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Yet your entire comment is essentially saying "He can do things I can't do!". So? Who cares? What's your point? Mine was that he doesn't have billions in ca
by b112 3y ago
Yet your entire comment is essentially saying "He can do things I can't do!". So? Who cares? What's your point?
Mine was that he doesn't have billions in cash, and by extension movements such as "tax billionaires until they are millionaires" makes zero sense. I've seen people advocate "tax billionaires to pay for UBI!", which of course is another "makes no sense" approach.
Why?
Well, let's pretend that someone with $50B in worth has $50B in cash. OK. So you take everyone that has >$1B in the US, take everything over that, and apply it to UBI. Guess what? You pay for one year of UBI. One year. Yet.. now.. there are no more billionaires left!
Of course the above doesn't track, as my point about "net worth" is that those $50B aren't cash, they're mostly ownerships in companies. Which means that the government is effectively going to have to seize those stocks, and force sell those stocks, but.. um, to who? Remember, there are now no more billionaires left!
Who would by all those stocks, now that there are no more billionaires? Certainly the market would crash completely, by offloading trillions in worth overnight. And we'd have moved into an entirely government run corporate economy, as the government now has majority voting rights on a large number of companies. Yay?
And still next year, no more money for UBI.
You stated that my take is only "high school" level, but it seems to me this communist "take all the money from billionaires" thought process is not even high school level. It's not thought through.
And part of that thought process is "What does the net worth of a billionaire mean"?
And of course, the above is complete nonsense too, as many companies are owned by other companies. Which eventually end back at investors.
So what do you do? If a company is owned by a company, owned by a billionaire, you then .. what, take that company? What if it's a bank investment fund worth billions, but oh no! Some of those investors are rich! Do you take that?
What's the goal here? To prevent individuals from steering large companies? Which of course isn't entirely the case, there are boards of directors (see this specific Musk case!).
And how do you deal with those horrible foreign billionaires? You can't tax them directly, so do you just take their stocks? The lesson being, "If I invest in US companies, they'll just take my money!".
None of this is thought out clearly by anyone I speak to, except "Those dasteredly billionaires have, and I don't, so take take take!".