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Comment by crummybowley | Hacker News Reader

I think math can help.

Even if we stole 10B from Bezos and gave it out equally to every US citizen... Its ~$30. Is this life changing for anybody in the US? If so what percent. Most beggars on the street clear more than $30 a day, some make $30 a hour!

So yeah, common core has failed us, and the inability to understand numbers is a problem.

I do this nearly every time somebody is upset somebody else has money. One time it was some Walmart executive. They got some multi million dollar bonus. I did the math, it would have been something like 2.27 a week more for all the employees.

Edit:

But yet we have folks still going around on twitter saying he could give everybody a million (some even a billion) and still have money left over.

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> Even if we stole 10B from Bezos and gave it out equally to every US citizen... Its ~$30.

I mean, obviously it's gonna look small if we fixate on Bezos specifically. If we "stole" a flat $1B from every American billionaire and paid it out equally to every US citizen, that stimulus jumps up to $1,996.70. If we "stole" all the money from every billionaire, that'd jump up further to $12,569.61.

We can go further. The top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion. If we "stole" all of that, the resulting stimulus would be a comfy $102,842.28.

> I did the math, it would have been something like 2.27 a week more for all the employees.

$122.58/year could very well make a considerable difference to someone barely scraping by. And again, you're fixating on one Walmart executive; what about the other executives who likely received similar bonuses? VPs? Middle managers?

lol.

If you made the top %1 liquidate all their assets to give to others everything would stop working. You would create more problems than ever.

Somebody would have to buy the assets, and because we are doing away with anybody who would have the sort of money to buy the assets, you would likely deadlock long before you would get 34 trillion out of the system. Like its mind boggling what you said. Where would this money come from? Other 1%ers who would then have to sale their assets?

Folks, Net Worth is not tangible, and even less tangible if you required a mass amount of folks to liquidate. It would simply drive prices down to a point where they were no longer in the 1% and then our economy would simply pop.

Every major system that moves money (this is what we want) would grind to a halt, and the folks you want to steal money for would simply have no job and have no cash flow.

But beyond that, stealing money assets, or even in this case "net worth" is immoral.

Bezos was a nobody driving a Honda Civic, folks just mad he drives a rocket now.

>But beyond that, stealing money assets, or even in this case "net worth" is immoral.

100% agree, so lets tax the fucker, and all the other fuckers.

> so lets tax the fucker, and all the other fuckers

I'm not a fan of Bezos or the other "fuckers", but how are American billionaires going to pay that tax? They'll have to sell assets to someone not subject to the tax, probably a billionaire from another country.

Do you really imagine anything will get better when most big American businesses are owned by foreign billionaires? Will working conditions in Amazon warehouses improve if Amazon becomes a subsidiary of Alibaba?

> They'll have to sell assets to someone not subject to the tax, probably a billionaire from another country.

Or you could tax the assets themselves, in which case it no longer matters who owns them. And seeing as how certain assets - like land - have inelastic supply (i.e. taxation doesn't affect the price point set by supply v. demand) and can't exactly be moved to offshore accounts, taxing the value of those assets would be far more economically sound than the current emphasis on income and payroll taxes.

If alibaba pays tax then I'm happy with that exchange.

> Somebody would have to buy the assets

Most of those assets fall into two categories:

1. Real estate, which doesn't need to be liquidated to be put under public ownership

2. Corporate shares, which don't need to be liquidated to be put under public ownership

The thought experiment around liquidating that wealth and cutting everyone a check was purely a response to your own hypothetical of liquidating a fraction of one billionaire's wealth and cutting everyone a check. Specifically, it was to point out that your "argument" misses the bigger picture around how much wealth is locked up in the accounts of even just billionaires, let alone millionaires.

> But beyond that, stealing money assets, or even in this case "net worth" is immoral.

Unless the wealthy do it through rent, lobbying, labor exploitation (including union busting), and monopolization, then it's all hunky-dory, right?

That's why I put "steal" in scare quotes. Retaking wealth already stolen from the working class is the precise opposite of theft, yet here you and others are, white-knighting for the poor millionaires.

Something's gotta give, or else the outcome will inevitably be far worse for that 1% than merely having to liquidate their assets.

So, you just gave the economy a one-time spending boost while "destroying the billionaires as a class". Let us also say that this action had no effect on purchasing power of the dollar, which is now mostly based on willingness of the rest of the world to trust it. (There are countries where 100 000 units of local currency won't buy you a nice dinner, but the US has never gone down this road, so most Americans just do not take this risk into account when modeling revolutionary changes.)

A year passes. Now what? No more billionaires to fleece, but the population demands some more, because spending windfall money is such a fun. So the next move is to fleece the millionaires...

Already the Ancient Greeks knew quite a lot about populist rule and its consequences. And the 20th century definitely tried it out in much larger dimensions, to much worse outcomes.

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