That's such a disingenuous statistic. A huge number of people, including a huge number of very well off people, have a negative net worth due to debt.

I don't have a car payment or a mortgage, so I have more wealth than at least 30% of America, over 100 million people, combined!

It's disappointing to see that FiveThirtyEight has now become just another outfit twisting the truth for their political agenda. I expected better from them.

If it were possible to put $45B into a typical savings account earning 1% interest per year, that $45B person will make more money doing nothing in 1 day than the millionaire is worth. The thing is, it's not possible to do that. It's actually difficult to make only $1 million per day off $45B in assets. You'd have to give away huge chunks of assets to avoid making $4+ million per day.

The problem is hoarding. It's no longer enough to go back to a 94% income rate for the top bracket like we used to have for ~30 years expressly to prevent this amount of hoarding.

Here's a quick demonstration: imagine all US taxation (apart from excise taxes) was replaced by a 3% yearly tax on household net wealth. No income taxes. No corporate taxes. No cap gains. No weird deductions based on expected future whatever. The question now is: cui bono? The hard working, high growth individuals (wealthy or not) benefit because their income and capital gains remain untouched -- they just need to earn enough in returns to offset the 3% tax. And who loses? The hoarders engaged strictly in "wealth preservation" (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=wealth+preserv...).

* What if I own a house but have no cash? Will I have to sell it and live on the street to pay the taxman?

* What if the ultra-wealthy buy property and then mark it down? I.e. they buy paintings, then "accidentally" "damage" them. Whoops, a billion dollars in artwork gone, sorry IRS. Later, it is miraculously repaired. Will the IRS have to start sending undercover agents to inspect people's art collections?

* A 3% wealth tax is still less than the growth rate of many financial assets. I.e. the stock market grows at ~7%. So the rich will still get richer. And if you increase the tax to say, 8%, congrats, you just destroyed the financial markets.

* What if the ultra-wealthy buy property and then mark it down? - People lie to the IRS now, system still functions.

* A 3% wealth tax is still less than the growth rate of many financial assets. - Not necessarily. Safe stores of huge amounts of money yield very little. I don't know all the implications on interest rates, etc.. but it's an interestng idea.

To address your concerns generally -- every tax policy has a variety of impacts on behavior. Multiple countries already have a wealth tax, so they are definitely workable. There are behavioral and policy methods of addressing potential negative consequences.

To respond more specifically:

> What if I own a house but have no cash? Will I have to sell it and live on the street to pay the taxman?

That's a straw man argument for a host of reasons. We already carve out exemptions for primary dwellings, and there's no reason why this wouldn't similarly apply, up to some limit. But even absent that, real assets are real assets, and there are multiple ways of extracting liquidity from them (and moreover doing so generates wealth for society). You can take on a "reverse mortgage", or rent out one of your rooms, or sell it and rent, or take out an annuity that's secured against your home, among other possibilities.

> What if the ultra-wealthy buy property and then mark it down? I.e. they buy paintings, then "accidentally" "damage" them. Whoops, a billion dollars in artwork gone, sorry IRS. Later, it is miraculously repaired. Will the IRS have to start sending undercover agents to inspect people's art collections?

That's fraud/non-compliance/tax evasion, and it's already a massive problem in the current tax system, except now it's cloaked in things like a "double dutch with an irish sandwich". In any case, this is a problem that is dealt with every day, in business, by insurance companies, and there's no reason why the same techniques couldn't be used by tax officials.

> A 3% wealth tax is still less than the growth rate of many financial assets. I.e. the stock market grows at ~7%. So the rich will still get richer. And if you increase the tax to say, 8%, congrats, you just destroyed the financial markets.

Yes, and a 95% income tax rate will destroy the labor market. So? And yes, at 7% CAGR on the S+P the wealthy continue to get wealthier (assuming all their assets are in equities, a big assumption). But note that, in the process, we've eliminated income taxes, so everyone else will be getting richer faster. A win-win.

The evidence is inconclusive - some (Norway, Switzerland) are economically strong societies, while others (Spain, India) are economic basket cases.

