It's Time to Tax Billionaires | Hacker News Reader

It's Time to Tax Billionaires

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88 pointsrntn177 comments

It always blows my mind seeing a post like this on HN and the top comments nitpick whether such a tax is needed.

These people don't need defending and they don't need that much money (for comparison, this was posted on here the other day and really illustrates the disparity quite well: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/).

The reasons for taxing them (including a flat rate on their net worth which would be a terrible way to tax people in lower income brackets but could be a great way to level things off at the top end where avoidance is rampant) are many: funding climate change reversal, poverty, health, housing, medical research, the list goes on.

We don't need more pedants splitting hairs about how to more effectively use the existing tax revenues. That is a distraction. We should do that too, but we should absolutely tax the hell out of the billionaire class who have been taking more than their fair share from our resources for decades and living at the expense of all of our futures.

Yeah, it's ahistorical. Some of these comments are soooo confident and condescending while ignoring basic history. Many high school kids know that the tax rate has gone down dramatically for the past 40 years. Turning that around even a little isn't some kind of hyper-leftist agenda. Like, is it really that radical to dial it back to where Reagan left it?

That itself is an ahistorical take. Tax as a percent of the economy has gone through the roof, both as a percent of GDP, and as inflation adjusted dollars.

If you compare to a benchmark like the 1940s, tax% of GDP has more than doubled, and GDP has increased ~4x. This means someone today taxes are about 10X the taxes (controlling for for inflation!)

Consider that 40% of US GDP now is collected in some form of taxation.[1] 40 cents of every dollar earned is taxed and spent as the government chooses. This is more than between FDR and Regan, and much more than the 20s (~15% of GDP).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Federal%...

Fascinating! How's that jive with the nominal tax rate being way higher back then? The highest bracket was 79% in 1940, and it's 37% today. Did we just get significantly better at taxing the middle class, or is there more at play?

The tax code in 1940 was not the current code with different rates but a different code entirely. To make an example (I am not a CPA and even less so a 1940s CPA): if you could have deducted your living expenses (food, rent/mortgage, clothes, vehicle etc.) even at the current rate you would not have been paying nearly as much in taxes as somebody who has to obey the current tax code. Same rate, different tax.

You really cannot express the tax regime with just a brackets table, the tax code alone, without IRS regulations and case law is 2600 pages as of now.

I see your source here, but something about this isn’t sitting right with me. My data science senses are tingling, and I feel like while these numbers may be correct, they may not tell a complete story. The implication that average joe is paying 10x in taxes what we were a few decades ago really does not feel like a believable conclusion.

My presumption is that government spending has drastically increased since then. There are so many more services that the government provides. If you look at government spending, healthcare and social security are the two biggest spenders, which makes sense since the population is ageing and there are a lot more older people to provide money and services for.

You are supposed to argue over minutiae of means-testing and bankrupting the economy when it comes to social programs for the poor/average person. However when it comes to taxing the rich, nothing short of the Perfect Government is good enough to administer such an increase in tax revenue.

It always blows my mind seeing people defending any tax when they can clearly see with their own eyes how ”good” is the government at spending the money it currently takes from us. And you want to give them more?!

Massive right wing strategy is to use the laws to make it nearly impossible for a government agency to function effectively, and then point to the ineffectiveness as a reason to defund it.

The fact is, government works pretty well in a lot of ways in a lot of countries.

That excuse does not explain the fact that the government services are crappy no matter what wing is on power and that the costs and size of said government are ballooning every year. Come on, for half the money I make I get a handful of substandard services while the other half gets me everything else in my life?!

There are ~200 countries on the globe. In how many do you think the government works well? 10%? 20%? Certainly in a minority of them.

How have they been living at the expense of all of our futures? What does that say about (cliche alert) bill gates who is a famous philanthropist (for the most part) and created whole industries worth of jobs with Microsoft?

Tax the rich (which we already do btw on the account they are citizens) is just another badly thought out cliches people love to throw out at bleeding hearts for internet points

Crazy idea, but maybe inheritance is flawed? What would happen if there wouldn't be any inheritance at all, the money goes to the state and in return gives people a basic income and a lump sum when you turn 18?

Pretty much feudalism: the current middle class would have to rent housing and agricultural land, owned by corporations, where the heirs of the current upper class hold high-paying but undemanding positions.

> With effective tax rates equivalent to 0% to 0.5% of their wealth, billionaires are proportionally taxed far less than ordinary citizens.

In countries with income taxes but not wealth taxes, that's not surprising and not an indication (to me) of "evasion".

But it's a convenient soundbite, despite being misleading in the context of inclusion in a "GLOBAL TAX EVASION REPORT 2024".

It is in fact for many people a solid argument for a wealth tax.

> that's not surprising and not an indication (to me) of "evasion"

Not directly, but it is indirectly. Overwhelmingly, wealthy people write more (tax) laws than poor people. It's in the wealthy's best interest to help themselves as well as their peers.

The United States makes an astounding amount of money in taxes already.

Why isn't the emphasis on using the current tax dollars more efficiently?

Every government institution that I have been a part of has massive amounts of waste and not on a small scale either..but on a large scale. universities, scientific research labs, government grants, defense industry, bailing out banks who gamble with client money, etc.

They lost billions in Iraq. No one knows where it went.

We're giving billions to Ukraine with zero strategic interest to the United States.

Bills pass constantly in Congress with funding riders that have absolutely nothing to do with the bill itself.

We don't need more taxes in America.

We need some accountability for where our current money taken in taxes is being allocated.

Two competing partial solutions to fiscal health?

Why not both.

I don't know whats a more intractable problem making the government more efficient or taxing "wealth".

I'm open to both but my gut instinct tells me that there would be less unintended side effects by just making the government more efficient.

However, I can imagine massive problems trying to do either.

Less side effects. But also much harder to implement. Especially when the people with the power to change things are incentivized not to change it.

So let just settle for the next best thing while we ride this clown show for as long as it can last. Because let be honest, the US gov is still doing an OK job compared to some truly dysfunctional ones out there. Not many Americans are dying to emigrate yet.

I think people come here despite the government.

If they wanted a good government they would move to some country in Europe which pays slightly more taxes but they get way more value for it.

I don't think the US government is doing a good job at all for the amount of taxes we pay.

As someone from europe let me assure you that the government also provides shit value for all the taxes we pay. The majority of taxe money get's just wasted and that is even the best case, worst case it is used for active suppression and attack of people and their rights.

It's hard evidence that shows European healthcare systems being more effective yet costing much less.

European countries have safety nets much more rigorous than the United States.

Education is much cheaper in many European countries than the US.

