moral values, thats not how real life looks like.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > every successful politician has somebody powerful and rich behind them who groomed them into position they have now, its not like they get elected and decide/vote from that point on based on their own moral values That sounds like an argument for public financing of political campaigns and the elimination of private contributions. How are political campaign contributions not bribery? For some reason, we allow and have legalized bribery in this area.
DeathArrow 3y ago
Just saw yesterday an episode from TV show Billions where billionaire Mike Prince asked prosecutor Chuck Rhoades if he thinks Billionaires are some rotten individuals who did very bad things to accomplish their fortunes. Chuck replays: "You've said it!" It's kind of short sighted to blame someone's misfortune on someone else fortune.
- IanCal 3y ago
  As I stand there next to the river, atop a mountain of lifejackets so numerous I need to employ people just to count them - ten thousand lifetimes worth, I see someone floating past in the water struggling and gasping as they thrash trying to stay afloat. They scream for help, although I can't hear them that well because I'm so high up on this pile and the water keeps getting in their mouth. I am no longer interested in them and look away. As they drift out of earshot I hear them shout at me. How rude! I have done nothing to them.
  - DeathArrow 3y ago
    So, rich people are bad human beings, for not wanting to help others. Someone really are. But some did help others and are continuing to do so. Just by being rich, doesn't mean you are bad. Likewise, by being poor, doesn't mean you are good.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - fireflash38 3y ago
      Corporations in a lot of ways are just diffusions of responsibility. They are also diffusions of culpability. I like to think that the best way to determine culpability for crimes/misdeeds of a corporation is by pay scale, including total benefits. So the CEO earning 200x the common worker at a company bears 200x the culpability of a worker. Billionaires have amassed an astounding quantity of wealth. I'd be very interested to see how much of that wealth was "earned" by actions, how much was grown based purely off capital investments, and how much in total that can trace its roots to dirty money (earned by underpaying, skirting regulations, negative externalities, other questionably legal activity). Do they have any responsibility for that?
mgh2 3y ago
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkx4EnFeKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkx4EnFeKg
d--b 3y ago
Someone should introduce an economical concept equivalent to escape velocity in physics. If you throw an object towards space from Earth, it will always fall back to Earth, unless you throw it with enough speed (IIRC something close to 11km/s), with which it will eventually "escape" Earth's gravity. I have a feeling that money follow the same rule: If you have some money but below a certain level, and don't do anything, that amount of money will be eaten by you, taxes, and inflation. But if you have enough money, current rates mean that taxes & inflation will erode your capital slower than the interest you'll earn from that capital alone, and so money is inevitably growing on itself. As a society, we should prevent "escape capital" to be a thing. I totally fail to understand why this is a polarizing issue as 99.5% of people are on the same side of the threshold...
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  > As a society, we should prevent "escape capital" to be a thing. Perhaps if you captured all of someone's wealth when they died, dole out maybe a $1M to each child/spouse.
  - xyzzy123 3y ago
    Or apply increasing "drag" as wealth accumulates, i.e, wealth taxes, maybe starting at a few bps once you have $100m. Throw in some social accolades / parades / public acclaim for people who pay the most taxes.
    - riskycodes 3y ago
      I have been considering the latter (accolades and/or naming things after tax-payers) as something that is severely under-utilised in most places.
    - xenonite 3y ago
      Charity yields higher appraisal, while reducing taxes. Though this has the benefit of letting better decide what is done with the money.
paganel 3y ago
Meanwhile the head of the IMF has just posted some babbling stuff about AI. Talk about estrangement of the elites...
- lifestyleguru 3y ago
  For a change let's talk about uniform charging cable.
lbj 3y ago
So people who work all the time increase their worth, while people who don't work actually lose wealth? I'm quite surprised
- richbell 3y ago
  This is a reductive take that adds nothing to the discussion. If "work[ing] all the time" was really what differentiated the wealthy from the poor, my 70 year old neighbour working 2 jobs would be a millionaire.
- TrackerFF 3y ago
  There are people out there that work as many hours as your average CEO, doing actual physical, back-breaking work, but are also losing wealth.
  - camdenlock 3y ago
    You think hours worked is equivalent between professions…?
- fleischhauf 3y ago
  it's not about increasing their worth, it's being the top five already and doubling it.
lorax 3y ago
Oxfam carefully picked the dates they used to make the gain as large as possible. They used November 2023 compared to March 2020. What happened in March of 2020? The stock market dropped from 3380 (Feb 10) to 2304 (March 16). For the end date, if they had used Oct 30 instead of November, the S&P was at 4358. The Using the numbers I just gave, the gain would only be 29%, not 114%. That's a huge difference. (As you probably suspect, I also carefully picked the dates I used to minimize the gain.)
- Neil44 3y ago
  The Guardian is pretty left wing so they're not going to look too closely at the numbers if they say what they want them to say. These kind of articles always imply that it's some kind of zero sum game which irks me because that's so clearly not true.
  - peterfirefly 3y ago
    And so is Oxfam. Oxfam always pumps out propaganda like this, year after year.
    - lock-the-spock 3y ago
      Oxfam does PR but they are first and foremost a charity feeding and providing shelter and healthcare to millions around the world. Maybe the perspective they take is influenced.by their staff watching people suffer and die from preventable deaths each year. I would love to hear someone sa similar thing about Coca Cola or Kellogg's "Oh they pump out all this propaganda".
      - peterfirefly 3y ago
        Lots of people do say that about industry as a whole or about specific sectors of industry.
  - lock-the-spock 3y ago
    Why is it not true? Sure stock value is more or less theoretical but this is not all stock. Any euro or dollar going towards Amazon or Tesla shareholders does not feed back into the local economy and cannot support roads, kindergartens and retirement homes.
RickJWagner 3y ago
Who's going to actually raise the taxes? Perhaps Bernie Sanders, with 3 houses and a multi-million dollar portfolio?
- PeterisP 3y ago
  Billionaires like Warren Buffet (https://thehill.com/policy/finance/99096-warren-buffett-increase-my-taxes/ https://thehill.com/policy/finance/99096-warren-buffett-incr...) and others have argued to raise taxes on the wealthy - he and other supporters are anyways donating most of their wealth, not leave it as inheritance, so it doesn't make much of a difference to them personally, but having a rule that applies to all the other billionaires as well would obviously bring in much more funding than their own.
Beefin 3y ago
> Just imagine what £22bn a year invested in public services and infrastructure could pay for the problem is most public services are hilariously inept. the bill and melinda gates foundation did more for eradicating malaria than USAID did since it's inception... anduril has done more for military defense per $ than northrop, lockheed, and raytheon... private insurance is infinitely more effective and cheaper than obamacare... its silly to say "oh they should be taxed more", because then the $$ is in the most inept institutions. a better solution would be to enforce some kind of philanthropic organization. say elon musk needs to donate 10% of his capital gains to whichever 501c3 he wants, and it can be his own... that is affter all what vanderbilt, rockafeler and carnegie did.
- gnz11 3y ago
  > private insurance is infinitely more effective and cheaper than obamacare... Obamacare is legislation and not insurance. It did not eliminate private insurance.
ankit219 3y ago
Articles like these always follow a predictable script: > Compiled using data from the research company Wealth X and Forbes, it says the combined wealth of the top five richest people in the world have increased by $464bn, or 114%. Over the same period, the total wealth of the poorest 4.77 billion people – making up 60% of the world population – has declined by 0.2% in real terms. The keyword here is "in real terms" which is doing most of the lifting here. I know not using this term would not realistically make much of a difference, but it changes the hyperbole used in the article. Then there is this: > global income inequality was now comparable with that of South Africa, the country with the highest inequality in the world. South Africa has a GINI index of 63%. It's hard to define range of comparable when Brazil had a GINI index of 53%. Outlets like The Guardian do more harm to these causes because of such uncritical and clickbait reporting.