Side effect of introducing a wealth tax is an increase in corruption as all of a sudden subjective evaluations of illiquid property can lead to substantial increases, so there are scenarios where it's cheaper to pay off the assessor in private than be subjected to an increase. Litigation to question the assessed value is a fairly minor occurrence nowadays, but with universal wealth tax owners of illiquid property are likely to sue more often, as there's more property to assess (and hence make mistakes).

India and Italy are known for high corruption levels, and you could argue that placing low-paid government officials into high-value positions is almost corruption by design.

(my comment starts with "With this comment I'm answering both PG's post and an answer to his post that can be read here: http://cryoshon.co/2016/01/02/a-response-to-paul-grahams-art...)

If you're buying existing stock, someone on the other end is receiving your money that they will then spend or invest as they see fit. Very little money is idle, since it's in no one's interests for it to be.

>> If this were a card game, the millionaire could go piss himself.

Thankfully the economy is not in fact a card game, and no billionaire can force you to piss yourself.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/the-grea...

This isn't a story about how the political power of billionaires is failing, it's a story about one billionaire winning against some other billionaires. The underlying problem of wealth inequality and its effect on the political system remains.

There are many reasons that people have debt, and it's not all exorbitant spending. At the same time SOMEONE is profiting off that debt, and they have a vested interest in keeping that debt alive. This is a good talk that discusses nonintuitive pains the middle class is experiencing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A

Yes, people do profit from that debt. Good! Because otherwise you wouldn't be able to turn some of that future earning potential into buying power today. This ancient innovation, the loan, allows us to do that. If the lender didn't stand to profit from interest, he wouldn't lend. It's a triumph of capitalism.

The problem with education loans is that they're not real loans. The government gives them distortionary financing that inflates tuition. Everytime the government raises the max loan amount, tuitions rise to match it. The college bureaucracies grow to match revenue. It's the same that happens with any bureaucracy that gets unearned money.

Everyone should pay the full price of their college education, either up front or in the future. That's the best way to keep college affordable.

Free markets work, why is there this presumption against them?

On the scale of 80 people with billions upon billions vs. half of everyone else, it's hardly a disingenuous statistic.

The purchasing power of those 80 people isn't going to start looking insignificant if you change the basis for comparison to net wealth plus imputed future income streams.

Also, global poverty is not the fault of Western riches. It's not something we (Westerners) can do anything about either, except engage in mutually beneficial trade. Most of the world is being held back by bad governance, dictatorships and democracies alike. The West has the only economies of significant size that still have the broad outlines of a true free market system.

However, no human life is average in that respect. Everyone occasionally wants to fix the car, bail mother out of jail, keep the new restaurant open for another month, hire another cook, quit the job, drive to California, or whatever. Some of those variable circumstances can be addressed through insurance, but many cannot. Many of them are more along the lines of "it is my will to do this thing I had not planned on doing, right now."

That stuff, that human stuff? That requires wealth. We can paper that over with "easy" credit, but that's a leaky abstraction, and it really only helps one make the choices that consumers are allowed to make. Just ask a 90yo (hint: probably remembers a particular period of history): wealth is strictly better than credit. That's without even considering transaction costs.

ps. try getting a reverse mortgage without first owning a house...

This economic inequality feels similar to racism. Why should a very wealthy person be pre-judged to be worse than others without knowing the whole picture? You seem to be singling out startup founders as being OK, it’s just the others that are bad?

Sure, income distribution is unequal, but it doesn’t have to turn into villifying those at the top of the heap.

I don't see a claim that any of these folks are bad people for their money. Gates, for instance, is doing extraordinary good in the form of philanthropy; it's a stretch to imagine that the "offensive economic inequality" is a judgment of his character (although you may be correct that parent's choice of word "offensive" was risky). There are grounds to criticize his richness based on the anti-competitive actions of Microsoft in the '90s, but his richness per se isn't valid grounds to condemn him.

