Bezos does not have a castle filled with a scrooge mcduck moneypool. There are not castles filled with grain that could otherwise be used to feed the starving peasants.
If you have money you generally don't want it to sit around and depreciate instead of investing into real-estate, private equity, etc. directly or indirectly.
Corruption of politics would be much harder, too.
What “money” velocity would be higher? Some of these companies have very little profit compared to wealth.
Being illiquid doesn't mean they can't use that wealth.
A person having 200 billion is not spending a big percentage of their wealth nor using it. Yes it's not cash but it doesn't mean it's unusable.
I'm not against the ability to be rich; I'm against the ability to be that rich. The system isn't made to have such wealthy people. My country is one of the rare ones that has wealth tax and you just have to see where the progressive tax rate stops to see what I mean.
This would probably get me sent to an American prison.
How is it not being used? Walk me step by step where you think this money 'is'. It really seems like you're not understanding here, or maybe i'm just not understanding, so please go slow, explain EXACTLY where you think the money is and why it's not being used like you say.
I don't know how you imagine that billionaires use their money but I think we have very different ideas.
Do you not know how the fucking STOCK MARKET works? Why are you having this discussion about things waaaay over your head?
The only "money" that is not moving is the company cash they store in a vault somewhere. If Amazon has 40 million dollars in the bank, it is exchanging hand MANY times. It's being loaned out by the bank. This is fucking basic stuff that's embarrassing for people not to know.
Now onto stocks.
Let me explain really really simply: If I start a company and someone invests 10 million in the company, i'm. using that to hire some engineers and buy some servers, etc. The money is exchanging hands. My 'wealth' is now a billion dollars because I only gave up 1% of the company for that ten million. What money am I hoarding? That billion is literally created from nothing, there was no 'billion' before I took that investment. Do you understand something that basic?
It absolutely is not. Can you elaborate?
If by investment you mean funding rounds, then yes I guess. However, they don't use a noticeable of their personal wealth for that purpose at all.
Happy to be proven wrong, though.
Don't pretend that because most of their wealth is termed as illiquid that it doesn't still count. It counts, they can access it and make use of their wealthy whenever they want. Rather than doing great good deeds, they are sitting on some cash and lots and lots of assets and their focus is on growing and expanding their wealth; that is hoarding.
His foundation also has farms as investments, but these are agribusinesses that are in operation, they aren’t being left to lie fallow.
As far as feeding people, he could single handidly fund SNAP for a year and still have 100 billion plus.
Do you realize jeff bezos was a billionaire long before amazon recorded a profit? So quite literally no, this is not true.
If you actually introduced your wet dream billionaire wealth tax that's going to pay for everything forever, all these people would be forced to go to the market at the same time and sell their assets while every other billionaire is also going to be in the same position at the same time, so who are they selling to? The market would crash (also incidentally impacting all your middle class retirement plans) destroying billions upon billions of dollars in wealth. But OK, let's say you get this money now, let's pretend you could get enough, and the government starts spending it on entitlement programs--what you have just done is convert investment into consumption. What do you expect to happen in this case? I'd expect surging inflation.
Society effectively consumes everything that we produce. If we want to consume more, we need to produce more. The government can put their finger on the scale as to what is produced and who consumes it, the government can put policies in place that lead to additional production via removing obstacles from productive activities, introducing obstacles to unproductive activities, making investments or subsidies, etc. but all of this is more complicated and messy, it needs to be done intelligently and carries risk of distorting market realities leading to unintended consequences. This is called "governing" and it's what politicians are supposed to be doing. Outsiders who want power but can't effectively govern are always trying to sell people on these "one weird trick" narratives of easy fixes to hard problems.
Bezos has, I believe, two jets and three yachts along with a number a large homes with large household staff. A lot for a person to be sure, but most of his wealth is unrealized investment in a company that delivers goods to hundreds of millions of people's homes and powers countless tech companies that are used by billions of people. Taking his boats and planes away is just not going to move the needle, it's not going to make groceries cheaper or reduce the price of college tuition or add housing stock (aside from a handful of luxury homes in a couple of neighborhoods around the wold) or add any new doctors to the medical field. Certainly taxes can be increased, but no one should expect this to make a real dent in the budget. We got into this situation by decades of taking the easy route, so of course people are looking for easy solutions.
This is the exact same kind of magical thinking that the right uses to convince people that their life would be oh so much better if they just kicked out all the immigrants. There is no magic bullet, most spending by the government is on the middle class, most consumption is by the middle class (this is even more dramatic if you measure this in real world physical goods terms rather than including "luxury" markup on spending by the upper middle class). This is a huge group, hundreds of millions, that collectively consumes an unfathomable amount of resources, and moving some numbers around on a few computers in downtown Manhattan is not going to change this.