Also a wealth tax is pretty hard to implement itself. See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37989924

>They lost billions in Iraq

You're absolutely correct, but I just want to emphasize the scale: trillion. That's over a thousand billions. It's an amount that's so huge it's truly hard to comprehend and visualize.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_W...

Exactly. They spent Trillions which is insane.

What I was referring to is like 12 billion just unaccounted for!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_misappropriat....

There are practical limits to efficiency. I have worked in both the public and private sector in my decades long career, and I can't say that private efficiency is that much better than public efficiency.

I disagree. Maybe you've worked in more efficient government agencies, but I've worked in both sides and the private industry groups Ive worked with arent perfect but are massively more efficient.

Or perhaps you have just worked for more efficient private industry groups.

There is waste in private enterprise to be sure. The key difference is that that mostly punishes people who voluntarily invested and can choose to stop investing if they get fed up with it. That's (practically?) not at all the case in terms of federal government waste.

What makes that the key difference? Doesn’t it depend on what you care about?

The voluntary part is the key difference from a libertarian perspective, but it is not the most important bit if your goal is to, say, minimize suffering for the worst off in society.

These taxes would only affect an incredibly small amount of the population, so it's pretty much invisible to anyone but billionaires. We definitely need accountability more than taxing billionaires though. Most billionaires would probably settle just under the threshold that they get hit with these taxes. There is also plenty of infrastructure to hold more assets without it counting towards your billionaire status. It may actually become an unenforceable tax, but I don't think we know yet.

Ukraine is destroying Russian military equipment and killing its soldiers; I think that's a strategic win to weaken Russia. Plus the US frankly needed to claw back some of its reputation after Trump, so aligning against an invader helps that while avoiding outright war.

Russia's economy is the size of Italy.

The United States would utterly destroy them and any other country (except mayyybe China) in an outright military battle. Like it wouldn't even be close. No help from Ukraine needed.

We have 11 aircraft carriers here in America. No other country has more than 2 aircraft carriers. Our military dwarfs other militaries both technologically, financially, and in sheer power. Just spitballing but I bet we could probably reduce our military strength by 50% and still beat almost every country in the world.

We struggled with asymmetrical guerrilla warfare back in Vietnam so that could be a problem but in a head-to-head battle like world war II, we're unbeatable. I'm also assuming they've advanced quite a bit in knowledge/technology of taking on asymmetrical geurilla warfare nowadays.

However, the massive force equalizer is Russian nuclear weapons and I don't see Ukraine getting rid of any of those.

> However, the massive force equalizer is Russian nuclear weapons and I don't see Ukraine getting rid of any of those.

I learned something new today! Apparently Ukraine used to be the third largest nuclear power in the world, then handed them all back to Russia.

> The former Soviet Union had its nuclear program expanded to only four of its republics: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. After its dissolution in 1991, Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power in the world and held about one third of the former Soviet nuclear weapons, delivery system, and significant knowledge of its design and production.[2] Ukraine inherited about 130 UR-100N intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) with six warheads each, 46 RT-23 Molodets ICBMs with ten warheads apiece, as well as 33 heavy bombers, totaling approximately 1,700 nuclear warheads remained on Ukrainian territory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_de...

Interesting. did not know that. Looks like they possibly destroyed some too back in the 90s?

> We're giving billions to Ukraine with zero strategic interest to the United States.

This is a bewilderingly head-in-the-sand assertion.

I haven't seen any evidence showing that Ukraine provides any strategic interest to the United States.

I'm open to being wrong if I see any compelling evidence.

It's significantly weakening one of the US's greatest geopolitical enemies for a small fraction of the US defense budget.

Even if you don't care about the US's geopolitical aims and want to reduce the defense budget, eliminating Russia as a military threat is the best justification for reducing the defense budget and stabilizing European democracy.

Russia is not a military threat though. It has an economy the size of Italy. Three US states each have bigger economies than Russia. The US blew past it on every level militarily, technologically, and economically decades ago.

It has nukes but Ukraine doesnt solve that.

>Russia is not a military threat though

Community Notes: Russia is literally invading a US ally right now.

So what?

USA is not the world police.

If there's no strategic interest or benefit I don't think I should have to work a few extra hours per week to help pay for that war.

>no strategic interest or benefit

There is a lot of strategic interest in the US helping against Russia.

>I don't think I should have to work a few extra hours per week to help pay for that war.

Then vote for different politicians or move countries.

These current politicians are continuing to skyrocket the national debt.

I don't have to vote for new politicians. I just have to wait for the dollar to collapse.

I suppose that not allowing Russia to massively increase their power is an important benefit well worth billions to the US.

I don't understand how Russia is considered powerful. Its got an economy the size of Italy. Three US states each have economies larger than Russia.

The US is light years ahead of Russia, economically, militarily and technologically.

Well you seem to be making two parallel points. It's common and uncontroversial to rail against bureaucratic inefficiency. But you sully that point by mixing it in with less obvious areas of "waste" like Ukraine. There is accountability for Ukraine aid. The government is very open about that aid and there are competing politicians who are openly against it. The electorate can vote for their preferred policy if it's that important to them.

You seem to argue that it's only accountability if it results in your ideal policy. I disagree - after all, if instead you got your way then would I be able to argue that the politicians weren't held accountable for throwing Ukraine to the wolves? Hardly.

Syria, Yemen, Crimea, Darfur, Rwanda...we throw countries to the wolves all the time. In many cases the USA IS the wolf. I think the USA killed half a mil innocent civilians in Iraq part 1 and 2? The people in charge clearly arent hung up on noble intentions.

Russia has the economy of Italy so its not even remotely a threat militarily or economically. They have nukes but no matter what happens in Ukraine it doesnt get rid of those.

The US exports more oil than it imports so its not really oil fields.

So I dont understand the strategic interest of Ukraine.

I think our tax money could be used for something better.

If its your view that the billions given to fight the Ukraine is an efficient use of resources thats cool. Ignore that part of my post. It wasnt meant to start a flame war, I am open to friendly discussion though

> So I dont understand the strategic interest of Ukraine.

How is it not in Americas strategic interest to decimate its biggest military rival, whilst committing a small fraction of its yearly military budget?.

At the same time it reduces Russian military exports and makes them look incredibly weak.

It also helps defend democracy in Eastern Europe.

> biggest military rival

Russia has the economy the size of Italy. Three American states have bigger economies than Russia. Were more advanced than them on every level technologically economically militarily. The only thing they have is nukes which they'll still have no matter how Ukraine turns out.

We would wipe the floor with them in a head on military conflict.

> defend democracy

That's been the propaganda reason for previous wars...

