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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no.

Consider if the US government liquidated every US billionaire at 100% of their stock market paper value (impossible, the liquidity influx would smash the stock price to the ground and ruin middle class retirements).

In this non-existent perfect world, it would raise about… $6-7 trillion. Enough to cover the US government deficit for under 3 years, or run the government for under one year. Then it’s gone.

Completely liquidating every billionaire would be satisfyingly cathartic, but still wouldn’t be enough to cause a real trajectory change. The idea is useful political fodder, to hide the fact even a hypothetically heavily taxed billionaire class can’t even cover today’s spending problem.

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In your hypothetical, none of the money is re-invested which would be an utterly ludicrous thing to do. It also doesn't account for the GDP growth typically associated from people having lower healthcare\transportation costs and how quality of life increases translates to much higher productivity (see Brazil's experiment giving money to mothers in favelas, for eg, and the uplift of the entire economy). It's not a difficult extrapolation - if you're not bogged down with medical or student loans or rent or etc, you have disposable capital to purchase things and hire services

But the money in your hypothetical would literally just disappear into the void, never to touch the US economy again. It imagines a world where SNAP beneficiaries purchase nothing with their cards, the money simply vanishing, as if eaten by a deep god, not even existing as shit on the ground for two enterprising economists to consume and stimulate GDP growth with

This is a transparently bad thought experiment jury-rigged for failure

Ahh, but they wouldn’t have undemocratic power from their wealth if it was liquidated. China does this right, the US could learn how to handle these people better.

That's a slippery slope that never ends as long as there are distinctions on this earth.

A homeless person may very well say that someone with your salary and ability to donate $500 to a political cause is undemocratic.

And the homeless person would be right! Not every political system in the world depend on donations in the form of money.

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