yonatron 3y ago
Notice they said "a tax on net wealth". That's just plain evil. You can't tax paper gains! Almost all of these billionaires have their holdings in stock. It's theoretical money, not cash. If you own a house, and the "value" of your house goes up 5%, should you be taxed on that gain? Clearly not. It's not money you actually have. How are you going to raise that money every year? Borrow? You're already in debt. And these fools already want to tax you on your "income" from borrowing as well. There's a reason all moral societies only tax realized gains. Also all these haters of wealth and capitalism are sorely lacking in math. Not even math, just arithmetic! If you forcibly took ALL the billionaires money ( which is what these haters REALLY want), about $12.2Trillion and gave it to the poor half (4.4 Billion people) everyone gets about $2,700. That's it. And one time only!! Woo hoo! Congrats! World poverty and lifestyle solved! NOT! Meanwhile, for the sake of your idiot ideological revenge, all the companies and employees and economic drive and sub industries and localities driven by the Billionaire's success amd enterprises are now ruined. Millions of people have now lost their jobs. Also no one will attempt it again. Great solution. #mathlessfools! In Britain, this fictional 22B per year over 65 Million people is a nice whopping 338 pounds per person. Again: problems solved. Not! And the rich, who drive economies and employ millions will definitely flee somewhere that doesn't perpetrate these stupid hateful laws. This is all about people thinking it's moral and virtuous to say "Sorry, you have too much! We've got to limit your success and take from you" #handicappergeneral #Marxism #famine It comes down to this: #killthegoose
rwmj 3y ago
Only tangentially related, but I'm enjoying this BBC Radio series Good Bad Billionaire: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0g7xj36 https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0g7xj36
edpichler 3y ago
They subtly write it as if it were a zero-sum game.
- drcongo 3y ago
  Yeah, in reality it's much worse than that.
- bad_username 3y ago
  ... with fixed and immutable amount of total wealth.
  - edpichler 3y ago
    ...so we will learn that "rich"="evil" and we have a war between classes. Classic indoctrination. Conflicts of interest are in all areas, including journalism. They could have just stated the facts and shown different angles of view.
beardyw 3y ago
In the past this sort of trajectory has led to bloody revolution. No one should discount that possibility. The tools to prevent it are, as before in the hands of the rich. As before they will probably do nothing.
ryzvonusef 3y ago
Why exactly do we multiply made up numbers and then get our knickers in a twist? $Current_Stock_price * #Number_of_Shares != Actual Wealth by owner of those shares. Like take "Ol'Muskie", if we are to believe the linked article above that "His fortune rose by $6 billion during December 2023", then are we to also believe he actually lost 200 BILLION BENJAMINS at the end of 2022? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-30/elon-musk-becomes-first-person-ever-to-lose-200-billion https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-30/elon-musk... He neither lost the money then, neither gained it now. It was just paper gains and paper losses. These are not Saudi princes or whatever, the "wealth" they have is meaningless. They are wealthy, absurdly so, but the exact number (and ranking on some list) are not worth bothering about. ____ I fully understand the need to tax rich individuals, but that requires adjustment to the tax code... an adjustment that would most likely be most fiercely fought against; not only by these dunderheads, but by the far less visible but the far more populous (and powerful) group of low-billionaires and multi-millionaires. I have long maintained[1] that the next-tier rich people have a far more secretive and negative effect per dollar; the ~10 or so tippy-top rich are just far too visible to escape the scrutiny in ways the next group does. Just my personal observation, I could be wrong. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38262314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38262314 ____ Like most people, the "loan against shares" in lieu of salary really grates at me. I think there needs to be some sort of "deemed salary" type thing, but it needs to have a carve out for people who truly are taking a loan against their assets as collateral. No idea what qualification for a "true loan" would be most fair, but here is an idea... There is an growing consensus that if you are a billionaire (or whatever wealth level is considered appropriate), then any shares you take a loan against, should be considered "sold" for tax purposes, and any gains should be realised and taxed... but if they start "repaying" the "loan", then they can deduct that amount from their future taxes. I think this might help offset some of the tax burden from the salaried class (also make things feel more fair), but I would love to hear if there are some flaws in this plan. ___ but we need to stop faffing over these "paper wealth" lists, that only re-direct our energies from where they need to be, and give us false targets to focus on.
nojvek 3y ago
These are the top 10. I don’t have a problem with them being rich, and using that money to create even better technology. (MSFT, GOOG, TSLA etc) What we should restrict is how much policy and fixed resources like land they control. Not only billionaires but housing is a great example of an asset that is mostly owned by the rich that makes them even more rich. Senators and Congressmen is mostly wealthy (top 1-2 percentile folks) making laws for their need and those who “donate” to their causes. 1. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX (Automotive, Aerospace) 2. Jeff Bezos: Amazon (E-commerce, Cloud Computing) 3. Bernard Arnault: LVMH (Luxury Goods) 4. Bill Gates: Microsoft (Technology, Software) 5. Warren Buffett: Berkshire Hathaway (Conglomerate covering insurance, energy, food, and more) 6. Larry Page: Google, Alphabet Inc. (Technology, Internet Services) 7. Sergey Brin: Google, Alphabet Inc. (Technology, Internet Services) 8. Larry Ellison: Oracle Corporation (Technology, Cloud Computing) 9. Steve Ballmer: Formerly Microsoft, LA Clippers owner (Technology, Sports) 10. Mukesh Ambani: Reliance Industries (Conglomerate covering petrochemicals, oil, gas, telecom, retail)
nojvek 3y ago
If you don’t like Elon being rich, don’t buy a Tesla. Or use Facebook to make Zuckerberg rich. They became rich because they built something valuable that a lot of people give them $$$ for. We the population made them rich. The big question is if the top reach is preventing the bottom from becoming rich? That is what we should be against. US will still keep on churning new billionaires as long as new ideas get to to complete with old ideas on the same grounds.
- HEmanZ 3y ago
  No, Elon is rich because he inherited $250 billion dollars from his parents who made the money off of slavery. /s I had a friend of mine who owns two teslas tell me this at a bar last month, in complete seriousness. I guess it is the zeitgeist of the internet right now.
- bahama_mama 3y ago
  People won't stop buying and/or using these products/services, because exactly what you said: > They became rich because they built something valuable that a lot of people give them $$$ for. We the population made them rich. There isn't many EV cars <$40k that can have >250mi range. There aren't many other powerful social networks as Facebook that can let people connect with their friends and families. An average Joe doesn't care about Elon nor Zuckerberg. Sure, they probably heard about Elon and his recent shenanigans, but it isn't much of a factor when purchasing a good/service. As a result, we can't rely on just society regulating wealth.
bahama_mama 3y ago
What I dislike about the current discourse in the American politics is the constant chatter about "reducing expenses". We have $1.7T deficit in 2023, so we would have to find cuts to account for that even if we just wanted to break even. It's nearly impossible. What about substantially expanding taxation to increase the federal income and fund more socially-responsible programs such as maternal care or child care. So the question is, who is going to pay a bit more? Random Joe who makes $100k/year or someone who sits on >$50B wealth?
sershe 3y ago
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics ... unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." I feel like it needs an explicit rule for "non-tech articles written, propaganda-lite style, to elicit rightful indignation"
keester 3y ago
I think you mean they doubled something with some equivalence to money .. what would that be?