> Russia has the economy the size of Italy. Three American states have bigger economies than Russia. Were more advanced than them on every level technologically economically militarily. The only thing they have is nukes which they'll still have no matter how Ukraine turns out.

That doesn't mean they aren't a military rival, Russias been building up there military stocks for decades, and inherited huge stockpiles as the successor state to the USSR.

That stockpile pile is being so quickly decimated that Russia is starting to dig into there stockpiles of tanks that are 60+ years old.

> That's been the propaganda reason for previous wars...

In what way is helping a country defend itself from a brutal imperialistic invasion not helping defend democracy?.

> helping a country defend itself from a brutal imperialistic invasion not helping defend democracy?.

It's not anything that I'm willing to work a few extra hours a week to pay for.

That kind of attitude and appeasement is exactly what lead us to WW2.

World wars are over. Countries have Nukes now.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and now Palestine. The blood thirsty war mongerers must keep it going. Disgusting.

The wealth tax feels to me like "we've tried nothing and we're out of ideas". If we want to tax billionaires, we should start taxing their income. Undoing the tax changes since Reagan would go a long way. If it isn't possible to do that, then it won't be possible to tax wealth. If it doesn't work, then we can consider wealth tax.

Undoing a lot of what Reagan did is needed.

Taxing Billionaires is tricky... they can manipulate data (like anyone else) to show their actual income as 0 dollars.

I'm more worried about what would happen to the money thus produced... the US government has been digging itself a large fiscal hole the last 3 years and shows no sign of stopping.

Problem with taxing income is that they take out debts, paying taxes on the minimum payments, and then pass the assets with stepped up basis to their heirs.

What income? Buy, Borrow, Die. Most of their income is not traditional income. They live in debt because debt isn't taxable.

Buy, borrow die relies on the step-up in basis upon death though; it's a bit of a loophole (albeit with some justifications) which could be closed. I tend to agree that the focus should be on closing loopholes before trying an entirely different tax.

Do billionaires make income? Don't most of them just have absurd quantities of stock in a valuable company that grows to an absurd value, and instead of selling it they just borrow against it? Stock (at least in the US) has traditionally not been taxed until sold.

EDIT:

Ah, I just saw that HumblyTossed made the same point I did; I should have read the other comments.

One way to stop that is to get rid of the step-up in basis on inheritance, or modify inheritance tax to be on a similar level to income tax.

Or make loans against stock value a taxable event.

Or even just saying "loans above $N are a taxable event", and make that value like $500,000. This would allow like 99% of the population to actually borrow against their stocks in the case of an emergency without having to liquidate their stocks or be punished for it, but $500,000 is nothing for a Bezos or a Musk.

This would only stop borrowing via loans that are collateralized by stock assets. These banks would presumably still offer uncollateralized loans to these folks (you have $X billion dollars, I'm confident you'll be able to pay off a loan for 2% of that, here you go, no collateral needed). Then, the end effect will be slightly riskier loans for the banks, and slightly higher interest rates for the billionaires.

And if you set the limit at $500k, you're going to block rich, but not super rich folks from taking out loans to start new businesses, etc. To me it seems this would hurt more than help.

Fair! What I don't know about this stuff is a lot. I'd actually like to see an economist break down what they think is the best way to approach this.

That would have a substantial cooling effect on the housing market as well. (I don't think that's a good thing, but some may.)

Billionaires seem to be quite skilled at avoiding inheritance tax. They have avenues for passing on generational wealth besides what most people imagine as passing it all directly via a will. For example, they can create a corporation that owns and manages their vast assets, and then transfer control of that corporation.

In theory, a wealth tax is a perfect tax because it's a tax that incurs minimal deadweight loss. This is why lots of economists are proponents of land value taxes. The problem is that any sort of wealth that isn't tied to land or a commodity is completely subjective, so the ultra rich will always be able to find some loophole to any practical application of a wealth tax.

I cannot understand taxation for the sake of taxation. The purpose of taxation is to divert those funds to pay for something.

"We want to fund a new healthcare program, so we are going to pay for it by an increase in taxes" makes sense.

"We want to tax billionaires because they should pay more tax" does not make any sense.

I don't think that's actually true since the 70s with the introduction of modern monetary theory. If I understand that correctly, taxes serve effectively as a means of decreasing wealth disparity, subtracting money out of the economy, and ensuring that a minimal level of work gets done. They are not a means of paying for things, at least at the federal level. At the state level, where they don't control the money supply, I think it might matter more.

I know that MMT is a bit controversial in economic circles, and I am very much not an economist, but that's my understanding.

MMT is mostly magical thinking

There is an element of truth

I'll admit that I'm getting my lay-person's understanding of it from "The Deficit Myth" by Stephanie Kelton, who is a real economist but I have no idea how respected she is in the fields of economics.

> The purpose of taxation is to divert those funds to pay for something.

That is a purpose of it.

But another use of taxation is to act as a counter-balance against the natural property that power is self-reinforcing: When you're rich, that gives the power to increase your wealth. And as that system iterates over time, inequality increases.

I think it would be a better world if we taxed the rich more even if we just straight up burned the money.

But, also, you can do useful stuff with the money. If nothing else, you can use it to lower taxes on everyone else.

Agreed, I see the billionaire tax as a bandaid to the wealth inequality that unchecked capitalism inevitably creates.

Our system is built to funnel money away from the average worker and towards the top of management. Over time the boss wages grow and the labor wages shrink relative to the cost of living due to the incentives of those making the rules at the top.

This solution seems crude, it takes a slice of money off the top to relieve the tax burden for those at the bottom. It doesn't fix the root cause of inequality but at least it's a patch.

Why "bandaid"?

Or asked differently, how would you fix the root cause of inequality?

I believe wealth tax is the best fix for the root cause of inequality.

I see the root cause as being this observation: If you have power, you can use the threat of it to make people do things for you. Wealth is liquid power, and the threat of using it doesn't spend it.

The effect of that is that inequality has a natural tendency to grow: those with a little more can use that as leverage to get even more and repeat that process over and over.

Widespread progressive taxation is the most effective tool I can think of to act as a damping force on that positive feedback loop.

I agree.

How would you execute a wealth tax? People having power can avoid it by preventing legislation and after legislation by using loopholes.

> People having power can avoid it by preventing legislation

I think a fundamental precondition is a functioning democracy. The magic of democracy is that it subverts the usual dynamic of "wealth = power". The currency of democracy is votes and in an election, everyone has equal spending power to purchase the candidate they want.

Of course, lobbying, campaign financing, and all sorts of other shenanigans undermine that. I don't have a good solution beyond pushing for more civic engagement.