What is to blame, what is "offensive," is a society that allows people to become fantastically wealthy like this. What would the harm for society be if, through whatever means, it was much more difficult to become this wealthy? Maybe it is high taxes on the ultra-rich, maybe it is an unwillingness to allow high CEO salaries, maybe it is a serious estate tax, etc. Is it really true that Gates, Zuckerberg, Page, Brin, etc. were motivated primarily by money to found Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc.? If they had a 99% marginal tax rate once they have assets of $500M (on any form of gaining wealth), would we have a weaker Microsoft or Facebook or Google doing less good for the world because they wouldn't be working as hard? Would the good done to people on the lower end of the scale not outweigh any possible harm here? That seems hard to imagine.

And it is precisely because these people could be less rich that the comparison to racism feels ill-placed. A society biased against people of a particular race cannot make existing people cease being of that race, and preventing new people of that race would be grossly immoral. A society biased against billionaires can in good conscience make fewer people billionaires, and it can even prevent hereditary billionaires without any particular immorality (although I think most of the people on that list are self-made).

There's often an assumption in these discussions that if a billionaire isn't spending their money in a socially optimal way, the government will spend it better. But if you look at how governments actually spend their money, you'll find very little evidence to support that assumption.

Just 158 families dominate U.S. presidential campaign contributions: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/158-families-do...

Inequality is not only about money, it's also about influence.

Single payer health care is a good example.

We should strive to avoid dogma and choose the best available solution.

[1]http://www.cbpp.org/research/romneys-charge-that-most-federa...

E.g. that chart says that ~96% of Medicare spending went to beneficiaries. That sounds good, but all it means is that 96% of the dollars were paid to hospitals/doctors/medical device manufacturers/etc. It says nothing about how efficiently those people are providing their services, i.e. how efficiently those 96% of Medicare dollars are being spent. A lot of those dollars get quickly chewed up by high prices (which I'd argue are themselves caused by the market distortions that these programs foster).

Government expenditures stay the same but rich people pay more and poor people pay less.

Maybe you're imagining it on the wrong time scale.

If you say Larry Page can "only" make an effective maximum of $500M, that isn't going to stop him founding Google, but what does it do once he actually has $500M? He owns shares in his company that have grown to be worth $40B so then he owes the government ~$39.5B in taxes. So he effectively has to sell his company to pay his taxes. (And if he doesn't have to pay the tax until he sells the shares then he never will and your tax plan fails.)

Before the tax he was going to keep most of the shares and thereby have control of the company. The primary difference caused is therefore that more large corporations will be publicly rather than privately controlled. So the assumption has to be that that will somehow lead to higher incomes and standard of living for the middle class.

But that doesn't make any sense. Publicly traded companies have no soul. The CEO's job in a publicly traded company is "maximize shareholder value" and that means grinding competitors' bones into dusty by squeezing every cent out of your customers, suppliers and employees. The people being squeezed are the middle class.

At least if the company is controlled by a human person you can have Henry Ford saying his employees should get paid enough to afford his products. A company's owner is the only one who is authorized to decide that there is something more important than shareholder value.

The problem with today's economy is that that isn't happening often enough, in large part because too many major companies are publicly traded. But you're proposing something that would make it effectively impossible to happen at all.

I think you're totally right that this motivates public ownership (or at least Larry Page selling his company to other private owners, once his shares are worth $500M), and that this doesn't seem to be usefully doing anything productive for economic inequality.

I also think that there's no guarantee that Page or Ford will, in fact, decide to prioritize something other than shareholder value. In fact the argument for allowing them to make profits from the company seems to rest on the argument that they should value shareholder value. An alternative approach would be, once the CEO's shares are worth $500M, they should start to increase salaries or issue shares to their employees or donate to charity or something, such that their personal ownership interest remains valued at $500M but they retain creative control (which they wouldn't if they let it go public). But we're assuming they won't choose to do that, and that selling their shares is more valuable to them.

And there's no particular need for this change (which is extremely disruptive) to be the only change to society. What if we rework the assumption that a publicly-traded company needs to maximize shareholder value at the expense of employee welfare? What if there was a rule that, say, any publicly-traded company needs to at least start with majority employee ownership? Or union ownership?