182 points by ciconia 3y ago

The Oxfam report can be found here: https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/inequality-inc-how-corporate-power-divides-our-world-and-the-need-for-a-new-era-621583/ https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/inequality-inc-h...

lnxg33k1 3y ago

Think about the fact that in italy we still have people saying that neoliberalism is the way to go, that we need to lower taxes and workers rights because wealth will trickle down, that we need a modern economic framework to facilitate investment

dariosalvi78 3y ago
I don't know why you are being downvoted, but, for what it is worth, neoliberal policies are at the core of the European Union and the West in general. Everybody is aware of their failure, at least since 2007/2008, though nobody is able to propose any alternative, except populistic fluff...
- lnxg33k1 3y ago
  I liked Bernie economic ideas about redistribution of economic power, didn’t seem populistic, and if things change in US they can change worldwide
  - dariosalvi78 3y ago
    In US politics, I like also many of the proposals from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. There are some radical-enough but still doable proposals, but what is fashionable everywhere nowadays is to just throw the blame all problems to "the foreigner" or "the immigrant". I really don't see any way out of the current mess (climate change above all) rather than a world war. I hope I'm wrong.

sorenjan 3y ago

Looking at the top 10 list it's dominated by American tech billionaires. Weirdly Steve Ballmer is #10, even though he was "only" CEO of Microsoft, not the founder. So much for the argument that the wealth comes from innovation and risk taking that I sometimes hear. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/article/the-top-ten-richest-people-in-the-world/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/article/the-to...

the-rc 3y ago
We can dunk on Ballmer all we want, but he was an early employee and he did negotiate for 10% of equity and profits, at a time when software was not an industry. If that's not taking risks...
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Also he kept his bids on casino table... Not like it was ever going to go to zero... But still, he was taking a risk.