All of the forces working against democracy are driven by capitalism. We need to at least remove capitalist influence from government and social programs because our goal should be to maximize living conditions for all, not to maximize profit for a few.

Otherwise, the US is run by and/or funded by institutions that are legally obligated to shareholders to maximize profit over human well-being, and the ultra-rich get to hide behind these frameworks to shield them from guilt.

Like you said, I don't think there is a great way to fix this without an overhaul of the entire government and voting systems to return power to the people.

Respectfully, I disagree.

Forces working against democracy are driven by people wanting more power at the cost of the majority. These people can head companies. So it might look like capitalism is trying to infiltrate a democracy.

As the other person said, more widespread wealth taxation sounds more effective than just going after billionaires but it's a start. I don't think lowering taxes on the poor is going to raise them out of poverty though, the issue runs much deeper than that.

The overall root cause would be much more complicated to fix. There is a lot of inequality built into the US that needs to be changed from the top and that probably isn't going to happen with a 2-party system where the 2 parties are fairly similar and block each other from making progress. Also, have so few choices when voting prevents any minority party from having a chance.

I think that would involve rank choice voting across the board is critical. It would allow new political parties and candidates to come into power and people could finally vote for politicians they like instead of voting against politicians they dislike. Obviously we also need more fair election funding and an end to corporate lobbying. We need to interrupt all the corruption before we can begin making very much progress.

The issue with all of this is that the people at the top with power have nothing to gain and everything to lose from these changes.

Consider some of the criticisms in the following video. I realize that the video says my suggested methods are futile, but I still see them as the path of least resistance towards progress.

https://youtu.be/oYodY6o172A?si=kr2A2RjEVBQvGW_s

I assume there's a jealousy component.

That being said, the current tax code is pretty unfair and stupid, but a wealth tax is not the answer. Fixing the tax brackets (which currently top out federally when you earn ~500K or so, instead of increasing exponentially up to the highest earners), and increasing the capital gains (including long term) tax brackets would go a long way to fix the problem.

It baffles me when presumably smart people on HN overlook the simple solution and clamor for a wealth tax, which would be incredibly expensive and impractical to implement, require Orwellian surveillance of people's property, and would potentially upend the pattern of having the most productive people in society tying all of their net worth to their company, and not being beholden to short-sighted boards of directors.

> I assume there's a jealousy component.

Really?

I somehow doubt that. I'm not jealous of Bezos, Musk, etc. With my income, I have money left over after I buy the essentials and the non-essentials. I honestly have no idea what I would even do with a billion dollars except give almost all of it away. I don't want a mansion. I don't want a million dollar sports car. I don't want to pay a captain a full time salary to sit in a marina waiting on me to decide to take a cruise. I don't want any of that. I don't.

What I want if for kids to have free lunches and a great education. I want homeless to be taken in and given shelter and food. I wan't everyone to be able to just go see a doctor on a regular basis. Those are things I want. And the wealthy are keeping those things from happening. Either by electing (or being elected) people who won't do it or just not paying fair amount of taxes.

What's stopping you from voting for the things you want and voting for your own taxes to go up (and everyone making around the same as or more than you) to pay for it? Why target a few billionaires with an entirely new type of tax system rather than just increasing the rates and decreasing the legal deductions on the system we have now?

You already admitted that you have more money than you need? Why not divert that, via taxation, to the things you want?

I never vote against increasing my taxes unless it doesn't make sense what it's going to be used for. Nothing I said indicated to the contrary. Nothing I said indicated that I wasn't willing to put up my own money also.

Nothing is stopping them from voting on those things... if they are on the agenda. But with a duopoly consisting of two business-oriented parties you are unlikely to see it on the agenda.

> What I want if for kids to have free lunches and a great education. I want homeless to be taken in and given shelter and food. I wan't everyone to be able to just go see a doctor on a regular basis.

It's not that I disagree with the content of the platitudes you are preaching, but it's so nonspecific, pointless, and self-righteous that I have no idea what you want, except to "tax the rich", which is meaningless, since they are obviously already taxed. I advocate for a specific, true progressive income tax bracket that stretches brackets up logarithmically to within an order of magnitude of the highest earner from the previous year, and also applies to the current long term capital gain situation. That's the solution to increasing income disparity, but I don't think being rich is some inherent evil.

> And the wealthy are keeping those things from happening.

Assuming you can prove your conspiracy, what is your solution? Killing them? Why not just fix the tax brackets? My point is that you and many others spend a lot of energy harboring negative intentions toward people who have done nothing to you simply because those people have a lot of money, even if they earned that money through voluntary value generation. Maybe you don't like to call it jealousy, but it's something unhealthy.

Besides, one could argue that Elon Musk, with all his flaws, has generated a lot more value to society than you or I or the equivalent increase in budget for the Department of Education if you taxed him into oblivion (such that he couldn't start SpaceX or buy a controlling stake in Tesla) after he sold his stake in Paypal...

> The purpose of taxation is to divert those funds to pay for something.

The purpose of taxation is to shape behavior.

Not in the Constitution in my country, member of EU. What "EU Tax Observatory" wants is actually against the Constitution here.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to frame this problem as "we want to tax billionaires because they should pay more tax". While a small minority of people do actually feel that way, realistically the context is just about every government in the world is running a deficit nearly all the time and just about no one wants to lose programs they care about so we need some method of addressing that shortfall. Taxing the people who can most afford it, especially in ways that generate significant government revenue seems like the best solution to many.

Tax everyone to slow movement, pull everyone closer together and claw back inflation.

The Fed was running on cheap money for a long time, the pendulum swings the other way eventually..

Ask some doctors

Ask some teachers

The lack of cash is not the only problem, but generally it is a big problem

Care to debate the theory behind this particular policy proposal? What problem is it aiming to solve? Is this problem really so bad? Why or why won’t it be effective at solving said problem? Etc.

Structuring tax policy to incentivize behaviors deemed economically healthy is nothing new. You may not like this or agree with all the specific policies, but it’s still a thing. Why pretend otherwise? How those revenues are spent are again a matter of debate themselves and another topic altogether.

What's your tax bracket? Don't answer, but consider if it's higher than the 8% rate paid by America's billionaires.[0] Mine is, and so is that of every engineer, doctor, lawyer, and executive I know. Fast food workers pay 10%.

Our taxes have been paying for something all along: yachts!

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/09/23/...

Arguing for taxes because of (both) funding things as well as creating a more egalitarian society is absolutely an argument you see made in more social democratic societies (than the US).

We've been conditioned to the current levels of revenue in our governments and that everything is "too expensive" to get done. This cuts off any discussion of what can be done by government on the other end and becomes a circular argument.

