It's especially interesting, because although a billion dollars is a staggering amount of money for one person to possess, if you distributed the wealth of the world out to every single person evenly, it would only be something like $50,000 per person (based on some quick Googling), which is a life changing amount of money, to be sure, but it's a one time deal. It's not $50,000 per year of income, it's $50,000, period. The amount of wealth created per year is a fraction of that. Were it all distributed equally, basically everyone in the developed world would be taking a massive hit in quality of life, and every single person in the world would still be sweating medical bills in the low $10,000's.

I agree that the numbers become meaningless past a certain point, especially where we're talking about valuations, where it's basically a bunch of people's vague agreement on a price and there are incentives to make it look one way or another, but we also have really bad intuitions about just how much wealth there is out there.

>distributed the wealth of the world

In the limit of a single individual wealth works in a naive fashion where such distribution is possible. But on the scale of the economy, such a thing is not possible without inventing a better distribution mechanism than capital itself. If you redistribute each peace of your car's engine to each passenger, you will be forced to walk. Even as a thought experiment, evenly distributing the wealth of the world is not possible. As the wealth is produced by the incentives inherent in gradients of inequality.

Thus the project of the modern socialist is to develop redistributive structures that maintain such incentives. There are echos of this in George and Harberger, but little in modern Jacobin-style socialism, whose proposals amount to gifting the means of production to the sorts of people that staff an HR department.

Yeah I agree it's not remotely practical and that there would be all sorts of crazy consequences, I just think the thought experiment is useful as an intuition check for how much wealth there is. As an aside, I don't agree that wealth is produced by the incentives inherent in inequality. Wealth is created when people make things and do stuff, which often happens because people want more than what they have, and that doesn't require inequality at all, just a desire to have a better life, however defined.

Back to the main point, we see someone worth $100b and we think there's plenty for everyone, but even in a best case scenario, where we can magically distribute an equal share of all the wealth to everyone and it all holds its value, there's nowhere near enough for everyone to have the standard of living we have become accustomed to in the richest parts of the world.

Those incentives can't exist if any improvement in the quality of life must be distributed evenly among 7 billion people before it may be claimed.

It's true that most people are more interested in absolute quality of life than they are in the relative status granted by inequality, but the one implies the other.

You can make a case for less inequality, of course; but now we're quibbling about the price, as it were.

I mean, the thought experiment isn't about the logistics of redistribution, it's about the sheer amount of wealth. These counterpoints amount to saying that actually redistributing wealth like that would have terrible unintended consequences, which I agree with, and I think just serves to underscore that there is much less total wealth than most people think there is.

Say a billionaire gave away all his money to middle class families. He targeted those in the range of say 40-80k. In the end he chose people who were entrepreneurial. That's essentially 100k to 1,000,000 families w/ an entrepreneurial bent.

Say just 25% are successful in re-investing that money by buying small businesses w/ cashflow off flippa, or buying rental property, etc... Or starting a SaaS business, and that 25% is able to increase their income to 1 million.

Then that 1 million+ * 250,000, means his investment of 100B brought 250B to the economy. The other 75% who weren't so lucky in business, maybe they also invested and still built up a nice nest egg for retirement, or maybe they bought a home so they had a guaranteed roof over their head if hard times hit.

Many of the 75% might be able to get their net worth to 250-500k because of the 1-time gift.

This is all speculation.... In the real world it might be more like 10% are successful, but maybe 1-3% are super successful (become billionaires themselves).

If we had a cap on how much capital you could hold, then that would at least guarantee it funnels back to the bottom echelons of society. Though, I think the best cap would simply be a CEO cap of 150x average salaries (including contractors/offshore/etc). The CEO could earn whatever they wanted, as long as they simply gave everyone on their payroll a raise to meet their new bonus.

The other fact is that 90% of the successful people ARE successful because they didn't have to worry about money. When you struggle to put food on the table, it's hard to think about anything else or work on a side project. There was a good twitter feed/conversation back and forth w/ some people in SV a few months ago that basically was about one person saying 'anyone can make it', and the others saying 'those same people started at their parent's basement, they weren't exactly homeless or struggling'.