These are probably also terrible ideas, but my claim here is that we don't have to accept that the world as it is is optimal. There may be fairly fundamental changes we can make to our assumptions that result in a better place.

I would argue definitely public. Google market cap is over $500B. Anyone else who owns $500M would have the same incentive, so you would have at least 1000 owners, and almost certainly far more than that because the owners would want to diversify instead of investing their entire $500M into a company they don't even close to control.

> I also think that there's no guarantee that Page or Ford will, in fact, decide to prioritize something other than shareholder value.

There is no guarantee, but if it is to happen at all then that is currently the only way it can.

> An alternative approach would be, once the CEO's shares are worth $500M, they should start to increase salaries or issue shares to their employees or donate to charity or something, such that their personal ownership interest remains valued at $500M but they retain creative control (which they wouldn't if they let it go public).

Part of the problem is that because of the way taxes currently work, it's "better" (people pay less taxes) if the company's stock price goes up than if the company pays a dividend, so they tend to structure things to make that happen. So Page doesn't get proportionately that much "income" from Google in the sense of cash money (unless he sells his shares), but his net worth doubles with the share value. So if you want to keep the original owners in control of the company, but you want the company to be able to grow, then so must their wealth.

You could try to separate control from ownership, but who is going to invest in a company controlled by someone with no obligation to even try to grow the investment? If you want to help the world by donating your money to Elon Musk then you can already do that today.

> An alternative approach would be, once the CEO's shares are worth $500M, they should start to increase salaries or issue shares to their employees or donate to charity or something, such that their personal ownership interest remains valued at $500M but they retain creative control (which they wouldn't if they let it go public).

The problem is their wealth is derived from the value of the company. Larry Page doesn't have X billion dollars in cash, he has shares of a corporation with that market value. He (personally) could only donate it to a charity or give it to employees by liquidating the shares and divesting the ownership stake in the company.

The company could do those things to an extent, but if you're talking about a law to require that then it no longer has any real relationship to concentration of wealth or who owns the company. And you'll end up with all the same trouble with trying to measure the domestic profit of an international corporation that we have with corporate income tax.

> What if we rework the assumption that a publicly-traded company needs to maximize shareholder value at the expense of employee welfare?

The idea of a publicly traded company is premised on "maximizing shareholder value" because making money is the shared interest that binds the shareholders together. If you take that away then who gets to decide where the profits actually go? And who is going to invest in such a company if an undetermined party who isn't them gets to decide what happens to their profits?

> What if there was a rule that, say, any publicly-traded company needs to at least start with majority employee ownership?

"Start with" means nothing if it will change in fifteen minutes. Most companies do start with majority employee ownership. But if employees can't sell their shares then do they really own them? You could try something like giving the employees a vote (without an ownership stake) in electing corporate officers, but the result is going to be predictable. They'll elect people who pay the employees unsustainably high wages and the company will soon go out of business.

I can tell you how to fix a lot of this. The tax code currently makes it highly desirable for corporations to never repatriate their overseas earnings, because if they do they have to pay a very high corporate income tax on it. Which means they don't ever issue those earnings as dividends, instead they accumulate huge piles of cash. The shareholders don't mind that much (not as much as they mind paying high taxes) because holding cash raises the share price and shareholders who want cash can then have it by selling shares. But it means the only way to take profit is to sell shares, which for a controlling shareholder means ultimately giving up the controlling interest in the company.

People always talk about the cash hoarding problem, because it is an enormous problem, but the solution people suggest is a farce. People say to have a tax holiday to let the money come back into the US. And once in a while they do it... and no one takes advantage of it. Because not only was there a tax on repatriating the money, once it's in the US, all the future interest on the money will be taxed, whereas it isn't when the money is offshore in some tax haven.