This gets brought up alot, and a few things always tend to spoil it.

1) the world is global, if the US did this then alot of billionaires would suddenly move to Canada. Until the tax code is unified people will chose where to live partially based on taxes.

Look at how many people move from Silicon valley to Texas or Washington just before their companies IPO.

People will just move to avoid the tax. THere are plenty of countries worth living in that don't have a wealth tax. France found out the hard way.

https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/education/2021/02/11/le...

2) Wealth is not as easily measured as people want it to be. And most wealthy put assets inside corporations so not much wealth is held in their name. Can you tax a person for wealth held in a corporation outside of the US?

Tax treaties tend to distinguish between hard asset held in a country, factories and real estate and less tangible assets, like stocks, dividends, etc.

3) Right now alot of people complain about being taxed on stock options for illiquid options to begin with. We've all heard horror stories about tech employees having to exercise their options and pay tax on that when they can't actually cash out the shares to help pay the tax burden.

How do we tax an employee who holds millions of dollars in illiquid options that are well in the money? And how is that different than taxing someone on the price of a Picasso painting that a billionaire owns but has very little liquidity?

If you claim that the billionaire can just sell the painting for what people will pay for it even if its pennies on the dollar, then you can argue so can the tech employee. Someone will always buy your shares for pennies on the dollar if you don't want ot pay the wealth tax.

> the world is global, if the US did this then alot of billionaires would suddenly move to Canada.

Yeah, just like how there are no companies in states with high taxes because raising the corporate tax rate will just cause companies to move and only leave small companies like Google who can't afford to move stuck with the bill.

We have a long historical trend of observing people moving to avoid taxes. Just ask Europe with its 0 billionaires.

> Yeah, just like how there are no companies in states with high taxes because raising the corporate tax rate will just cause companies to move and only leave small companies like Google who can't afford to move stuck with the bill.

This is false, though you are correct that companies do often leave jurisdictions with high taxes to move to low tax areas.

> We have a long historical trend of observing people moving to avoid taxes.

Fully in agreement here.

> Just ask Europe with its 0 billionaires.

Europe doesn't have 0 billionaires. They have a few, but to your point they are very underrepresented, so you are directionaly right here.

I guess the /sarcasm tag was indeed necessary. I didn't feel the need because I thought what I said was trivially verifiably false and was clearly making a mockery of your prior comment.

To my point about Europe, I'm not under the impression that there are few billionaires in Europe because either: 1) entrepreneurs move from Europe to the US to start a company from the ground up or 2) begin in Europe and then move headquarters to the US (more likely Ireland), or 3) personally move residency regardless of their company location.

I'll note that the US taxes you wherever you are. In fact, one of only 2 countries to tax based on citizenship. So Americans moving to Canada wouldn't do anything without them renouncing their citizenship. So that would really make it unlikely that billionaires are moving residence just for tax avoidance. I mean we don't even see a lot of that with states. California and New York both have the greatest number of billionaires AND have some of (if not) the highest tax rates in the entire country.

I'm just saying (as I was using satire to express) that we don't see your claim of "people will move." This has been a long cried claim that has never proven to be reasonable, despite being claimed for decades (and truthfully, even longer). I'll stick with my observable correlations over old Tea Party propaganda.

Idk, I'll drop a source or something in case that one stat isn't convincing enough (or recognizing that 4 of the top 10 global companies are in CA and only 1 of those 10 companies moved (Tesla)).

https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-tax...

Ha sorry, yes I assumed you were serious.

> I'm just saying (as I was using satire to express) that we don't see your claim of "people will move."

To poke a huge hole in your theory that problem don’t move to avoid taxes I’ve posted a link. France tried A billionaire wealth tax and people moved to avoid it. The tax was a disaster and they scrapped it.

So that’s provable true that people will live to avoid such taxes.

https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/education/2021/02/11/le...

Yeah, I don't think it doesn't cause people to leave (certainly no thing is absolute) but rather suggesting that we don't see this to be a large effect in practice. And my understanding of that specific example is that it has some quirks with France's specific implementations as well as the high movability in Europe. Every billionaire has a house in the South of France and can get there relatively easily but that's not so easy in the US despite not being too hard to change state residence (like changing country residence within the EU for good parallel), but country (non-intra-EU) changing is much more cumbersome. Plus, as we've established, if you're American you have to renounce your citizenship to avoid taxes. So... definitely no reason to move to Canada. Just saying...

Because it is hard does not mean it should not be done. If they leave, they leave. One would expect tax regime iteration as loopholes are detected, closing them. Perfection is unattainable, but also unnecessary.

Wealth is simply rows in a database (public securities) or paperwork at custodians (whether private equity, real estate, art, etc). The same systems that would defend your ability to own can tax what you own. You can't own without government enabling it.

"Oh no the billionaires might leave." And? The world existed before such wealth accumulation, and it will be fine without them.

> Wealth is simply rows in a database (public securities) or paperwork at custodians (whether private equity, real estate, art, etc). The same systems that would defend your ability to own can tax what you own. You can't own without government enabling it.

I'd argue alot of wealth isn't tracked like this. How would you query for who owns all the Picassos in the world?

How would you track off shore money? What specific database are you suggesting we query?

You get to a point very quickly where you realize that wealth is even more of a black box than income and is even harder to track and record.

> Picassos

Transaction and insurance reporting.

> How would you track off shore money? What specific database are you suggesting we query?

FinCEN (https://www.fincen.gov/) and other related entities. Plug into any institution with a license to hold value.

Propose the asset class and I will tell you how to find it and suss out who owns it in a way trivial for government to implement.

Here is a recent example of FinCEN closing a reporting gap: https://www.fincen.gov/boi ("Beginning on January 1, 2024, many companies in the United States will have to report information about their beneficial owners, i.e., the individuals who ultimately own or control the company. They will have to report the information to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). FinCEN is a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.") As future gaps appear, close them.

(a component of work has been at asset custodians and I am familiar with reporting requirements to government regulators; if you can own it, it can be tracked)

I really think you are vastly underestimating how hard this is.

How would you find out how much real-estate I held outside of the united states?

To your point, What specific database would you just look it up in?

> How would you find out how much real-estate I held outside of the united states?

Form 8938 for reporting, treaties with other countries mandating reporting. Agreed while difficult, it would not be impossible to avoid fiat rails when transacting in foreign real estate (ie evading transaction reporting thresholds). You would likely want to employ a data team for ingesting public real estate ownership records out of country if you were going to get serious about this gap, maybe form a clearinghouse for all developed nation tax authorities to consume the aggregate data lake created.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8938.pdf

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/corporations/fatca-informatio...