TrackerFF 3y ago

I don't know what the specific solution is, but it is a polarizing topic. I've read a lot of conservative opinions on this, from scholars to your average forum users, and have spoken with people IRL about this topic - and one thing that pops up again and again, is that many conservatives don't see wealth inequality as a problem. The main argument is that the poor today have it better than N years ago, so the system must be working. And taxing the rich just stems from jealousy. Sprinkled in with just-world hypothesis. EDIT: My observation is that poor people have easier access to debt today, compared to 30+ year ago. When I grew up - if you were broke, you were broke. You called family or friends, went to the pawn shop, or whatever - banks wouldn't issue you a credit card. When I went to college, banks were literally throwing credit cards at everyone and their dog. I had zero income, but still got a CC with $5k limit. Never actually used it, but they it took 2 minutes to fill out the form (at the airport), and I got one in the mail a couple of weeks later. If it was that easy to get a CC, then I guess poor people must have managed to bankroll themselves through bad times, as long as they managed to meet the minimum payments, or get new cards to cover the old ones. Just an anecdote, of course.

kevingadd 3y ago
The problem with the poor surviving entirely on debt is that it creates the illusion of stability, so if a stranger looks at their life from the outside they go 'well, Bob's doing fine, he has a car and an apartment and can eat 2-3 times a day.' But then Bob gets sick just enough exactly once, and he gets fired because his employer isn't legally mandated to give him enough sick days or keep him around, and then he gets evicted because he has no savings, and then his car gets repossessed because he can't make the payments without a job, and then he can't get a new job because he needs a car to drive to work from the homeless shelter. And Bob still has 4-5 digits in credit card debt. Even worse still if he ends up sick enough to be hospitalized. Then he's probably got 5-7 digits worth of medical debts on top of being homeless and jobless. The problem isn't (IMO) the standard of living for america's poor, it's the precarity. At any moment even a small accident could ruin your life if you're poor in this country.
tgv 3y ago
> many conservatives don't see wealth inequality as a problem Conservatives have never been known for sympathy with the poor. It's basically their schtick: away with this democratic nonsense. That only gives power to the rabble. Back to the glory days of (fighting) the empire! What I don't get is your debt/CC anecdote. If you cover old debts by getting new ones, you're enlarging your debt (I don't think there's ever been a negative interest on personal debt in the period/society you refer to). That doesn't end well, until the system, which usually involves the government, as the market doesn't give a damn, manages to change your fortunes.

tetris11 3y ago

I hate this world. I hate that this is what all this has led up to. We've accomplished at lot of science, empowering tech, and social justice through collective effort, but it hasn't been enough. I hope for a new destabilizing tech that happens so fast and so rapidly, that those at the top will have no idea how to corner the markets emerging from it, and that the tech is so groundbreaking that it makes the existence of these vampires wholly irrelevant.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Freak_NL 3y ago
This is not a matter of technology. Any new technology will just get coopted by the rich and powerful. That plucky little startup tasked with making the world a better place will get bought, merged, hedged, stripped, and morphed until it is just (part of) another megacorp. This is a social issue.
sprash 3y ago
Don't hate this world, simply hate central banks. Fiat money is the primary reason the rich get richer and poor get poorer.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  Why just fiat money? Money as a concept is yet another vehicle of inequality.
- yetihehe 3y ago
  It's a tool, not a reason. If there were no fiat money, there would be other tools. Greed is the reason. If you somehow removed all currently rich people, in 20-30 years you would have another batch of super rich.
  - mlrtime 3y ago
    Greed is just a proxy word for human nature. Humans are the reason. Now you might read this and think "This isn't true, I'm not greedy". I'm guessing 99.99% of people reading this thread have more money and food than the average human on earth. Statistically if you reading this you are greedy relative to the average human. This isn't an excuse to not try better.

Dah00n 3y ago

A lot of people will complain after reading articles like this one. It is quite hopeless to even try to get a discussion going about what could be a better system. As long as even small tweaks are out of the question, I guess it will only get worse in the future.

saiya-jin 3y ago
What do you mean, there are systems out there which effectively deal with any and all complaints common folks have against the rich, ie Switzerland and its wealth tax. Not too much to force everybody to avoid it, not too little to not matter when big sums come into play. Now why this well known approach haven't been implemented in your own country is a question for your own politicians and their donors. Yet rich still come here to live or retire, despite lacking any serious personal tax-haven lure (in some places in some cases taxes are lower than average here, but for real tax havens just within Europe see Channel islands, Luxembourg, Malta, Cyprus, Netherland etc plus everything gets reported back to home countries in case of EU or US).
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  The Dutch have a wealth tax too. Actually, it is treated as an income tax: they say that all wealth will produces a typical “fictitious” gain of x% (I think 6%). So, they tax the fictitious gains at 30%. So, that leads to a 2% overall wealth tax. So, if you have $1m in assets, they assume this money makes 6% a year (60k). On the fictitious gains of 60k, they then charge 30% tax (20k). I haven’t checked the specific numbers above, but that’s the gist of it. It seems fair on principle, though I haven’t thought about it too much. Would that be a possibility in the states?
  - tetromino_ 3y ago
    How does this fictitious gain tax interact with the non-fictitious capital gains tax? In other words, if I were a rich man, and invested my assets gaining 5% as opposed to keeping them in a Scrooge McDuck vault, would I be taxed at 30% of fictitious 6% + 30% of real 5% i.e. effectively at 66% of my capital gains, or only at the "fictitious" income, or only at the real capital gains?

itchycoo-park 3y ago

Here's a fun exercise: Take a look at the Forbes Rich List for 2020-2021, and find me a billionare who lost wealth. What we did over those years will be recorded as one of the single biggest wealth transfers in history.