Actually it was Paul Graham who said:"The next time someone claims that starting startups is for rich kids, remind them that Airbnb happened because its founders literally could not pay their rent,"

Matthew Prince, the founder and CEO of Cloudflare replied: "Oh Paul, you know better. I had to borrow money from my mom to pay my taxes when we were starting Cloudflare. But I certainly came from a relatively privileged background, and so did the AirBnB founders. It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net. #bereal,"

Source: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1129897694984646657

I'm not saying we can ever 100% make everything equitable. Not until we have robots doing 100% of the work and < 10% employment and the means to just let people have what they want or need to be happy, in a world where money isn't even a thing we value anymore, or even use.

But if we could just give everyone a floor, or safety net then we can see a lot more combined global progress. Imagine if every child had food on the table just in America and a roof, and healthcare, and could focus on being a kid and getting an education. Imagine if just doing this created 1 million new scientists over the next 50 years that wouldn't have originally existed.

What could they find or discover? The goal shouldn't be take everything but.. take enough that the game isn't forever slanted out of control. That's what GBI or a negative income tax would do. Hell just single-payer healthcare might be enough for some families -- if they didn't have to pay medical bills or copays.

That's a fallacy. It doesn't consider Knock on effects of that money moving very rapidly to pay debts and trade

Not to be a jerk, but I feel this perspective is meaningless from the get go. Redistribution/politics is about the marginal utility of a dollar and the time-value of the application. A dollar in a billionaire's account is worthless. Using those dollars to build a universal pre-k or healthcare system will generate more wealth than a one-time $50k payout.

I don't think it's that simple. Sure, money in a billionaire's possession probably isn't going to be used for consumption, but it's not like that money is chilling in a matress somewhere; it is invested. Those funds are a source of capital for public companies, seed funding for small businesses, VC investments for growing companies, charitable contributions potentially, even funds for countries through bonds etc. I'm going to stay away from making pronouncements on how this money ought to be used; I'm merely pointing out that the situation is more nuanced than how you have framed it.

Sure... but there are two simple facts: a) billionaires are unelected and b) they dictate the usage of vast quantities of resources.

Personally, I believe this is immoral.

I think you made great points in your comment above, but I would point out that the thought experiment indicates that the resources they control are actually not that vast, compared to the wealth that would actually be required to raise everyone in the world to, say, the current average American standard of living more than temporarily. It may be moral to take that money and put it to better use, but it would run out a lot faster than most people think.

Perhaps, but I believe this leads into the issue of the waste inherent in the current American standard of living. The waste (big house, meat every day, giant cars, plastic everywhere, etc.) is, as you know, due to the low cost of extracting fossil fuels. I am optimistic that a lot of this waste can be eliminated without changing our quality of life significantly. The structure of our lives may change, but that's the exact thing I'm arguing for, anyway.

Bring on the fully automated luxury communism!

From my calculations of a total redistribution of money, which will be more than just redistributing funds from the wealthy, you'd have this:

Global money: $90,400,000,000,000

Global population: 7,742,131,000

Money per person: ~$11,650

Which is almost the poverty level of the US or >14x the global poverty level.

Except some countries 10k is like 100k in U.S.A if you calculated for local costs of living and adjusted you could get away w/ giving 2-3 billion $1k, and then higher amounts to those in the U.S.A. -- you could skip China because they're already a socialist country and should have all their needs met, and skip bad actors like N. Korea, Iran, etc... Might be able to get it up to something like 150k-200k per person in developed world.

But money gets spent it all will end up back in the top 1%'s hands. They have funnels in place to ensure that money funnels up into their hands. Which is why GBI makes more sense, by giving money gradually/recurring it keeps cycling. The poorer families getting GBI would spend 100% locally essentially keeping the money in the local economy.

> Except some countries 10k is like 100k in U.S.A

In some parts of the US, 100k would make you crazy wealthy. In other parts of the US, it wouldn't even make you middle class.

That’s the wrong way to look at it. Velocity of money creates value.