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/corporations/foreign-account-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance... ("Wikipedia: Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance... ("FATCA Intergovernmental agreements")

"FATCA is used by government personnel to detect indicia of U.S. persons and their assets and to enable cross-checking where assets have been self-reported by individuals to the IRS or to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). U.S. persons, regardless of residence location and regardless of dual citizenship, are required to self-report their non-U.S. assets to FinCEN on an annual basis. According to qualification criteria, individuals are also required to report this information on IRS information-reporting form 8938. FATCA will allow detection of persons who have not self-reported, enabling collection of large penalties. FATCA allows government personnel to locate U.S. persons not living in the United States, so as to assess U.S. tax or penalties."

> I really think you are vastly underestimating how hard this is.

The IRS has an annual budget of $12B-$14B and employs 79k people. Do they need more? We can do that if the ROI is favorable. They've only spent $2B of the $80B they've been allocated from the Inflation Reduction Act over the next decade.

https://www.cio.com/article/220588/irs-combats-fraud-with-ad... ("IRS combats fraud with advanced data analytics")

https://thehill.com/business/4267708-irs-crackdown-on-wealth... ("IRS crackdown on wealthy taxpayers brings in $160M in back taxes")

I find the ultra wealthy moving to avoid taxes pretty hilarious. It’s basically saying I have enough money to do whatever anything, except live/be where I’d like to.

Even within the US I know many wannabe New Yorkers who count their days and have to pick and choose what they come “home” for. Obviously to each their own but feels like optimizing for the wrong thing.

// Obviously to each their own but feels like optimizing for the wrong thing.

Depends on a percentage, isn't it? Few people are quibbling about paying +/- 1% here. On the flip side, I heard of a guy who sold a business for 10M. He moved to Florida for a bit to avoid paying New York 10% - 1 million. When we're talking about 10%+ of your income, it begins to matter.

> People will just move to avoid the tax. THere are plenty of countries worth living in that don't have a wealth tax. France found out the hard way.

And why are we assuming here that this is a bad thing? If the tax disproportionately affects the 1% and the 1% leaves, was anything of value lost? Or better yet, did we lose something of negative value?

Here's an alternative take: if the 1% leaves it would be analogous to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcism_of_the_Gerasene_demon...

The US is pretty keen to enforce its tax law internationally. If we did a wealth tax, there would be a number of options to limit using movement or citizenship renouncement as an easy out.

> Look at how many people move from Silicon valley to Texas or Washington just before their companies IPO.

Any VC funded company is aiming for huge returns. Should founders be rewarded for their risks? The tax system is saying fuck-you to every person who wins the startup lottery - forcing founders to move to keep their winnings is fucked up.

Even worse is 2% wealth tax. Win your moneys, then have it taken over the next 50 years at 2%. Worse outcomes the younger you are. Aaaand did they even mention CPI in the article?

The incentive structure is completely anti-startup.

There are a lot of VC funded companies: if we didn't have startups/VC I wonder how our personal lives would look now? Not saying VC is good, and definitely lots of waste (but maybe less than government LOL)

My hot take is that if the Forbes 500 ranking was determined based on verified taxable income and personal taxes paid to the country of primary residence - instead of arbitrary self reported income and self-appraised of property valuations - a lot of stuff would work itself out naturally.

I like this. Because it is both funny and points to the fact that for these people it is more about having a leaderboard score than utility. I mean there's really nothing Musk (or even Gates) could do that say... Gianluigi Aponte (#50) couldn't do. Which really is no different from what Pierre Chen (#500) can do.

That's not quite true. Musk bought one of the largest media platforms in the world and remade it to his whims. There's "fuck you" money, and then there's "fuck everyone" money.

Yeah, there's a non-obvious qualifier there. There's definitely things that Musk can do that those people can't. But the number of things that richer person A can do that poorer person B can't do exponentially decreases based on B's net worth, not on A's.

So yeah, Pierre Chen is gonna have a hard time buying Twitter but he's still not going to have a hard time buying a mega yacht, multiple million dollar homes, and could start a space company if he wanted to. We're quibbling over some pretty fine nuances here but from technical correctness I agree that you're correct. Just not in the "practical" (for lack of better words) sense. They're approximately equal. Much more equal than, say, between you/me and John Bogle (created Vanguard: net worth ~80m). I'd say there's even a bigger gap between Bogle and Chen than Chen and Musk. However you define value (things, capital, good life, whatever) is not linearly or exponentially tied to monetary wealth, but that's a sublinear function that looks exponential near the origin.

This is my take as well. The US/IRS could be giving awards to those that pay the most tax.

It's kind of ridiculous that a 1 mil campaign contribution gets more publicity than paying the IRS 100mil in taxes.

Is it me or this is a very low effort “we should have world peace” article that doesn’t bring much to the discussion?

> The billions raised could help governments avert oncoming crises like future pandemics and extreme weather events driven by the climate crisis

I’m not sure what to say here. I’d approach ideas from people who use incoming doom scenarios as excuses for empowering government very carefully. Almost feels like having Bezos keeping his dollars a better idea.

Vice News recently declared bankruptcy, which means that their libertarian philosophy has been sold to the highest bidder

Close. It was sold to the Saudis

> There are around 2,500 billionaires in the world right now, with a combined wealth of over £10 trillion. Just a fraction of that money is enough to, say, end global poverty, eradicate malaria and re-freeze the Arctic.

Does anyone know if any of these claims (about what we could do with a fraction of £10 trillion) are remotely true? I highly doubt we could come close to ending global poverty by simply throwing £10 trillion at the problem. Re-freezing the Arctic also seems technically infeasible but I don't know much about it. Eradicating malaria sounds somewhat more realistic I guess?

They're sensationalist claims. Global poverty, hunger, etc. aren't zero sum games we could win if we just had enough players to give up their equity. There are logistical impossibilities blocking humanity from these types of solutions.

> I highly doubt we could come close to ending global poverty by simply throwing £10 trillion at the problem

That isobviously true

But we could make a huge dent in poverty in countries with functioning civil society.

Cash does not completely end poverty but it ameliorates the worst of it.

The best examples I know of are in India and Brazil

Redistributing money is very effective

I think the better question is, Which entity can better allocate the capital? The government or the billionaire? Given the historic track record of government spending I would argue the we are much better with the capital staying in the private sector. As a bonus, if capital is grossly misallocated in the private sector, the company may go out of business, and those resources are freed up the the highest bidder. When the government grossly misallocates resources, the burden falls on the tax payer and rarely gets fixed in any reasonable time horizon.