throw123123123 3y ago
Why not creation of wealth?
lifestyleguru 3y ago
The wealth finally trickled. The rest is an adverb.
- TrackerFF 3y ago
  Evaporated straight up to the top.
arrowsmith 3y ago
Only "one of the" biggest? What are the other contenders?
dtnewman 3y ago
Sam Bankman Fried? Possibly wasn’t a billionaire at that point yet, but either, it’s the exception that proves the rule.
zpeti 3y ago
Here's a fun exercise: start at January 2022. Massive amounts of wealth were "lost" Of course they weren't actually lost, it's just that the fed started increasing interest rates and the stock market tanked. Did wealth transfer to the poor? No. So did these people "transfer wealth" from the poor from 2020 to 2022?
- makomk 3y ago
  Yeah, the big headline claim of Forbes' billionaires list from 2023 at https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ is that half the billionaires on the list lost wealth over the previous year and that in total they were worth less than a year ago. I don't think that's adjusted for inflation either, unlike claims about workers' pay getting worse. There was also a drop off in billionaires' wealth in 2020, which coincidentally is where a lot of claims about the rich getting richer from organisations like Oxfam and publications like the Guardian start measuring from.

anovikov 3y ago

Never understood why inequality is a problem. At least as long as people can move geographically and/or law enforcement does a good job. There is a problem of rich not spending enough, but it is a consequence of "fighting inequality" which results in them being shy of spending, and while it is indeed dangerous long-term, that is a purely social/psychological problem which can be solved without any "physical" economic changes.

gxyt6gfy5t 3y ago
The problem is the asset bubble and inflation eroding normal people’s savings and wages. Leading to wealth transfer. Inequality isn’t a problem in itself is zero sum thinking
- anovikov 3y ago
  Inequality decreases inflation because rich don't spend much of their earnings, unlike middle class and especially poor. See: decade of QE -> no inflation; some modest amounts of cash given to the poor as covid checks -> massive inflation. THAT is the only problem with inequality i can see: it reduces economic growth because it decreases spending in the economy. If we can somehow trick the rich into spending same proportion of their income as the middle class does (that is, simply explain them that there's nothing shameful about megayachts/private jets/private armies in the 3rd world/crazy longshot startups/islands full of hookers), things will get back in balance.
kevingadd 3y ago
Unless you live in a fortress you should be afraid of inequality worsening, no matter which side of it you're on. Rising inequality leads to societal tension and human misery.
sidlls 3y ago
I'm American. I've been in two economic classes: dirt poor (as in, more or less homeless, when I was a child, for a bit) and now on the low end of rich (net worth in the mid 7 figure range). I've seen both sides of this inequality, in America, personally. And new social circles that have opened up have given me something of a first-hand view of the "truly" rich as well. I can list numerous ways that it's a problem, if you like. Here's one to start: "as long as people can move geographically" isn't applicable to those on the lower end of the economic scale. Your comment represents something generalizable about the rich, too: they are completely oblivious to just how hard and draining (physically, mentally, and emotionally) it is to be impoverished. I shudder to think what it's like for the poor in poorer countries.

noname120 3y ago

Attentional bias, see [1]. Curious inquisitors can take a look at [2] in addition to [1] for a more in-depth analysis. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-living-in-extreme-poverty-cost-of-basic-needs https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief

jychang 3y ago
That data stops in 2018. If you read the first line of OP's article, it says "The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes to $869bn (£681.5bn) *since 2020*" (emphasis mine). Last time I checked, there was something big happening globally since 2020. You're not even looking at the right data. This is like if someone posted an article in 1960 about growth of nuclear weapons and you posted a chart showing that there were no nuclear weapons before 1945.
- noname120 3y ago
  Inequalities are increasing, but absolute poverty is diminishing year-over-year (and not just only extreme poverty). The article almost exclusively talks about inequalities rather than absolute poverty. If you look at page 37 of the report[1] that you can find in the sources of the report that this article uses as a source you will find that global poverty (not just extreme poverty!) has consistently declined year over year except in 2022 where the preliminary estimations show that it possibly declined by 0.9% — which is, by the way, half the 1.8% positive growth of 2021! The article takes an unfounded alarming stance by making it seem like it has been degrading more and more and that the rich always get more rich whereas the poor always get poorer. That's incorrect, and for all I know 2022 is just an exceptionally bad year for non-rich people due to the consequent layoffs in the middle class — there is no reason as far as I see that the trend will stay in this direction. [1] https://researchrepository.ilo.org/view/pdfCoverPage?instCode=41ILO_INST&filePid=13113570100002676&download=true https://researchrepository.ilo.org/view/pdfCoverPage?instCod...
ajnin 3y ago
This graph is about "extreme poverty", that is people living with less than $2.15 a day, per UN definition. It's possible to have less "extremely poor" and more "poor" people at the same time.

Xcelerate 3y ago

One thing I’m curious about that these articles never go into: what is the eventual physical utility of all this stored wealth? As an analogy, if money is like potential energy when kept in the form of financial instruments and real estate, what is its first eventual “kinetic” form after belonging to a billionaire? For example, if you were to trace all of Rockefeller’s fortune after his death, I would imagine most of it initially went to his heirs. But eventually, at least part of the wealth diffused out of the bloodline, and if you were to go through and account for the physical utility of that money, what would it look like? Labor to create superyachts and exotic sports cars? New buildings on college campuses? Cancer research? It would be nice if we had a system that quantifies this somehow, because in addition to the problems created by wealth inequality, I would argue that there are sufficiently many inefficiencies in most governmental bureaucracies as to result in a similarly poor usage of money as a billionaire who spends some of their wealth to construct a mansion on a private island. To play devil’s advocate, suppose we have a hypothetical billionaire that never spends any of their money on luxury or excess but rather devotes most of their time to figuring out how to use their wealth in a way that extracts maximum humanitarian value from it. You could argue that what constitutes “humanitarian value” is totally subjective and that decisions concerning such a large amount of money shouldn’t be left to one person. But on the flip side, would you say that most governments succeed at representing the average person’s desire for utilizing tax revenue in a way that optimally benefits society? Do they accomplish this efficiently? I don’t know the answer and don’t really have a strong opinion either way without further research, but sometimes I wonder if despite the problems they cause, billionaires sort of represent the “exploration” part of “exploration vs exploitation” in reinforcement learning, as they slightly destabilize a societal system that might otherwise be stuck in a rut or a local optimum.