If you have everyone money, they would buy and sell goods and services instead of hoarding it.

You do realize billionaires actually invest their money, not "hoard" it. In stocks they finance companies. In banks they lend to borrowers.

Their money are put to good work. They don’t just put the money under a mattress.

> Most people out here are sweating medical bills in the low $10,000's, while the news is talking about billions being gained and lost in the span of a few weeks - so fast it makes you wonder if that amount of wealth really even existed in the first place.

If people lose confidence in the system because of that it’s because they can’t multiply. Billionaires are very rich compared to middle class people, but there are very few of them, and lots of middle class people. Elizabeth Warren’s new health plan will cost $50 trillion over ten years. Middle class Americans make $8 trillion a year, compared to about $130 billion for America’s too 400 taxpayers.[1] Confiscating the total wealth of every billionaire in America (about $3-3.5 trillion) would pay for Warren’s health plan for well under a year.[2]

We spend way too much time worrying about the wealth of a small group of people that, in the end, doesn’t add up to that large a fraction of total wealth or income. This is, in my view, the biggest reason why America can’t have nice things. Over on the other side of the pond, they don’t worry as much about figuring out how to tax billionaires. Because they know that, in the aggregate, it’s the middle class that has most of the money.

[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/returns-taxpayers.... Rough proxy for billionaires.

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/10/03/forbes-400-a.... Top 400 billionaire have $3 trillion. Another 220 billionaires not included, but due to the cut off they have at most another $600 billion.

Lost in points like this, where you’re trying to scare people by saying a large number, is that the distinction between a Medicare for All type of system and the current private system is less about how much it costs and much more about who the middleman is.

* In M4A, Americans will pay ~$30T/10yr to providers through the government as a middleman.

* In the current private system, Americans will pay ~$30T/10yr to providers through whichever company their employer has selected as a middleman.

The only cost question re: M4A is whether Americans will spend slightly more or slightly less overall when costs are increased because coverage is extended to 10% more people, and costs are decreased by:

- massive efficiency gains of a single payer,

- elimination of profit to shareholders who siphon money away from care,

- better preventative care that reduces or eliminates more expensive catastrophic care.

And additional intangible benefits like:

- not having your healthcare decided by your employer,

- having the ability to be an entrepreneur and/or start a small business while having the security of healthcare,

- the fact that small business will be able to better compete with huge corporations for desirable employees because they won’t have to offer health benefits themselves.

My point wasn’t to take a dig at M4A. (I'm a proponent of universal healthcare, though I'd prefer extending ACA.) I mentioned it because OP talked about sweating medical bills. The point is that the cost of providing healthcare to everyone is vastly more than the wealth of even billionaires. (By the way, the expert estimate linked from Warren's own site is $52 trillion/10 years, not $30 trillion.)

No, but her plan isn't the only one out there. Bernie's plan was estimated I believe at 23 billion over 10 years, which a right wing think tank actually (accidently) proved would cost less than we're paying now.

But in 25 years how much does the system improve, what if it's like 50T over the 1st 10 years, then 30T the 2nd because of gains in efficiency? There's a lot of 'in the air' variables as well, where it could end up being 30 or 40T over 10 years if the efficiencies are higher than expected or if we can better negotiate terms w/ drug companies.

If we legalize weed and shrooms and tax them at the national level, that itself would also be a great way to gain money for healthcare. We also can easily halve our military spending and still have a strong national defense. Also adding a VAT may be a good idea, we could even give discounts to citizens so immigrants and visitors travelling in America also help offset our healthcare costs. For instance say vat is 4%, and we charge 12% for non-citizens it would A. discourage illegal immigration, and B. it would stop people worrying about immigrants because they'd have to pay higher VAT than everyone else, so they'd be tax payers and not just 'using the system'...

This is maddening. The problem with the US healthcare system is that we're paying ~$30T/10yr†, not who we're paying it to. The idea that locking those exorbitant costs in would be a win is baffling.

The efficiency gains of single payer are overrated. We pay more than other countries do in admin overhead, but admin overhead itself is a small fraction of total costs, and as a percentage of our spend, admin costs would necessarily rise, probably dramatically, if Medicare starts covering 30 year olds in addition to 68 year olds.

