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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain to me why you think taking all of the wealth of 100 billionaires will help the poor? 100 billion spread over the population of California is less than $3000/person. So you can wipe out all of the billionaires and give everyone $50/week for one year, what is that going to change?

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To add some context, California's tax revenue for 2014-2015 was $130bn. So having an extra $100bn would order-of-magnitude double their income for one year.

It's not clear to me whether or not that would make a big difference. I lean no, because my default assumption is that governments are really bad at spending money, but I could see it going either way.

Of course, there are also poor people outside California, and there's no particular reason to focus on the ones inside.

(I also note that 100 billionaires own considerably more than $100bn between them, but that's a minor nitpick.)

$3000/person is around or larger than the world's median individual annual income: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2016/05/giving-and-glob... .

I'd also expect the total wealth among the 100 billionaires to be well over 100 billion, considering just Ellison + Zuckerberg + Page together have over 100 billion.

In a similar vein to these two figures, the richest 62 people in the world hold as much money as the poorest 50% of the world: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/18/richest-62-... . As a direct consequence, if these 62 people gave all of their money (except for a couple million each) away immediately, 50% of the world would have twice as much money.

(edit: I'm not suggesting that billionaires instantly give all their money away as a direct cash transfer. Just providing a counterargument to "billionaires don't have that much power")

>$3000/person is around or larger than the world's median individual annual income

But we're not talking about the world, we're talking about spreading it over the citizens of California in particular, which have one of the highest incomes in the world.

If you want to talk about it in the scope the entire world, divide their wealth by 7 billion instead of 40 million to see what it gets everyone. Also, almost nobody in the US is for taxing the rich in the US to just give to citizens of other countries.

$3K per capita would be an enormous economic stimulus. Or give public schools $3K per student, and you'll see huge changes. It's a lot of money.

After $2500 for administration, there's just enough for a new aircraft carrier

I disagree, it's not simply the amount of money that is of concern here, but how it is allocated. Throwing money at problems is not the proper solution.

> Or give public schools $3K per student, > and you'll see huge changes. It's a lot of money.

Yes, you'll see them spend $3K more per student. You won't actually see any improvements in the students, though.

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/04/07/study-no-link-betw...

The public schools have many problems; lack of money is not one of them. Having any idea what to do with it is.

Well, this is kind of a red herring, because it's widely known that schools of all types have been drastically increasing their administrative bodies, ballooning costs without actually doing anything for the students with that extra administration. Plus also it's the CATO Institute.

Think about what you're saying: "It's a red herring! We know that schools spend money they get on dumb things!" Yes, that's my point. :) If we could magically fix that, it might--in principle--become a good idea to give them more money. Giving them money does not actually magically fix that.

It's worth noting that Maciej forgot that the tech barons he hates actually tried this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-newark-schools-p...

What I'm saying is that presenting a report which shows more money getting spent on not the students, but some side thing which doesn't actually benefit the students... That is the red herring. That report isn't actually about money spent on students. It's money schools are spending on "administration". If the money given to schools isn't spent on students, it is useless. Spending money on educating actual students (and not ballooning administrations) actually does improve student education, just ask any teacher and ignore the principal.

It would be essentially cash for clunkers, which wasn't an enormous economic stimulus.

> you can wipe out all of the billionaires and give everyone $50/week for one year, what is that going to change?

well if you put it like that, the world ...

It's only for citizens in California in my calculation, which already make much more than that on average. So it would hardly change anything.

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