weatherlite 3y ago
I think your hunch is correct very unequal distribution of money leads to economic inefficiency since the money is hoarded (or put into financial instruments or luxurious real estate) and does not trickle to the rest of the economy. Even if on average things are fine (they're not really), if the average citizen is getting left behind you're slowly eroding the middle class and democracy.

mathverse 3y ago

We need to tackle generational wealth. Not by outright taxing it but force an action on inactive or speculative capital. Democracy is being eroded if an actual power can be obtained through accumulating wealth. I dont want billionaires to change the world. I want elected people to do that.

rullopat 3y ago
I don’t see any smart, competent and nice person elected by the the greedy, dumb and dishonest average Joe.
- eecc 3y ago
  Then invest in raising the average. Did you know there are only about 8 million PhDs in the whole world?
  - rullopat 3y ago
    To be honest I don't such a very big connection between intelligence and education
saiya-jin 3y ago
Show me 1 single truly good honest person who managed to get through all the crap of local and state politics to get into party and get elected... if you think you know some, you just don't know them well enough. There are no nice people in politics anywhere near real power, just broken, messed up, sociopaths and so on. Why do you think these folks would do anyhow better than rich when deciding common good? Also, every successful politician has somebody powerful and rich behind them who groomed them into position they have now, its not like they get elected and decide/vote from that point on based on their own moral values, thats not how real life looks like.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > every successful politician has somebody powerful and rich behind them who groomed them into position they have now, its not like they get elected and decide/vote from that point on based on their own moral values That sounds like an argument for public financing of political campaigns and the elimination of private contributions. How are political campaign contributions not bribery? For some reason, we allow and have legalized bribery in this area.

DeathArrow 3y ago

Just saw yesterday an episode from TV show Billions where billionaire Mike Prince asked prosecutor Chuck Rhoades if he thinks Billionaires are some rotten individuals who did very bad things to accomplish their fortunes. Chuck replays: "You've said it!" It's kind of short sighted to blame someone's misfortune on someone else fortune.

IanCal 3y ago
As I stand there next to the river, atop a mountain of lifejackets so numerous I need to employ people just to count them - ten thousand lifetimes worth, I see someone floating past in the water struggling and gasping as they thrash trying to stay afloat. They scream for help, although I can't hear them that well because I'm so high up on this pile and the water keeps getting in their mouth. I am no longer interested in them and look away. As they drift out of earshot I hear them shout at me. How rude! I have done nothing to them.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  So, rich people are bad human beings, for not wanting to help others. Someone really are. But some did help others and are continuing to do so. Just by being rich, doesn't mean you are bad. Likewise, by being poor, doesn't mean you are good.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - fireflash38 3y ago
    Corporations in a lot of ways are just diffusions of responsibility. They are also diffusions of culpability. I like to think that the best way to determine culpability for crimes/misdeeds of a corporation is by pay scale, including total benefits. So the CEO earning 200x the common worker at a company bears 200x the culpability of a worker. Billionaires have amassed an astounding quantity of wealth. I'd be very interested to see how much of that wealth was "earned" by actions, how much was grown based purely off capital investments, and how much in total that can trace its roots to dirty money (earned by underpaying, skirting regulations, negative externalities, other questionably legal activity). Do they have any responsibility for that?

mgh2 3y ago

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkx4EnFeKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkx4EnFeKg

d--b 3y ago

Someone should introduce an economical concept equivalent to escape velocity in physics. If you throw an object towards space from Earth, it will always fall back to Earth, unless you throw it with enough speed (IIRC something close to 11km/s), with which it will eventually "escape" Earth's gravity. I have a feeling that money follow the same rule: If you have some money but below a certain level, and don't do anything, that amount of money will be eaten by you, taxes, and inflation. But if you have enough money, current rates mean that taxes & inflation will erode your capital slower than the interest you'll earn from that capital alone, and so money is inevitably growing on itself. As a society, we should prevent "escape capital" to be a thing. I totally fail to understand why this is a polarizing issue as 99.5% of people are on the same side of the threshold...

JKCalhoun 3y ago
> As a society, we should prevent "escape capital" to be a thing. Perhaps if you captured all of someone's wealth when they died, dole out maybe a $1M to each child/spouse.
- xyzzy123 3y ago
  Or apply increasing "drag" as wealth accumulates, i.e, wealth taxes, maybe starting at a few bps once you have $100m. Throw in some social accolades / parades / public acclaim for people who pay the most taxes.
  - riskycodes 3y ago
    I have been considering the latter (accolades and/or naming things after tax-payers) as something that is severely under-utilised in most places.
  - xenonite 3y ago
    Charity yields higher appraisal, while reducing taxes. Though this has the benefit of letting better decide what is done with the money.

paganel 3y ago

Meanwhile the head of the IMF has just posted some babbling stuff about AI. Talk about estrangement of the elites...

lifestyleguru 3y ago
For a change let's talk about uniform charging cable.