† I'm just taking your number here, not interrogating it.

Indeed. We already effectively have single payer system for large segments of the population, the Medicare itself. It still didn't push the costs down to European levels for Medicare recipients.

The US needs cheaper healthcare, but single payer won't achieve that.

Part of the reason for that is that Medicare is forbidden by law to negotiate prices the way other insurance companies can as a result of the GOP's Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003.

It can't be much of the reason, because prescription drugs are, contrary to popular opinion, actually a relatively small component of US healthcare spending.

The other thing about rayiner's post is that the language he uses is quite informative of his political views. Notice how he uses the phrase "confiscate wealth" to describe taxation, as opposed to, say, "paying their fair share".

My political views are pro-taxation and pro-public services. (Except we should have the Swedes or Singaporeans come over to run our public services.) Which is why I think waging a class war against billionaires for a piddling $275 billion in additional revenue, while not increasing taxes on people making up to $250,000, is pure insanity. European countries have figured out how to pay for public services with middle class taxes. We should follow their lead instead of dreaming about wealth taxes.

Also, I used “confiscate” in the context of literally taking all of billionaires’ money.

Warren's tax plan starts at the $50 million threshold. Not sure why you are counting only billionaires, or only the top 400.

Her math adds up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/05/warrens-p...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/opinion/did-warren-pass-t...

Warren’s wealth tax doubles to 6% at the billionaire level. (France’s and Sweden's highest wealth tax was 1.5% until they got rid of it.)

Warren’s calculations just prove why the whole fixation on billionaires and income inequality is a distraction. You're talking about a wealth tax that is unconstitutional, at levels that are completely unprecedented. You're talking about risking capital flight, and setting political capital on fire, to move the United States far to the left of Europe. (What a great campaign ad for Donald Trump! Warren is proposing to do something that even France realized was a bad idea.) And for what? Is it going to pay for M4A? Or balance the budget? No. Not even theoretically.

I say this all as someone who wants universal healthcare to be implemented (even though I'm pessimistic about it saving any money). I think Warren's proposal with respect to employer-side payments is actually pretty clever. But the wealth tax is a huge political liability, and it could take M4A with it. And when that happens, it won't be the fault of billionaires (the wealth tax wasn't going to raise the necessary revenue anyway). It'll be the fault of people making $200,000 who think they are "middle class" and shouldn't have to pay the same level of taxes their counterparts in Europe pay.

Why is the Warren head tax (the "employer-side payments", which will be taken out of the hides of employees the same way health insurance costs already are) "clever"? Aren't head taxes generally problematic?

I like the idea of keeping things similar to what people are already paying as a starting point. Although I hadn’t realized that it would end up being a head tax rather than a payroll tax.

This comment doesn't say anything; it's simply innuendo.

> If people lose confidence in the system because of that it’s because they can’t multiply. Elizabeth Warren’s new health plan will cost $50 trillion over ten years. Middle class Americans make $8 trillion a year, compared to about $130 billion for America’s billionaires.

To anyone who might take this as an indication Warren's plan will increase HC spending, if we do nothing average yearly HC spending for the 2020s in the US is going to be over 5T anyway. It was at ~3.65T last year, and growing fast.

People obsessed with "how will we pay for it" just don't understand. The skewed distribution of wealth creates a situation where people don't have time and energy left over from their hustle to take care of themselves and to take care of each other in basic ways. People are sacrificing to the gods of capitalism. Correcting the skewed distribution of wealth would shift agency back to people to mind the business of living life up close, rather than having their life energy extracted.

This is part of a degrowth mindset, and it will freak people out who flee from the shame of not winning, who cannot handle pauses or idle time, who must have control over other peopes' lives. But we can't have those people running this planet into the fire. They're gonna have to learn to be alright.

>The skewed distribution of wealth creates a situation where people don't have time and energy left over from their hustle to take care of themselves and to take care of each other in basic ways.