The problem is, the only way to actually fix it is to not tax income. In theory it would be solved by only not taxing investment income, but that would be entirely unfair to people who are still paying income tax on earned income. What needs to be done is stop taxing income entirely and tax consumption instead. Scream about regressive taxes all you like; how progressive is it today when middle class people are paying 25% and investors and corporations are paying nothing?

With no income tax there is no reason not to bring the money back into the country, which puts it in the hands of human owners rather than huge corporations, without forcing them to sell shares that removes their controlling interest in their companies. At that point essentially all their reasonable choices for what to do with the money are good for society: They can spend it (and pay the consumption tax), or they can give it to charity, or they can invest it and grow the economy and generate tax revenue when the invested-in company spends it and pays consumption tax. Instead of having it sit in some offshore money market account managed by some corporate executive whose money it isn't, where it helps no one and no tax is ever paid.

Are you also suggesting a high estate tax, so that you're encouraged to spend or invest it instead of building up wealth for your family?

Of course. But weird taxes are very hard to get right.

You can basically order taxes by how progressive they are. The least progressive is a head tax; everybody pays a fixed dollar amount every year, income and consumption irrelevant. Next is a flat tax; some universally fixed percentage of total income or consumption. After that it isn't really a straight line: Luxury taxes, property tax, graduated income tax, etc.

The problem with everything more progressive than the flat tax is they heavily induce tax avoidance and often hit the wrong target. If you tax cars with big engines then wealthy people start buying trucks with big engines. If you tax trucks with big engines you end up hitting working class people. If you tax real estate then rich people invest in the stock market and working class people can't afford a home. If making more than $250K/year brings you into a very high tax bracket then people find all kinds of deductions and tax losses to take, or arrange for their $1M/year compensation to be paid as $200K each to yourself, your spouse and your three children. And so it goes.

The trick is to stop trying to outsmart people. The problem is the least avoidable tax, collecting the same dollar amount from everyone, is very, very regressive. But all we have to do to make a very, very progressive tax is invert the sign. Have the government pay everybody a fixed dollar amount every year. Basic income. If you pay for it with a flat consumption tax, which is the next least avoidable, the flat tax is more progressive than the head tax that the basic income is the inverse of, so you can make it however progressive you want just by changing the amount of the basic income. Then there is no tax avoidance to be had anywhere, no argument about what should be taxed or not, and everyone pays their share.

> Are you also suggesting a high estate tax, so that you're encouraged to spend or invest it instead of building up wealth for your family?

"Invest" and "building up wealth for your family" are synonyms. Estate taxes are silly. It's the same problem with separating owners from their businesses. Then the companies become incorporeal diffusely-owned soulless sociopathic conglomerates. Who cares if the family that started some chain of stores continues to own it forever? Care instead if people in the middle are better off than their parents were.

So some people here aren't completely against basic income. Some more good arguments in favor.

What you can do instead is just tax net worth as a flat tax (or a slightly graded tax), instead of taxing income. This impacts only those with a large positive net worth, and that makes more sense.

That solves the estate tax problem as well.

But for other kinds of revenue that makes less sense. The 5 millionth copy of Windows does as much good for that particular customer as every previous one, at essentially zero marginal cost. Does knowing that, in advance, discourage you from making Windows as good as it is?

Anyway, my point was that this is something we can have a reasoned discussion about, without either side needing to poison the well by making analogies to immorality. You can have a perfectly moral society that's either biased or not biased against the hyper-rich. If you believe one of these is wrong as policy, that's fine. If you believe the hyper-rich don't matter to the fairness of a society, that's a perfectly reasonable argument. But if you believe one of these is so wrong as to be equivalent to racism, it seems very difficult to justify that claim, and if you can't, it seems highly counterproductive to discourse.

The "soak the rich" approach is immoral in my book. Any discourse that doesn't consider the moral angle to these issues is incomplete.

You should probably read the history of US inheritance laws. They were deliberately designed from the start to "soak the rich", for the express purpose of avoiding a European-style hereditary aristocracy where massive wealth (and the corresponding societal influence/power) would be passed from father to son for multiple generations.