lbj 3y ago

So people who work all the time increase their worth, while people who don't work actually lose wealth? I'm quite surprised

richbell 3y ago
This is a reductive take that adds nothing to the discussion. If "work[ing] all the time" was really what differentiated the wealthy from the poor, my 70 year old neighbour working 2 jobs would be a millionaire.
TrackerFF 3y ago
There are people out there that work as many hours as your average CEO, doing actual physical, back-breaking work, but are also losing wealth.
- camdenlock 3y ago
  You think hours worked is equivalent between professions…?
fleischhauf 3y ago
it's not about increasing their worth, it's being the top five already and doubling it.

lorax 3y ago

Oxfam carefully picked the dates they used to make the gain as large as possible. They used November 2023 compared to March 2020. What happened in March of 2020? The stock market dropped from 3380 (Feb 10) to 2304 (March 16). For the end date, if they had used Oct 30 instead of November, the S&P was at 4358. The Using the numbers I just gave, the gain would only be 29%, not 114%. That's a huge difference. (As you probably suspect, I also carefully picked the dates I used to minimize the gain.)

Neil44 3y ago
The Guardian is pretty left wing so they're not going to look too closely at the numbers if they say what they want them to say. These kind of articles always imply that it's some kind of zero sum game which irks me because that's so clearly not true.
- peterfirefly 3y ago
  And so is Oxfam. Oxfam always pumps out propaganda like this, year after year.
  - lock-the-spock 3y ago
    Oxfam does PR but they are first and foremost a charity feeding and providing shelter and healthcare to millions around the world. Maybe the perspective they take is influenced.by their staff watching people suffer and die from preventable deaths each year. I would love to hear someone sa similar thing about Coca Cola or Kellogg's "Oh they pump out all this propaganda".
    - peterfirefly 3y ago
      Lots of people do say that about industry as a whole or about specific sectors of industry.
- lock-the-spock 3y ago
  Why is it not true? Sure stock value is more or less theoretical but this is not all stock. Any euro or dollar going towards Amazon or Tesla shareholders does not feed back into the local economy and cannot support roads, kindergartens and retirement homes.

RickJWagner 3y ago

Who's going to actually raise the taxes? Perhaps Bernie Sanders, with 3 houses and a multi-million dollar portfolio?

PeterisP 3y ago
Billionaires like Warren Buffet (https://thehill.com/policy/finance/99096-warren-buffett-increase-my-taxes/ https://thehill.com/policy/finance/99096-warren-buffett-incr...) and others have argued to raise taxes on the wealthy - he and other supporters are anyways donating most of their wealth, not leave it as inheritance, so it doesn't make much of a difference to them personally, but having a rule that applies to all the other billionaires as well would obviously bring in much more funding than their own.

Beefin 3y ago

> Just imagine what £22bn a year invested in public services and infrastructure could pay for the problem is most public services are hilariously inept. the bill and melinda gates foundation did more for eradicating malaria than USAID did since it's inception... anduril has done more for military defense per $ than northrop, lockheed, and raytheon... private insurance is infinitely more effective and cheaper than obamacare... its silly to say "oh they should be taxed more", because then the $$ is in the most inept institutions. a better solution would be to enforce some kind of philanthropic organization. say elon musk needs to donate 10% of his capital gains to whichever 501c3 he wants, and it can be his own... that is affter all what vanderbilt, rockafeler and carnegie did.

gnz11 3y ago
> private insurance is infinitely more effective and cheaper than obamacare... Obamacare is legislation and not insurance. It did not eliminate private insurance.

ankit219 3y ago

Articles like these always follow a predictable script: > Compiled using data from the research company Wealth X and Forbes, it says the combined wealth of the top five richest people in the world have increased by $464bn, or 114%. Over the same period, the total wealth of the poorest 4.77 billion people – making up 60% of the world population – has declined by 0.2% in real terms. The keyword here is "in real terms" which is doing most of the lifting here. I know not using this term would not realistically make much of a difference, but it changes the hyperbole used in the article. Then there is this: > global income inequality was now comparable with that of South Africa, the country with the highest inequality in the world. South Africa has a GINI index of 63%. It's hard to define range of comparable when Brazil had a GINI index of 53%. Outlets like The Guardian do more harm to these causes because of such uncritical and clickbait reporting.

yonatron 3y ago

Notice they said "a tax on net wealth". That's just plain evil. You can't tax paper gains! Almost all of these billionaires have their holdings in stock. It's theoretical money, not cash. If you own a house, and the "value" of your house goes up 5%, should you be taxed on that gain? Clearly not. It's not money you actually have. How are you going to raise that money every year? Borrow? You're already in debt. And these fools already want to tax you on your "income" from borrowing as well. There's a reason all moral societies only tax realized gains. Also all these haters of wealth and capitalism are sorely lacking in math. Not even math, just arithmetic! If you forcibly took ALL the billionaires money ( which is what these haters REALLY want), about $12.2Trillion and gave it to the poor half (4.4 Billion people) everyone gets about $2,700. That's it. And one time only!! Woo hoo! Congrats! World poverty and lifestyle solved! NOT! Meanwhile, for the sake of your idiot ideological revenge, all the companies and employees and economic drive and sub industries and localities driven by the Billionaire's success amd enterprises are now ruined. Millions of people have now lost their jobs. Also no one will attempt it again. Great solution. #mathlessfools! In Britain, this fictional 22B per year over 65 Million people is a nice whopping 338 pounds per person. Again: problems solved. Not! And the rich, who drive economies and employ millions will definitely flee somewhere that doesn't perpetrate these stupid hateful laws. This is all about people thinking it's moral and virtuous to say "Sorry, you have too much! We've got to limit your success and take from you" #handicappergeneral #Marxism #famine It comes down to this: #killthegoose

rwmj 3y ago

Only tangentially related, but I'm enjoying this BBC Radio series Good Bad Billionaire: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0g7xj36 https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0g7xj36

edpichler 3y ago

They subtly write it as if it were a zero-sum game.