Can you help me understand this better? Because I see this sentiment often. I'm just gonna do some quick math... Bezos + Gates + Musk + Zuckerberg = let's round up to $300 Billion. Divide that evenly among the 327 million US population. I'd get $917. Do you believe that I will take better care of myself or be a better father in the long run if I get a one-time bonus of $917?

Right now, people with a lot of money basically dictate how people with not enough money use their time. How do they do this? By effectively withholding housing and food unless the people with not enough money do the work that the people with more money tell them to do... Often at the cost of taking care of their kids, of their bodies, of their mental health, of their living spaces. Money as a tool for distributing resources and collective decision making is at odds with money as a tool for domination, exploitation and extortion.

Modifying the distribution of wealth isn't about chopping up the richest peoples money and handing it out to everyone else. It's about altering the flows of the dynamical system so that power is continually distributed in an equitable way, one that optimizes more peoples' ability to thrive and co-create healthy lives.

It's about changing the meaning of having vs not having money, it's about reducing the intensity of the leverage people have over one another, and about freeing people to have basic autonomy and agency in their lives.

I find it a bit naive that the whole system would work like some sort of highway robbery :-) I'm pretty sure that's not what's meant when people talk of "wealth redistribution". Your argument looks like a strawman to me.

I'm not trying to make an argument, I'm trying to understand what the GP means in practice. I know people sometimes use questions passive aggressively, but that wasn't my intent. A more even distribution of all the wealth looks like people having a few thousand dollars of wealth. Much less if we're equalizing the whole world and not just the US. What are we imagining happens?

I'm from a former Communist state (one of those states that became Communist at Soviet-tank-barrel-point :-) ). So Communism doesn't have much appeal to me.

My personal perspective is that equalizing things fully doesn't work. You want incentives to motivate people. However, it's quite amazing what motivates people - after all, for the average billionaire going from $62bn to $63bn isn't really some sort of milestone, unless they somehow surpass some other billionaire. Sometimes the things that motivate people are a lot more fine grained that it seems. So pure financial motivation is rarely the main incentive.

On the other hand, such huge imbalances do eat away at democratic principles.

My personal opinion is that at some point, companies should be treated as utilities/companies of vital national interest. After all, that's how rich people make most of their money, through shares, not through salaries.

So, basically, once a company is taller than X, the country this company is based on gets a certain share of the company, 5%, 10%, 20%, it doesn't matter. I'd also make these shares non-voting. Even better, I'd force these companies to give out a certain percentage of these shares to employees (after all, they're "the people").

We'd have fewer billionaires, we'd have more stable middle class people, we'd have higher state revenues, we'd have less of a disconnect between totally private companies, regular people and governments.

As the owner of a company, you have a choice: create a huge company and have to share the spoils or stay small and nimble and have greater control.

Let's imagine the US govt takes 10% of the shares of Amazon. These are non-voting shares. Amazon doesn't pay a dividend as far as I know, so what is the point? The government doesn't have control over the company, the government doesn't get any revenue. The government can't sell the shares because then it just has to come confiscate 10% more shares from Amazon.

How do I, as a regular citizen, benefit from this? Is there some mechanism I'm not seeing? Because it feels like it's just a meaningless paper transfer.

Amazon won't pay dividends for a while. A country lasts centuries.

Secondly, that's why I was also thinking of a variant where employees get shares, too.

What is the difference between Amazon giving me, an imaginary Amazon employee, $100 in cash vs $100 in stock? Amazon is a publicly traded company, so any employee can choose to buy stock. Is the idea to force the employees to hold the stock without being allowed to sell it? If they can't sell it, what value do they get from it?

As an investment strategy, I never hold stock in a company I'm working for. That puts too many eggs in one basket. If the company fails for some reason, not only have I lost my job but I've also lost my retirement savings. I would personally oppose being compensated in company stock and would sell it ASAP if given the option.

Dividends, influence (the employee shares would have voting rights).

I'm not saying it's the best option or something I studied deeply, but we need something better.

Otherwise, with automation, we're back to feudalism.

> Do you believe that I will take better care of myself or be a better father in the long run if I get a one-time bonus of $917?

