- Incredibly lucky.
- Benefitting by an initial position of advantage. Most often family or nation of origin, though gender, race, or religion also. "Winning the birth lottery".
- Benefiting by externalities.
- Exploiting monopoly advantage.
- (Frequently) Lobbying for advantage.
- (Frequently) Engaging in illegal activities.
- (Frequently) Engaging in unethical or exploitive activities.
There are numerous super-competitive hard workers who are not billionaires. Some were unlucky, some born in the wrong place or time, some burdened by consscience or ethics, some crushed by existing monopolies or entrenched interests.
You conveniently skipped over the part where the comment you're responding to said "family or nation of origin". If anything, more billionaires in 3rd world countries got their wealth through corruption and family connections. Take the top billionaires in Africa:
1. Aliko Dangote: see "Family and Personal Life" on his Wikipedia page, which includes "He is the great-grandson of Alhaji Alhassan Dantata, the richest West African at the time of his death in 1955."
2. Nassef Onsi Sawiris: His Wikipedia entry starts with "is an Egyptian billionaire businessman, the youngest of Onsi Sawiris' three sons". Onsi Sawiris was a billionaire.
3. Mike Adenuga is more self-made, but even then, "his mother, Omoba Juliana Oyindamola Adenuga, was a businesswoman of royal Ijebu descent."
There are other more notorious examples from that list of billionaires, like Isabel dos Santos.
I'm interested to see how you re-evaluate your argument "when put against facts".
It's weird, you're arguing against a point that no one else is making. Of course there are many billionaires whose individual intelligence, innate gifts, hard work and diligence were crucial to them earning their fortune. Just as obviously as there are many billionaires who earned their fortune through family, connections, graft, etc. (It's also pretty easily arguable the majority of the wealthy earned their money this way, given that for every "self-made" rich person there are usually loads more family members/connections who inherit or benefit from that wealth).
But the larger point is that nobody makes their fortune in a vacuum - even all these "self-made" rich relied upon the structures of their society to enable their wealth accumulation, so it seems more than morally fair that that society has a claim to some of that wealth so the next generation can reap the same benefits. Just look at all the Internet billionaires, or billionaires who rely on GPS. Both the Internet and GPS were created by the government, and it seems fair to me that the government take a chunk of the wealth enabled by the enormous investments into those systems.
Africa with a population of 1,216 millions has ... about 20 as you state (my tally from Wikipedia is 18, but I'll take the higher number).
By billions of population, that works out to 1,160/billion North America, and 16.4/billion for Africa.
It would seems odds might somewhat favour one born (or living in) North America. By a factor of roughly 70.
One might similarly compare Germany and India, with roughly similar counts of billionaires at 107 and 102, respectively, though slighly differing populations: 83 millions vs. 1.3 billions. The rate per billion works out to 1,289/billion for Germany and 75/billion for India, differing by a factor of 17.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_by_populati...
Or is it just hard work?
The assertion to which I ras responding, and disputing, was your statement: "The people who are billionaires are billionaires because they are super competitive and super hard workers."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24395252
You are now asserting a markedly different, and I would suggest inconsistent, position.
Not that I disagree with your sentiment. Just, there are non-trivial problems w.r.t. taxing wealth, as opposed to taxing income (which is probably already being paid in fungible, liquid, dollar bills).
Firstly, there are 2 types of capital gains. Short term gains are just taxed as normal income and long term gains are taxed from 0,15,20% depending on your bracket.
The whole purpose of lower taxes for longer gains is to incentivize longer term investments, encouraging people to stay in the market longer since any "lesser gains" could be offset by the lower taxes, and also fostering a much healthier type of growth as opposed to a quarterly focus.
If anything, I think short term gains should be taxed more. I think the current environment is quite unhealthy, with lots of speculation and people just getting a quick buck selling options on Tesla week to week.
On the other hand, the health industry (from drugs to hospitals) makes a shittoan of money, and most of it is by pushing BS on people and (in the US) by overcharging 10x simple procedures...
Could you give some examples? Real personal income has been rising pretty steadily for as long as the data has been collected [1]. So the median person earns more as the years go on, not less.
You could tax everything at the lowest rate at the point of sale but make people do the accounting and pay their real rate if they are in a higher rate. The "tax" at the point of sale would act like income withholdings do now.
You could categorize good so that yatchs have a much higher rate than groceries.
You could also come up with an average price for good so that really expensive e.g. clothes and cars are taxed at a higher rate than they are for "normal" goods.
All it takes is some creativity.
My point is that this will be a very large amount of effort for people, and there will be a large amount of tax evasion due to both laziness and greed.
It took me a while to understand consumption taxes, but now I'm fully in favor of them. The level of your standard of living is solely determined by what you spend money on, not your total wealth. Plus taxing consumption would be much easier and harder to skirt than a wealth tax.
It's actually just as easy, if not more. E.g. you don't "buy" a car, your trust/company buys it, and you just happen to use it for "business purposes". Same for all your other needs. And good luck trying to tax spending abroad...
A 10,000,000/year consumption by a billionaire is an insignificant part of their wealth and their annual revenue, but still allows for an extravagant lifestyle.
A 40,000/year consumption by a working class person make barely allow them to make end meet, and it might be everything they made in that year (and they might even owe a lot as well).
So, taxing 20% on consumption, would net 2M on the billionaire (a laughable amount for them) and 8K for the working class person (which could be a matter of life or death for them, some health treatment, their kids going to college, etc.)
a million seconds is about a 11.5 days. a billion seconds is about 32 years. a few million dollars to a billionaire is next to nothing.
Any tax can be made more progressive in implementation (high deductions, tiered rates, etc). Impact on poor vs wealthy shouldn't be a consideration when deciding what we want to tax.
Since much of this consumption is conspicuous, it's even possible that high levels of taxation could even be geffen-like:
Yes, we both have lear jets but I'm so rich and spend so much that mine cost _twice_ what yours did.
We need a tax system overhaul but I’m afraid no one has the political will to do it before stagflation creeps in from the current fed policies and bankrupts is all anyway.
From the practical perspective, if one has the same lifetime earnings as another, they will have paid the same amount of tax over their lifetime. Why should they be taxed again for choosing to save or invest that money?
I'm all for taxing any gain once it's actually converted into income (and while I understand the motivation behind different capital gains rates, I'm not super opposed to taxing capital gains as income.) Taxing wealth always seems to me to be explicitly taxing the choice to invest in the future or build something, though.
Taxing income disincentivizes circulation of money within community. When A does some work for B, B does some work for C, C does some work for D, and each of them pays a fraction of the income to the govenment, after a few steps the money effectively disappears from the community. The only way to get it back is to do some work for someone outside the community. But maybe the people A, B, C, D are effective at helping each other locally, but not really competitive at providing work outside the community. With no income tax, they could trade with each other. With income tax, their choices are either gray market or poverty.
Wealth tax hurts the startups. Income tax hurts the local communities. Land tax hurts the rent seekers. The rent seekers and startups have greater lobbying power than poor communities, and our laws reflect that.