The footnote proposes to tax capital the same as labor.
An interesting thing about Bill Gates is what a tiny sliver of GDP he managed to capture over almost 40 years. Something like $0.1 trillion out of several hundred trillion dollars.
Let's say the total GDP over the last 40 years was 300 trillion dollars. Also, let's say Bill Gates's wealth is 100 billion dollars (for ease of calculation).
100B / 300T = 0.003 = .3% of 40 years of GDP
Let's say that the average population of the US during that 40 year period was 170M[0].
170M * 40 years = 6.8B person-years of work (PYoW).
Bill gates contributed 40 PYoW to the GDP, which is 0.000000059% of the GDP.
However, he captured .3% of the GDP as current wealth (not including wealth spent during that 40 years)
That means his wealth capture is 5 million times the "average".
That 'tiny sliver' is anything but.
But that was the point of my post, to compare the captured wealth to consumption. People always talk about how the wealthy are screwing the rest of us over and everything would be great if they weren't taking so much, but it turns out that consumption is also a huge portion of the economy. Total wealth in the US is on the order of $100 trillion (this includes all housing and so on). Consumption of several trillion dollars a year adds up to that pretty quick and seizing it all and turning it into circuses isn't going to go very far.
Which isn't to say I am against programs that result in wealth transfer, it just pays to try to look at things clearly.
I addressed the comment you made, not the comment you didn't make.
I mean, I didn't painstakingly lay out my meaning, but there you go.
I'm not strongly tied to the language I used, I just find the comparison interesting.
GDP is the national income.
Going back to Adam Smith, "Wealth is the annual produce and labour of the nation". Elsewhere he argues that "the sole use of money is to circulate consumable goods". As a man not given to short sentences, I recommend paying attention when he uses them.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_II...
Defining, and measuring, and allocating wealth has been a bit of a conundrum for the past 240+ years. And a while before by some reports.