The good news is that humanity has saved up a few trillion for emergencies. The bad news is that it's been saved up and hidden in tax havens. Pity
Doing the same for an energy project that might actually pay back (unlike the covid losses) is far less disruptive.
Finally, the amount of money hidden away in tax havens by the rich is nothing compared to this. Don’t drag down something as important as the climate crisis with some smooth brained class warfare.
Try to tax it away and use it for something that would benefit everyone and suddenly it becomes a lot less abstract to him.
It really is weird how frequently I see the view you espouse and how nobody who repeats it seems to consider the clearest, most obvious counterexample that so completely disproves it.
So yes, I think what would happen is what did happen.
B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k.
The OP said "If Jeff Bezos dumped his entire holding [...]". I find it very hard to equate "dump" with "still over the course of a decade".
> B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k.
Now you're exaggerating in the other direction. The point is that if these people whose fortune is entirely stock of a massive company wanted to sell all of that stock for cold hard cash on the stock exchange in the same way you or I might sell our stock for a big purchase, they would actually only get a fraction of the nominal value ascribed to them.
Sure, if they do it slowly over the course of a decade, and if the business avruay survives that long at its current valuation (which Amazon might, but Tesla won't), then they can eventually actually get the fortunes they theoretically own.
Im just illustrating the difference between liquidity and wealth.
Contrast that with Jeff Bezos, who owns 10% of Amazon, or Elon Musk who owns over 20% of Tesla. Half of Gates's holding is nothing in comparison to half of Bezos's.
When you sell large share blocks like Gates did, you do it very slowly to avoid market impact. Elon Musk couldn't sell slowly enough to avoid an impact when he sold shares to buy Twitter.
The guy above was telling me this would drive the price down. You know what actually happened though. The share price went up.
The "billionaire shares are imaginary meme" is just a rhetorical trick designed to confuse the economically illiterate.
The only interesting thing about this meme is figuring out where it came from and how it was so efficiently pumped into the public consciousness.
Even so, you don't know how much higher the price of MSFT would be if not for Gates's selling. Other factors just drove the price up faster than he drove it down.
Either way the meme of bezos's wealth being a fiction is comprehensively disproved.
Market caps and startup valuations are fictions. That doesn't mean that they don't say something important - they convey information about who has market power, political power, technological progress, etc. All of those things are worth a lot. Fictions can affect reality. They are frequently more powerful than truths. Theranos, Nikola, and Tesla have all moved billions of dollars of real money on the back of fictional product descriptions.
The difference being that most of that money ended up in rich people’s pockets, and are now causing a global economic crisis.
The rapid increase in just human labor prices seems to indicate that money is making it to people somehow because COVID didn’t kill enough of the labor force to have that kind of effect.
Something mitigating an ongoing can be expensive, have the intended positive effect immediately, but not be paid back for a long time (or sometimes ever).
Federally subsidized flood insurance is a much smaller scale example. There are many places in Florida and the gulf in general where houses get destroyed by hurricanes and have to be rebuild for $X every 20 years when we only collect maybe 25% of $X in premiums.
Whenever I see something mechanical made of bronze or something it always looks like a real waste. New finishes and coatings look pretty good and composites are strong and corrosion resistant, and steel is cheaper.
Not everything can be replaced but some can.
Reagan's achievement was to eliminate tax shelters in exchange for lower tax rates. This pulled the investment out of those unproductive shelters into productive activities, leading to the prosperity of the 80s.
Many of our current problems can be traced back to changes which occurred in the 70s and 80s.
Yes, prosperity on GDP numbers, blessed be Its name. Unfortunately not everything is reduced to making line go up.
I'm amused you're blaming 2008 on Reagan.
That said, the link between presidential policy & short term economic changes is universally overstated. The government can cut down basic research funding and the effects won't be felt for a half century.
That can't help but produce positive economic changes.
I support tax cuts being tightly coupled with much reduced tax avoidance. Retroactively.
Citation needed. Show me data that demonstrates that use of tax havens is correlated to tax rates. The data over the last 30-40 years at least at first glance seems to disagree. Tax rates (in particular top income bracket, capital gains and corporate taxes) have continously reduced, while the amount of money in tax havens has increased.