What would a fair rent in Galt's Gulch be? What should John Galt have charged the other strikers for not only collective defense like the distortion field, but for the community existing? For the opportunity to live in such a society? If the US government collapse didn't happen, the number of people Galt would have wanted to live there would have been fairly high, and their willingness to pay, once they knew what he was up to, would also have been high. And he had a genuinely good product, and every right to eject people from Galt's Gulch at gunpoint.

Taxes up to that point are certainly fair. Whether governments as currently implemented are the right entities to collect those taxes is a question (though, by no means interpret me as advocating a Randian anarcho-capitalism just because I used Galt's Gulch as an example!), but your labor is fruitful within a society, and that society certainly has the right to charge you for it, or demand, at gunpoint if necessary, that you stop taking advantage of what they provide for free. (You always have the right to opt out of taxes if you opt out of the taxing society, as Roger Ver did.)

For a less fictional valley: how much does the government fund Bay Area universities in the form of research grants? And how much did the tech industry gain from that, and what would a fair price for access to that have been? Imagine a parallel universe where Stanford and Berkeley never got a penny of government funds. How much should a VC or founder in this parallel universe pay for transportation to ours?

Denying people the fruit of their labor is immoral. But society collectively also labors to build a better society.

Cultivating a happy citizenry is collective defense. When the electorate is well-fed, well-clothed, healthy, educated, and with career prospects, then there will be no bloody revolutions and disorder in the streets.

Better our taxes pay for UHC or free university tuition, than even more militarized police forces, drone fleets, and a larger surveillance state to maintain order.

As an side, capitalism is more effective at achieving socialism's moral ends than socialism is. It's something people should get behind even if they don't place moral value on private property. You might disagree, but we can argue about that on the level of facts.

And the primary method people use to get and keep this money is through exploitation and abuse generally of workers, tax systems, etc. Which is just icing on the cake beyond the original problem of wealth concentration.

Also we have the notion that people are being paid 300, 400, 1000 times as much as their employees. This is a lie; one person generally isn't worth 1000x as much as another. There are thousands of others who would be able to replace any person in any job with similar results. The money they get is through the manipulation of their wealth, power, and connections to make more, and the Rand-esque 'great man' fallacy where Americans assume industry is driven but supermen and women at the top who truly deserve what they are getting, and not primarily as a collective effort. When a company succeeds, where should the profits of that success go? The wealthy have up until now succeeded in enforcing a deeply capitalist system where all of the profits go to the wealthy and the least possible earnings are divvied up to the peasants who beg and struggle to be allowed to earn from their labor at all.

This is merit capitalism. http://meritcapitalism.com/

Who said anything about judging them? Bill Gates is obviously a good person. That has nothing to do with whether or not we as a society want to allow unlimited financial returns for success in business.

So yes, there is offense in the inequal distribution, when one unique snowflake controls 1% of the world's purchasing power, while roughly 1% of the world's population was required to make that power possible. Whether that offense is moral or evitable is a separate question, but I understand why people frame it as an offense.

Imagine if one rich person earned all the money in a country. That would be a very bad situation on many levels from concentration of power, to the induction of universal poverty. The question is, how far towards that extreme can you go while discouraging the bad effects? PG has many good points, but there was a major study that showed that US policy is mainly controlled by the preferences of the wealthy, even when the majority of the population disagrees. That doesn't sound like representative government.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...

I don't think we should discourage the vast majority of entrepreneurs, but we should make it harder to get and maintain wealth once you move into the tens or hundreds of millions in assets or income, and past a certain number of billions, possibly blocked. I'm not sure what to do about people leaving the country once they reach that level though so that last part is probably not a good solution, but in spirit we shouldn't let a few people have too much unelected power. They're not just buying new shirts. The problem with wealth is that you can leverage the fact that people like one aspect about you (your ability to provide some business service) into another domain where they don't have to like you so much.

https://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Expa...

People with more money pay taxes at a lower rate than people without. It's very easy to pick obvious cutoffs where people are wealthy to the point of absurdity compared to their "peers".

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w10433

https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocr...