Being a billionaire is like ascending to a higher plane of financial being where the trivialities of normal day to day expenses no longer matter to you. Unless you do really stupid things with that money it’s almost impossible for a billionaire to get poorer.
It’s a limit break on the functionality of capitalist society which regardless of the ethics of capitalism itself requires some sort of nerf/patch to prevent the billionaires from exploiting the rest of us and preventing us from striving to be what we want, wether that be a broke artist or a multi millionaire real estate developer.
I don't think any business should be allowed to grow above a certain size. I believe it's a massive net negative for society. I'd support a taxation system that prevents such an occurrence or nationalisation where the service is vital and economies of scale are beneficial.
When they reach a certain size businesses begin to distort the functioning of the free market. At this scale their sudden downfall would destabilise large sections of the economy. Therefore profit is siphoned into private hands until such an event whereupon society foots the bill.
A network of smaller businesses precludes this from happening. Any failure that affects enough of them to cause the same level destabilisation is likely to be a societal issue rather than mismanagement and would therefore be more deserving of public funds.
Smaller businesses also have less influence over politics.
How does politicians profiting from them solve anything.
My comment that you replied to is calling out whywhywhywhy's comment as bad faith because it's conflating tax collection with corruption, but says nothing that's specific to taxing billionaires. Your comment also doesn't say anything regarding taxing billionaires specifically.
Then we're in agreement that taxes are a necessity. Can we also agree that taxes should be collected fairly (even if we might disagree on what a fair balance might be)?
By building systems where teachers are not held accountable for output of their work you just have a broken system that doesn't help anyone.
Roads are a very small amount of tax money, not worth mentioning.
Without the tax funded school I, and the vast majority of my peers there, likely wouldn't be literate or numerate. I wouldn't have been in a position to win the lottery of a private school bursary.
The quality of the teachers at the the private school was certainly a little better but the worst were about as bad as any public school and the best not much better. The main difference was simply the level of funding.
> By building systems where teachers are not held accountable for output of their work you just have a broken system that doesn't help anyone.
I've found that teachers are the biggest critics of these systems. Rather it's the general public and administrators that have decided the role of the teacher is to do little more than act out a pre-defined curriculum with zero individual agency. In such an arrangement there's no individual output to judge.
Those choices aren't a feature of tax funded schooling. They're administrative/societal decisions to structure schooling in a particular way. It does not follow that schools must be structured this way if funded through taxes.
> Roads are a very small amount of tax money, not worth mentioning.
On a state level they're roughly ~6% of total expenditure. 3% greater than policing or prisons and only 3% lower than healthcare or education. Total expenditure >$200 billion total in 2019[0].
I don't think I've ever met a person who believes their roads to be particularly well maintained, which would point to a much larger figure being required to adequately maintain the infrastructure. It should also be noted that the $200b figure is pre-infrastructure bill.
[0] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
You’d think they would have risen up and stopped these new people from becoming rich. How hard could it have been?
[0] don’t righty know if anyone was a billionaire in the 70s
"Really stupid things" like buying a social media company?
Just because you own a company doesn't mean you have instant access to its value in cash.
If Musk wants to spend $100M tomorrow on a frivolity, he can.
And Elon literally was able to leverage billions of dollars to buy out Twitter (and then saddle Twitter itself with most of that debt because leveraged buyouts are a thing). He wasn't able to leverage that kind of money because his creditors think he'd do a so much better job at running the company. He was able to do it because they figured he'll be able to make sure they'd gain more from giving him the money than holding onto it. It's not a meritocracy.
Heck, ultimately this is what political power boils down to: not how much you have but how much you can do. And billionaires can do a lot more than a single person with a net worth closer to the median. Framing that in terms of purchase power is just a visual shorthand that's easier to understand without unravelling how the entire system operates.
> use a brand new luxury car as a dinner table … every day
then you will have to find a way on how to repay that money back to the bank.