> $391,232,000 goes to the IRS.
Insane! On the one hand this mistake is a rare case of the rich paying a lot of tax. But very odd not to have tried to avoid this by (whatever rich people do)
Insane! On the one hand this mistake is a rare case of the rich paying a lot of tax. But very odd not to have tried to avoid this by (whatever rich people do)
In a better world, people would just laugh at anyone who tried to claim this (or, better yet, try to help them with their mental/social problem).
The difference in actual material wealth between the rich and the poor isn't that excessive today. Beyond a certain threshold you're only buying novelty. And the gap is shrinking every year.
Edit: money kind of represents a debt society owes to the individual. By owning the most money, it actually means that society is most indebted to them, or that they have loaned that many resources/value to society which has not yet been paid back, ironically enough.
You buy $1bn of commercial real estate you get $100m/y to maintain the upkeep in rent. You will be able to get line of credit to cover you for unexpected expense.
You could do that of course. But then you probably don't actually own the resource directly. You probably own the company in the form of shares, similar to money, another tradable token.
You're certainly not using the real estate for yourself like the comment we were replying to was saying. Indeed, if it's being leased then it's probably being used entirely by others!
1. Things have value.
2. People can own things, fractionally or entirely.
3. Owning a thing entails control of that thing.
So what does a world in which billionaires aren't allowed to exist look like? If the wealth is from creating a company, do we tax companies so progressively that it simply isn't possible for a billion-dollar company to exist in the first place? Do we take some fraction of the founder's company, and therefore their control over that company, away, e.g. with a wealth tax?
In principle I'm happy to ban billionaires, but I also don't love the idea of someone losing control of the company they created because other people decided it was too valuable. Asymptotically capping the growth of companies is appealing, but who knows what the second-order market effects might be (imagine if Apple had no incentive to scale to serve everyone who wants their products), and anyway one person can own multiple companies, so per-company limits by themselves won't put an end to billionaires.
The folks in mechanism design have to have done research in this area, but I'm not familiar with it.
At least that's how it can work out in Canada.