Yeah so then they have 100 friends and family, with 999 million each.
These sorts of proposals are just laughable to anyone with common sense. It’s like putting a 1 foot tall fence around your lawn and thinking it’ll stop people from walking on your grass.
We keep a running total. $999 million lifetime. You can give it away, you can hoard it, whatever.
Oh and it’s also unrealized gains on assets. Net worth.
After that you should have enough for life. You should be free and clear on a home and have enough savings to live the rest of your days off of. Everything you ever earn from then on gets taxed at 100%.if your stocks split and now you have a net worth > $999mil, guess who’s auto-selling stocks and donating the profits to the sick and hungry kid’s foundation? Guess who’s building a new wildlife bridge over a highway?
Guess who’s name can be on the new high speed rail station?
How are you going to keep a running total? Realistically, how? Much wealth is not publicly known, especially given international holdings. No one knows how much money Putin has, for example.
And then you have the more basic issue that private companies don’t have a known true value. They have a book value for the real property they hold (real estate, buildings, equipment, inventory, furniture, vehicles, etc) but many companies have a potential value far in excess of that due to technology. That value can’t really be calculated until the business goes public or is sold.
So what you end up with is people will just give their friends and family shares in their private company, valued at a very low number, then later when they go public they can all go up to $999m before selling out.
The thing to realize about billionaires is that they have so much money they can hire an entire accounting department to circumvent basically any simple tax law you come up with.
Except land value taxes. Land can’t be moved and the land value is assessed based on the neighbourhood, not on any information the owner might hold secret, so there’s no way to avoid land value taxes if you want to own land.
I’m not the OP, but I think your comment underestimates the power of the government if it were actually brandished against these people. The government has far more resources than any billionaire and if its levers are pulled in the right order, it could do far more than insist upon itself.
The problem is an extended period of relative peace, wealth and success has not (yet) been conducive to those levers being pulled. But it’s coming. It’s inevitable, because wealth cannot help but create its own demise. We last saw it during the Great Depression, the hangover of the last Gilded Age. The robber barons of that era did precisely the same thing the modern ones are doing, and they looked similarly invincible.
I don’t think there’s anything inevitable in Earth history, except the Sun going red giant. Just because regular people clawed back some power against the robber barons doesn’t mean it could be done again in our time, with all the differences in technology.
Technology is a force multiplier. Not just for military/violent force, but for speech and the control of information as well. It’s not an anomaly that people keep re-electing the same incumbents over and over again.
The wealthy are leveraging more and more power while also undermining future generations, destroying education and social mobility. We may end up in a situation not too different from North Korea, where the millions starve and a handful live in opulence, enforced by a brutal military police state empowered by weaponry, mass surveillance, and AI.
Yeah so then they have 100 friends and family, with 999 million each.
These sorts of proposals are just laughable to anyone with common sense. It’s like putting a 1 foot tall fence around your lawn and thinking it’ll stop people from walking on your grass.
No no not $999mil in the bank.
We keep a running total. $999 million lifetime. You can give it away, you can hoard it, whatever.
Oh and it’s also unrealized gains on assets. Net worth.
After that you should have enough for life. You should be free and clear on a home and have enough savings to live the rest of your days off of. Everything you ever earn from then on gets taxed at 100%.if your stocks split and now you have a net worth > $999mil, guess who’s auto-selling stocks and donating the profits to the sick and hungry kid’s foundation? Guess who’s building a new wildlife bridge over a highway? Guess who’s name can be on the new high speed rail station?
How are you going to keep a running total? Realistically, how? Much wealth is not publicly known, especially given international holdings. No one knows how much money Putin has, for example.
And then you have the more basic issue that private companies don’t have a known true value. They have a book value for the real property they hold (real estate, buildings, equipment, inventory, furniture, vehicles, etc) but many companies have a potential value far in excess of that due to technology. That value can’t really be calculated until the business goes public or is sold.
So what you end up with is people will just give their friends and family shares in their private company, valued at a very low number, then later when they go public they can all go up to $999m before selling out.
The thing to realize about billionaires is that they have so much money they can hire an entire accounting department to circumvent basically any simple tax law you come up with.
Except land value taxes. Land can’t be moved and the land value is assessed based on the neighbourhood, not on any information the owner might hold secret, so there’s no way to avoid land value taxes if you want to own land.
I’m not the OP, but I think your comment underestimates the power of the government if it were actually brandished against these people. The government has far more resources than any billionaire and if its levers are pulled in the right order, it could do far more than insist upon itself.
The problem is an extended period of relative peace, wealth and success has not (yet) been conducive to those levers being pulled. But it’s coming. It’s inevitable, because wealth cannot help but create its own demise. We last saw it during the Great Depression, the hangover of the last Gilded Age. The robber barons of that era did precisely the same thing the modern ones are doing, and they looked similarly invincible.
I don’t think there’s anything inevitable in Earth history, except the Sun going red giant. Just because regular people clawed back some power against the robber barons doesn’t mean it could be done again in our time, with all the differences in technology.
Technology is a force multiplier. Not just for military/violent force, but for speech and the control of information as well. It’s not an anomaly that people keep re-electing the same incumbents over and over again.
The wealthy are leveraging more and more power while also undermining future generations, destroying education and social mobility. We may end up in a situation not too different from North Korea, where the millions starve and a handful live in opulence, enforced by a brutal military police state empowered by weaponry, mass surveillance, and AI.