> Given the historic track record of government spending

Building schools

Building hospitals

Building infrastructure

Police

Parks

The post office for you Americans in the USA

Now do private investments: everything else. Every single object and service I use or interact with every day. From the clothes on my back and food on my plate to the house sheltering me, furnace heating me, car carrying me and the computer helping me earn a living.

Would you like to compare ROIs?

I agree with the sentiment, but it's a little too optimistic to presume tax payer foots the bill only for public sector endeavors. The huge financial industry bailouts weren't even that long ago! Private over public, but there should be no "too big to fail" and no cartels.

Seems to me that half of government spending winds up in billionaires pockets. Nice work if you can get it.

Incorrect. There should not even _be_ billionaires. It's _long past_ time to tax billionaires. At this point, it may not even be possible.

There really aren't that many billionaires. Most of what we refer to as billionaires are people who have a large equity stake in companies they run. So are we saying once your equity becomes to large you have to start selling shares?

People who say this stuff usually have zero clue how money works.

I’m interested why you think most of global billionaires are people with large equity stakes in companies?

People who often focus in on just the capitalist entrepreneur sect of the billionaire class often have zero clue how global Class Systems work, and just how many billionaires there are that have never worked an honest day in their lives.

Do you know of a place with a breakdown?

Skimming through the Forbes list, the top ones are pretty much ones I recognize as having been founders, CEOs, and/or early employees of large corporations. As I scroll down the list, there are a lot more that I don't know or believe are merely decedents of those such people, but I still see plenty I recognize as founders or as still running companies. Is it 10%? 50%? 80%?

Don't just assert we're clueless without providing some source to show us that we're wrong. Far too often such assertions aren't actually based on anything but vibes, so "just trust me" isn't much good.

> once your equity becomes to large you have to start selling shares?

Yes. If you own over $1B of corporations, you have too much power.

Even if you created that corporation yourself?

And if so, who should we hand over the power to? If we tax assets, it will be given to the government, which historically hasn't been all that great at allocating capital.

These people say they don't want all this power centralized to certain individuals, will in the next breath claim that government should seize assets after a certain amount. They want centralized control, they just want their preferred political party to be the ones with it.

> Even if you created that corporation yourself?

Yes.

> who should we hand over the power to?

The shares are sold to whoever's buying, so the billionaire can pay the wealth tax, to the government.

This would essentially be the same as when someone wins a car on a game show. The car is taxable income, which means that they sometimes have to sell the car to pay that tax.

> the government, which historically hasn't been all that great at allocating capital

The only way anyone gets to be a billionaire is by hoarding wealth. It's a catastrophically bad allocation of capital.

Do you realize the billionaire has no saying in how much money he “has”? He just owns stock in a company he built from ground up. It’s us saying that that stock has a certain value. It’s us saying the owner is a billionaire. We are the ones making him a billionaire.

You could make the same argument about landlords, but we still tax the value of a building.

And that, together with heavy regulation, is why we have the present situation where young people can't stat families because they can't afford a home. Not the example I would like to follow anywhere else.

What if everyone carried around little thankyou notes and any time someone did something nice or improved their life in some way, they give/send them a thankyou note.

Would you have an issue if someone eventually collected a billion thankyou notes?

I certainly would if those thankyou notes were the only way normal people could secure food and shelter and the collection of a billion of them was contributing to normal people being unable to obtain thankyou notes.

> the collection of a billion of them was contributing to normal people being unable to obtain thankyou notes.

The reason poor people are poor is not that rich people are rich! The rich being rich and the poor being poor are 2 separate phenomena.

It's not like there's some fixed pot of utility in the world, and the more one person has the less someone else has.

>It's not like there's some fixed pot of utility in the world, and the more one person has the less someone else has.

There is quite literally a finite amount of resources on this planet. Land, gold, oxygen, lithium... These things are limited. The more land one person has, the less there is for others.

That's true about land (that's why we should have a land value tax and abolish all other taxes).

There are either ways to make more, or alternatives for all of those things. We've never run out of a resource despite the constant fear of it happening.

They cannot give the note without taking it from someone else first. Money and land ownership are zero-sum games, for some to be rich, many have to be poor.

Would their kids inherit the thank you notes or would the kids have to start getting thank you notes on their own based on what they provide to the world??

Would you have an issue if that someone subsequently refused to part with 0.001% of their thankyou notes in order to save someone else's life?

This is a terrible analogy because it captures the good reason why there are billionaires (we reward them for building something useful) and none of the problems that come with it (wealth and power inequality, economic externalities, etc.)

Reading this you would think billionaires are all sitting is swimming pools full of money like Scrooge McDuck. The vast majority of these assets are in the form of the ownership of companies. The only way to unlock that wealth is to force sale of these assets. This raises several question.

Who should control these companies. Government? Now politicians and civil servants are running your economy. Plus you don’t actually get any extra public revenue to spend on anything. You just confiscate industries you now have to operate.

So ok, let’s sell these shareholdings. To who? If we’re ending large scale private wealth, where are the buyers? I suppose you might dilute ownership to more private capital but is that actually better? You’re just arbitrarily changing ownership. Seizing one persons assets and selling it to someone else. Some of those people will do better at it that others and what do you know, we’ve got billionaires again.

Except now they know you’re going to take their assets off them. What effect will that have on stock prices, investor confidence, entrepreneurship?

I don’t think this has been thought through very well. Or at all. The way to fix taxation is to, er, fix the tax system.

It's time to stop populist drivel like this, if this was just a political decision that was easy to implement and had only positive impacts, it would have been done decades ago, but just like "let's end crime" and "end hunger" this is just another populist political message to basically lie to people and I'm fed with this stuff. Truth truly took the back seat in the past decade.

While rich people avoid taxes all the time and many of them outright evade them illegally, the focus of narrative entirely on how this causes public finance problems is a joke.

Modern states, especially large modern states, annually obtain absolutely gargantuan amounts of money and spend gargantuan amounts of money on all sorts of projects that very, very often are at best of dubious value and in all cases often managed in ways that make them far more expensive than they could be. Other vast amounts of that state spending are even outright destructive or purely criminal, with hundreds of billions per year going to military campaigns or support for different interests that are entirely motivated by power games.

Why should all this never be profoundly questioned? Why should it never be strongly questioned why a major state like the U.S. with an annual budget in the multiple trillions, which regularly spends hundreds of billions on absolute black holes of public finance, might not trim or change some of that spending?

At the same time placing all fashionable NGO and media focus on the far smaller amounts evaded by billionaires is nearly absurd in how unbalanced it has become, but then, they're easy whipping boys (and girls).