Your POV fails to take into account the utility and time-value of the redistributed dollars. It's the difference between some unelected doofus having tons of power because of their stationary dollars, or building a universal pre-k and/or healthcare system.

I know I'd personally work less if I wasn't "blessed with the opportunity of choice" of terrible insurance plans offered by my employer where an emergency appendectomy leads to $5k in bills... or if I could work 75% time and reduce daycare hours.

It's still not clear to me how we are going to get the outcome you're looking for.

If the wealth is redistributed to the people (the mechanism isn't important) then that amounts to a few thousand dollars per person. This isn't the kind of money that would allow wide-spread reduction in work hours. My expectation is that most people will liquify that wealth and spend it over a long weekend. Do you have a different expectation?

If rather than being given directly to the people, instead the state keeps that money, are you predicting that Donald Trump will use it to build you a new school?

Regarding reduction of work hours, I’m a subscriber to the prevalence of “bullshit jobs” theory. Remove the power from corporate overlords via redistribution and put those resources under more democratic control. As a bonus people will take ownership over their schedule.

Sure, with less people working we may not have forty choices of toilet paper or same day delivery of counterfeit trinkets... but I’m more than ok with that. It will be necessary to reduce carbon emissions, anyway.

> We spend way too much time worrying about the wealth of a small group of people that, in the end, doesn’t add up to that large a fraction of total wealth or income.

People focus on billionaires due to the fact that they are the most stark representation of the deeply unequal society in which they live. Wealth inequality is very real, please refer to the following: https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/august/wealth-ine... It's a rhetorical device

> Middle class Americans make $8 trillion a year, compared to about $130 billion for America’s billionaires.

So the group of people who leverage capital to sustain themselves and don't have to work have lower net income than the group of people who have to work to have a roof over their head?

> $50 trillion

I love how these numbers increasingly grow. First it was 36 trillion from the well-known Cato institute. Mind you, this was actually going to save money in the long term, so we have to bump up the number. The United states spend almost 2x per capita what Canada does on healthcare, so it seems pretty odd that we'd use current pricing systems to estimate the cost when the original M4A bill expressly increases leverage to negotiate. $50 trillion is a spook.

> So the group of people who leverage capital to sustain themselves and don't have to work have lower net income than the group of people who have to work to have a roof over their head?

He’s talking about the aggregate income earned by the group. So the delta in individual incomes is offset by the massive delta in group sizes.

Huh, this is interesting. I completely missed the fact that these two groups are massively differently sized. So his 8 trillion vs 130 billion is laughable. If you define the "middle class" as roughly 50 percent of the population (this is pretty low considering how this word is actually used), then the billionaires 130 billion greatly outstrips the 8 trillion per person. There's just shy of 600 billionaires in the US vs roughly 160 million "middle class" then the per individual income is 50k vs 222k. Pretty Stark even when you completely disregard the wealth elephant in the room

Whether you look at things per-person or per-group is a matter of adopting a punitive outlook versus a practical outlook. If your goal is punitive, sure, it's relevant that the average billionaire makes hundreds of millions of dollars per year, while the average middle class person might make $80,000.

But I don't think Americans are punitive. They're not deeply troubled by the mere fact that there is someone out there with $8 billion. To the extent they care about billionaires, they're concerned about whether they're paying a fair amount to support the county that gave them so much. And from that perspective, what matters is the aggregate income of the group. And $130-150 billion just isn't much compared to the $6-7 trillion in annual government spending in the U.S.

Politicians thrive by disguising the punitive outlook as a practical outlook. They point to how much money Zuckerberg or Bezos have, and quickly pivot to how they could pay for universal healthcare, universal education, etc. A necessary aspect of that strategy is keeping people ignorant of the fact that even confiscating the total income of every billionaire would only pay for say 25% of U.S. higher education spending, or 4% of U.S. health spending.

> But I don't think Americans are punitive.

I don't think this is a remotely justifiable belief. We have the highest prisoner rate per capita, we sanction anyone the second they step out of line, and the entire two prior decades have been shaped by a collective trauma that pushed us into seeking retributive justice against anyone--regardless of their actual role.