drcongo 3y ago
Yeah, in reality it's much worse than that.
bad_username 3y ago
... with fixed and immutable amount of total wealth.
- edpichler 3y ago
  ...so we will learn that "rich"="evil" and we have a war between classes. Classic indoctrination. Conflicts of interest are in all areas, including journalism. They could have just stated the facts and shown different angles of view.

beardyw 3y ago

In the past this sort of trajectory has led to bloody revolution. No one should discount that possibility. The tools to prevent it are, as before in the hands of the rich. As before they will probably do nothing.

ryzvonusef 3y ago

Why exactly do we multiply made up numbers and then get our knickers in a twist? $Current_Stock_price * #Number_of_Shares != Actual Wealth by owner of those shares. Like take "Ol'Muskie", if we are to believe the linked article above that "His fortune rose by $6 billion during December 2023", then are we to also believe he actually lost 200 BILLION BENJAMINS at the end of 2022? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-30/elon-musk-becomes-first-person-ever-to-lose-200-billion https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-30/elon-musk... He neither lost the money then, neither gained it now. It was just paper gains and paper losses. These are not Saudi princes or whatever, the "wealth" they have is meaningless. They are wealthy, absurdly so, but the exact number (and ranking on some list) are not worth bothering about. ____ I fully understand the need to tax rich individuals, but that requires adjustment to the tax code... an adjustment that would most likely be most fiercely fought against; not only by these dunderheads, but by the far less visible but the far more populous (and powerful) group of low-billionaires and multi-millionaires. I have long maintained[1] that the next-tier rich people have a far more secretive and negative effect per dollar; the ~10 or so tippy-top rich are just far too visible to escape the scrutiny in ways the next group does. Just my personal observation, I could be wrong. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38262314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38262314 ____ Like most people, the "loan against shares" in lieu of salary really grates at me. I think there needs to be some sort of "deemed salary" type thing, but it needs to have a carve out for people who truly are taking a loan against their assets as collateral. No idea what qualification for a "true loan" would be most fair, but here is an idea... There is an growing consensus that if you are a billionaire (or whatever wealth level is considered appropriate), then any shares you take a loan against, should be considered "sold" for tax purposes, and any gains should be realised and taxed... but if they start "repaying" the "loan", then they can deduct that amount from their future taxes. I think this might help offset some of the tax burden from the salaried class (also make things feel more fair), but I would love to hear if there are some flaws in this plan. ___ but we need to stop faffing over these "paper wealth" lists, that only re-direct our energies from where they need to be, and give us false targets to focus on.

nojvek 3y ago

These are the top 10. I don’t have a problem with them being rich, and using that money to create even better technology. (MSFT, GOOG, TSLA etc) What we should restrict is how much policy and fixed resources like land they control. Not only billionaires but housing is a great example of an asset that is mostly owned by the rich that makes them even more rich. Senators and Congressmen is mostly wealthy (top 1-2 percentile folks) making laws for their need and those who “donate” to their causes. 1. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX (Automotive, Aerospace) 2. Jeff Bezos: Amazon (E-commerce, Cloud Computing) 3. Bernard Arnault: LVMH (Luxury Goods) 4. Bill Gates: Microsoft (Technology, Software) 5. Warren Buffett: Berkshire Hathaway (Conglomerate covering insurance, energy, food, and more) 6. Larry Page: Google, Alphabet Inc. (Technology, Internet Services) 7. Sergey Brin: Google, Alphabet Inc. (Technology, Internet Services) 8. Larry Ellison: Oracle Corporation (Technology, Cloud Computing) 9. Steve Ballmer: Formerly Microsoft, LA Clippers owner (Technology, Sports) 10. Mukesh Ambani: Reliance Industries (Conglomerate covering petrochemicals, oil, gas, telecom, retail)

nojvek 3y ago

If you don’t like Elon being rich, don’t buy a Tesla. Or use Facebook to make Zuckerberg rich. They became rich because they built something valuable that a lot of people give them $$$ for. We the population made them rich. The big question is if the top reach is preventing the bottom from becoming rich? That is what we should be against. US will still keep on churning new billionaires as long as new ideas get to to complete with old ideas on the same grounds.

HEmanZ 3y ago
No, Elon is rich because he inherited $250 billion dollars from his parents who made the money off of slavery. /s I had a friend of mine who owns two teslas tell me this at a bar last month, in complete seriousness. I guess it is the zeitgeist of the internet right now.
bahama_mama 3y ago
People won't stop buying and/or using these products/services, because exactly what you said: > They became rich because they built something valuable that a lot of people give them $$$ for. We the population made them rich. There isn't many EV cars <$40k that can have >250mi range. There aren't many other powerful social networks as Facebook that can let people connect with their friends and families. An average Joe doesn't care about Elon nor Zuckerberg. Sure, they probably heard about Elon and his recent shenanigans, but it isn't much of a factor when purchasing a good/service. As a result, we can't rely on just society regulating wealth.

bahama_mama 3y ago

What I dislike about the current discourse in the American politics is the constant chatter about "reducing expenses". We have $1.7T deficit in 2023, so we would have to find cuts to account for that even if we just wanted to break even. It's nearly impossible. What about substantially expanding taxation to increase the federal income and fund more socially-responsible programs such as maternal care or child care. So the question is, who is going to pay a bit more? Random Joe who makes $100k/year or someone who sits on >$50B wealth?

sershe 3y ago

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics ... unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." I feel like it needs an explicit rule for "non-tech articles written, propaganda-lite style, to elicit rightful indignation"

keester 3y ago

I think you mean they doubled something with some equivalence to money .. what would that be?