Even if you took all the wealth -not income or revenue but total wealth- in all known forms from all of the world's 2,688 known billionaires right now and applied it to public spending, its totality would barely cover the annual budget of the U.S. alone for more than 2 years. It would cover only a tiny fraction of the total pending outlay of the U.S. National Debt.

Again, this is just as the above applies to one country. Yet, it's the billionaires (and i'm no fan of them in many, many ways) that should be the explicit focus because of their tax avoidance schemes? I'd say that far larger issues exist with the sheer size of modern state spending, along with its scope and management problems.

Governments could also stop taxing the crap out of the middle and lower classes, but that would require them to stop spending like drunken sailors, but when you operate under the idea that government is the provider of rights and everything else citizens need, this is what you get.

The US Federal government alone collected $4.4 trillion in 2023. I'd have more confidence in statements like that if existing revenues were used to solve any one of the issues stated.

I‘m in favor of an income tax which gets higher the more wealth you have already accumulated: https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/9421/why-not-ha...

I'd rather see elimination of income tax and any other direct, tangible theft of earnings to the rest of us. The lines between billionaires, megacorps, banks, and politicians are blurry. I don't trust them to tax themselves fairly. Just start removing the needless taxes for those that are obviously impacted by it.

While we're at it, end the Fed.

"It's Time to Tax Billionaires Out of Existence (vice.com)"

There, FTFY.

During the Roman Empire, taxes collected by the regime were as high as 1%, soaring to a dizzying 3% in times of war. Tax collectors were so detested for gathering these kinds of sums that they were often murdered.

The roman empire also relied heavily on slave labor from captured territories and gifts from the wealthy.

...and spoils of war. If you were a pleb you paid your taxes in blood.

... Was that a pun? I read this as the modern usage of plebian and only now realized it might not be what you meant lol. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plebeians

they are taxed already is just the rules are too lax and they are too good at avoiding so you need unescapable rules. Example, taxing based on NW increases. which reminds me how difficult it is to create a good rule because taxing based on networth increases could be a purposeful way a country is trying to stifle their own economy and allowing other countries that doesn’t have these rules let their companies grow bigger and faster.

> With effective tax rates equivalent to 0% to 0.5% of their wealth,

We do not tax wealth, we tax income, so this is complete nonsense.

Why do we tax income though? Especially for billionaire in a globalized world, it's easy to hide incomes. Wealth is harder to hide.

I am not arguing that taxing income or wealth is right or wrong. Only that given how current taxes CURRENTLY work, TFA's controlled outrage is idiotic.

I like what Bernie Sanders says: income over $1 billion should be taxed at 100%.

I laugh at this idea. Sure it would be nice if possible. But people become billionaires through the art of inheritance and not paying taxes. They tend to excel at both.

Yes it's difficult. I think we should have a pretty high bar for evidence required to decide that this idea is impossible.

Because once you decide that it's impossible, then there will be no more evidence collected.

I would like to see a wealth tax passed and then evaded and then a follow up to stop the gaps etc. A few cycles of this before deciding it can never be done. I think this is a multi decade effort that is important for the future of all societies.

It will be interesting to see the ruling on Moore v United States* in regards to the adjudicated Constitutionality of a federal tax on unrealized income, the ruling of which has implications for the Constitutionality of a federal tax on wealth.

* - https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/moore-v-united-s...

We already have an inheritance tax why is there an objection to a person being successful during his or her life. Are we saying we'd be better off without Amazon, Google, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, Apple? All of these companies were built on the vision of one or a small number of founders. They collectively employ hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. You who make six figure salaries slinging javascript would probably not have jobs like that without companies that billionaies built. Would they have bothered or even been able to do it if we taxed away not only their income but also their wealth?

yes, we would probably be better off as a society without those companies (we can say that with certainty for meta _alone_). destabilizing democracy, suicide nets, AI for the "defense" industry, surveillance, misinformation, mass manipulation, adtech, etc.

> You who make six figure salaries slinging javascript would probably not have jobs like that without companies that billionaies built.

doing something else more productive? your disdain is apparent in this comment, so i'm sure you wouldn't mind it if people who "sling javascript" for six figures find something better to work on.

> Would they have bothered or even been able to do it if we taxed away not only their income but also their wealth?

do you start every side project with the question, "well how much will i have to pay in taxes when this makes me a billionaire?" most innovation in human history has existed absent a profit motive.

> most innovation in human history has existed absent a profit motive

Absolutely delusional!

einstein, marie curie, socrates, newton. should i go on? the only delusion here is thinking the pinnacle of human innovation is social networking and $1000 phones.

Billionaires top of mind for me: Bloomberg, the Google guys, Steve Jobs, Bezos, Dalio, Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg. Many grew up poor (probably Gates & Zuck had the most growing up but not billions) and none of them are famous for building products and companies with impact, not tax evasion.

Why would an inherited-billionaire be at the top of anyone’s mind?

The post I am responding to made a blanket statement about the group. I don't have a survey[1] of what percentage of billionaires are or aren't self made - so I thought about it, and of the ones available for recall, all were self-made. I assume what the poster talked about exists, but it seems to not be the most obvious case.

[1] While replying to you, I did a quick Google and found this link: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made According to this, what the poster was talking about was more true in the past. ~40 years ago, 60% of billionaires had come from rich families, while 10 years ago (when this article is from) that number was down to 32%. One can presume that this trend continues over the last decade as well. So at least 70% of billionaires are self made, and 20% (according to the same source) come from very poor families.

So at the very least, we can say that the post I am replying to is true for at most 30% and is false for 70%.

> The post I am responding to made a blanket statement about the group.

I think they can fend for themselves.

> I don't have a survey[1] of what percentage of billionaires are or aren't self made - so I thought about it, and of the ones available for recall, all were self-made. I assume what the poster talked about exists, but it seems to not be the most obvious case.

Inherited billionaires don’t make for exciting stories. That’s why they aren’t at the top of anyone’s mind. Was the point.

But “self-made” can also be loaded:

> [1] While replying to you, I did a quick Google and found this link:

You’ll see that that he defines certain people like Zuckerberg as not really being “wealthy” but “upper-middle class”. But I guess economists might have a certain bias towards the upper end of the spectrum when they only research wealth and those entities and people who have it.

I feel like you're being somewhat dense here. Zuck is obviously a billionaire because he created Facebook, not because he inherited wealth and managed to not pay taxes on it. Splitting hairs on whether he was "wealthy" or "upper middle class" doesn't really take away from that, especially since my original comment had him and Gates called out as the ones who grew up with more money.

To sum up although again, not sure it can penetrate the density, the conversation is about whether billionaires are "people born billionaires and manage to not pay taxes" as is the original assertion, or not.

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