I fail to remember which Puerto Rican uprising this was during, but there was a mother who was jailed for the crime of making her husband and children breakfast. When slavery was finally ended, the 10 years of reconstruction was met immediately with horrific acts of terrorism and reactionary violence to reassert white supremacy.

Punitive Justice is a core tenet of the American civil religion.

> People focus on billionaires due to the fact that they are the most stark representation of the deeply unequal society in which they live. Wealth inequality is very real, please refer to the following: https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/august/wealth-ine.... It's a rhetorical device

It's a rhetorical device that distracts from real problems and real solutions. Look at Warren's wealth tax proposal. It's blatantly unconstitutional and without precedent in the OECD. And what's the upshot? Just $275 billion in revenue per year. Compared to the $1 trillion or more we could raise by implementing a VAT, like every other OECD country has, or bringing payroll taxes in line with other OECD countries.

Focusing on billionaires also distracts from the nature of our "deeply unequal society." Look at the U.S. income distribution: https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-... https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/fair-share-top-400-us-taxpaye....

The top 400 taxpayers earned $127 billion in 2014, let's say an even $150 billion in 2018. There were 70 million returns filed by the bottom 50%. If you took all billionaires' income and redistributed it among the bottom 50%, they'd have about $2,000 a year more, or a bit more than 10%. But look at the top 50% minus the top 1%. (Even Sanders considers the 98th percentile to be "middle class" given his tax plan wouldn't raise taxes on people with household incomes under $250,000.) They have $7 trillion in income, versus about $1.1 trillion in income for the bottom half. If you want to talk about income inequality, that's the root of it. And that's the most significant kind of income inequality in terms of impact on peoples' daily lives. Billionaires aren't the ones driving up housing prices in urban neighborhoods and driving out people of color. Billionaires also aren't the ones that would be directly affected by the increases in VAT and payroll taxes that would be required to move to a more European model of taxation and public services.

If you took all personal income ($10 trillion) and divided it evenly among all filers (140 million), you get about $71,000. If you or your household make more than that, you benefit from inequality.

> So the group of people who leverage capital to sustain themselves and don't have to work have lower net income than the group of people who have to work to have a roof over their head?

Zuckerberg doesn't work? Buffet doesn't work? Kylie Jenner doesn't work?

> I love how these numbers increasingly grow.

The $50 trillion number was calculated by Warren's own experts: https://assets.ctfassets.net/4ubxbgy9463z/2Tg9oB55ICu2vtYBaK... (linked from: https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/paying-for-m4a)

Credit to Warren, her analysis doesn't assume that Medicare for All will result in massive cost savings, which I think is highly unlikely given the American political system.

> Zuckerberg doesn't work? Buffet doesn't work? Kylie Jenner doesn't work? > don't have to work

One of these things is not like the other. Don't be so slippery, please.

Your comment is posted as a matter of fact, but includes no sources/citations

Its probably true, just cherry picked.

Currently healthcare will be 52trill over ten years

Warrens plan from two estimates is 52-59 trill over ten years.

Billionaire thing seems wrong. Forbes 400 richest americans has 2.96 trillion total between them. Lowest person on the list has networth of 2.8 bill

You’re both right because GP was talking about annual income

The US economy already pays for near-universal healthcare through insurance premiums. The money already exists.

not to mention the amount of political influence billions can buy.

billionaires are incompatible with democracy

>At that point the numbers don't even matter. Maybe Neumann took Masa Son for $50 billion. Who cares?

The numbers don't matter to whom? I have to imagine the numbers matter to Neumann, Masa Son, WeWork stakeholders & WeWork employees. It is never meaningless.

A million seconds is 11.5 days.

A billion seconds is 31.7 years.

staggering difference.

I am curious on how a person can live in the USA for their whole lives for $3 - 5 million. Serious question.

Invest 3 million in the stock market. A safe withdrawal rate (historically, you would never go bankrupt if you did this, so you could survive 2008 without even worrying) is 3.5% per year.

3.5% of 3 million is 105k. That puts you in the 87th percentile of Americans.

Really? $5M is $100k a year for 50 years. I can live comfortably off of $35k a year a long as I'm not in San Fransisco or something. With just $1M I could live indefinitely off investment income, which would be like $50k a year. Double those expenses to support a family, and you're still under budget.

$35k pre or post tax and what's your total tax rate?

Either one is fine. $35k post tax is super comfy and easy to do, while $35k pre-tax is a little trickier, and would be 15-20% tax rate depending on your state. Monthly budget of $1100 rent and utils, $300 food, $150 car, $60 entertainment, $300 misc, plus $150 for (bad) health insurance. That's $25k/year. Not exactly a comfortable lifestyle but a few hundred dollars extra in a few categories wouldn't dig into $5M much.

Everyone's situation is different, but I wouldn't be so quick to assume yours is reflective of most.

I take home 20k/30k, etr of 35%.

Everything else seems pretty far under average, or in the case of rent, unrealistic. My prices are reflective of a high tax/cost of living city in the northeast.

Just rent on a studio within a thirty minute drive averages $1k, only including trash, snow.

Add $100 for basic cable internet.

Double that car cost, 150 almost covers gas and insurance. Doesn't include paid parking. Some jobs and Some parts of the area can get public transport to workfor them, I can't.

$60 is pretty low for a decent cell phone plan. Be more like 120 in reality.

health cares an extra $800/mo (after insurance pays) if I were to follow my health care providers reccomendations.

Well, the current poverty line for individuals is about $12k per year. Making that for about 80 years is about $1M in a lifetime. So the numbers quoted represent living at about 3x to 5x the poverty line on average. Or something like $35k-$70k per year, which seems doable with a fair amount of comfort (especially at the high end of that range) in most parts of the country.

Invest conservatively and pull out 2-3% per year. This should provide you with, conservatively, 50k-100k per year in post-tax cash (inflation adjusted) to spend as you like. Historically, you should be able to withdraw at this rate "indefinitely" with very low risk of zeroing out your funds.

5 million over 100 years is $50,000/yr. The median household income is just over $60,000.

I think you'd do fine.

As seen over the past few decades, $50k doesn't go as far as it used to, and I see no reason not to expect the same in the future compared to now. In 30 years $50k might be poverty level income.

Sure but that ignores everything about compound interest. And most people don’t live too 100. Consider it reducto ad absurdum on my part.

That's why you invest the $5m, not just keep it in cash.

Cost of living a decent life in much of the country is ~$35000.

And it will be decent for that price if you can just buy a good house and vehicle.

3,000,000 / 60 years of adulthood = 50,000 per year. Not a problem outside costal cities.

don't live in San Francisco.

Gates, Arnault, and Bezos each have had more than 100B, although not liquid.

Not really. Adding up all the shares that they own, and saying that they have that much money, is completely incorrect. If any of them tried to liquidate even a small part of their shareholding the price would go swiftly to zero.

The price would go down, sure, but the chance of it going to zero are... very close to zero. People aren't investing because these folks have shares, they're investing (at least in part) in the underlying value and forward numbers for the company.

I guarantee that 100% of any of their shares would be swiftly picked up if they were sold at a 5%+ discount to the 52-week low stock price.

I would equally guarantee that they won´t be, simply because there isn´t actually enough actual money to buy them all.

Markets are a real time pricing mechanism - they operate on instantaneous availability of both money and shares. Put enough shares out on the supply side, is the equivalent of flooding the demand side with money a. la. hyperinflation. In both cases, the good in question becomes effectively valueless.

They can borrow money with their stock as collateral (explicit or implicit). They only need the liquidity to cover interest.

btw take a look at Gates' portfolio. He's as liquid as it get's at that level.

Bezos does so every year in order to finance blue origin.

Yes, but a little bit every year != all at once. Selling off a bit every year, you can likely find a welcome market. Sell everything at once, the market will tank/disappear or go for an extreme loss. He probably wouldn't even be able to find a buyer(s) if he decided to sell off completely today.