Wealth taxes that are too high in relation to peers (other countries/states) will often lead to brain drain, capital flight and others. From an individual's perspective, many will see it as a disincentive in starting something new, you may also be incentivized to borrow more money to ensure the leverage is high enough to limit taxation and optimize current quality of life. Your decision to leave assets for your next of kin can also become distorted and you may feel encouraged to spend the money now (on them and otherwise) as opposed to getting tax fleeced.

Many other things need to be in place and fully functional for a high wealth tax to work and even then, it is likely to work for a 10 to 30 year period, only to serve as a dragging anchor at a later stage. I would argue that many of the challenges in Europe from a technological innovation standpoint, can be partially derived in high taxation.

It is also difficult to determine what is the right amount of taxation while taking into account the importance of incentive mechanisms. Also, at what point do tax hikes stop?

Some of the key real solutions to many of societies challenges is to have its populace be more active in all of its inner working, helping them to better understand the constraints and opportunities as opposed to being a bunch of people getting of top of their little soap box. There is also a major need for strong reforms to tackle nepotism, corruption and laziness at all levels of society.

Any chance your opinion was formed based on news/studies funded by wealthy individuals?

I'm not the person you responded to but this kind of comment really bugs me. Why assume someone didn't form their own opinion?

No one "forms their own opinion" in a vacuum. Your beliefs and opinions are influenced in a multitude of ways by your environment including the media you consume. Asking how the biases you have were formed is something everyone should be asking of themselves, and certainly doesn't seem like an inappropriate question.

Of course opinions are shaped by outside factors, but the reason those kind of responses are annoying is because they're just so... uninteresting.

I'm not the guy from above, but responding with "I disagree with you so are you sure your opinions are your own" is dismissive and doesn't lead to a more interesting or thoughtful discussion. Instead, asking WHY he believes gives you the opportunity to engage in the discussion, maybe change your views a little or change the other persons' a bit.

That's why comments like that are annoying, they're a way to dismiss discussion instead of engaging in it, and engaging in discussion is the point of this silly site.

I'm someone who also isn't wealthy and disagrees with wealth taxes. Responses like that one aren't an honest attempt to engage, and I'd also ignore it and move on :)

How do you get at how a person has formed their opinions without asking and it being taken as a slight? There was no dismissal or disagreement. Just an on-topic question.

Problem is that it's a subtle accusation of speaking in bad faith or an accusation of lacking agency. In order to have respect for the other person, you can't start from either of those positions.

This perfectly describes how I feel and what I was trying to get across. You're much better at English than I.

Original comment was pretty threadbare, just “wealth taxes wouldn’t affect me but I don’t want them”. It’s worth knowing why they think that, especially if it’s getting upvoted so much.

We have to be able to ask these questions and assume they’re not attacks to have productive dialogues.

And yours was formed based on gospel truth handed down from heaven? C'mon.

Why? (I mostly agree but it's not a strong opinion)

For me it comes down to a few things.

- I think wealth can be created and isn't always a zero sum transfer

- I think we want to incentivize wealth creation

- I think economic growth constrained by protection for human rights and environmental destruction is the best way to improve the quality of life for the most people the fastest.

- I think wealth taxes disincentivize a lot of these things with knock on effects (forcing people to liquidate their company equity, etc.). It's also repeatedly taxing the same money every year eventually down to whatever the cap is.

I'd rather set taxes/caps at generational wealth transfer if you're going to try and incentivize something - might as well go after dynastic wealth and the children that benefit from it without creating anything. I think focusing on housing and land use/zoning would also directly benefit more people by fixing existing perverse incentives.

PG writes about some of this in essays, Tyler Cowen's book Stubborn Attachments was also interesting on the growth aspect (though wealth taxes aren't specifically mentioned).

Why do we think wealth will be better allocated by a government? This money is largely already taxed either via capital gains or income. I'd suspect a lot of our problems are problems of incentives and competing priorities, not of available cash flow for government programs.

That's my take anyway, I suspect a 'hate the rich' motivated reasoning position pushing the idea of a wealth tax more than any serious thinking about incentives and what it might do. It seems political.

(I am nowhere near the level where the proposed tax would start and probably never will be.)

I don't have a super-well formed opinion about this but I think a wealth tax has some issues that don't get enough attention.

Like that the market value of an asset can fluctuate wildly and become untethered from the actual rational value of the asset.

So imagine you're Bezos or Musk and you're not trying to be super rich per se but just trying to build a company according to your vision and so you have a bunch of equity in the company (so that you can control it) but no matter how loudly you proclaim that the market is overvaluing your stock the price keeps going up and now you have to sell lots of shares in order to pay the wealth tax assessed against your equity and you don't have a controlling vote anymore and your vision for your company just dies.

And maybe the hordes of people who think no single person should have a controlling share of a billion-dollar company are right - I don't know. But I'm pretty sure a large fraction of people who build companies (like Bezos or Musk) are doing it to build an enterprise, and not for the cash. Otherwise they'd just stop and have fun with their private jets at a certain point. So if a wealth tax were not going to let them keep control of their enterprise beyond the first decade, they probably would opt not to waste their time building it at all.

And maybe that's fine, but I'm not sure what society looks like in a world where people don't want to build companies.

There is a ton of examples of societies where people don't want to build enterprises. Medieval Europe, where guild and social strata regulations prevented any large enterprise, except maybe large merchant operations. Sime of the poorer modern-day African countries, where social norms prescribe that any fortune has to be divided with the extended family, so concentration of assets to keep building something large is hard.

I frankly think that the American model of free enterprise with reasonably few restrictions made most to improve the well-being of its population.

I think a wealth tax is a bad idea (as described in my comment above), but you can structure equity so that you retain control even without a large holding of shares (see: Palantir, Facebook).

Arguably a wealth tax would create an incentive for everyone to do this which I would argue is probably bad since then the company controllers have less skin in the game.

Generally I think a wealth tax creates a ton of these perverse incentives with little true upside.

> you can structure equity so that you retain control even without a large holding of shares (see: Palantir, Facebook).

I'm a little confused about this though. If class A shares have all the votes (while most shares are class B shares), what prevents the market from valuing the class A shares at an extremely high value and the class B shares not at all? When the company finally gets big and stops growing, the source of its value to shareholders will be the dividends that it pays and it will be the voting class A shareholders that decide how dividends are allocated.

There’s typically a rule that the shares with extra voting power cannot be sold. They automatically convert prior to sale.

Basically they’ve thought of these things and controlled for them already.

If my wealth comes from owning a percentage of a company (say I own 30% of AMZN) what is the way to tax me other than taking my shares, i.e. the Gov would take certain percentage of my shares? And if we go that route how many years would it go by before Gov owned majority of shares of most companies?

Lots of people scream that we should tax the wealthy but I do not follow how you tax someone whose wealth comes from large ownership of a big company...?

Simple, it’s progressive, so if you are very wealthy and own 30% of the company you might need to sell 5% to pay off wealth taxes over a few years, and you sell them to people or institutions, with less wealth (and therefore less wealth taxes due). It wouldn’t end up with the government owning the shares, it would end up with people at a tax advantage relative to you owning the shares.

Whether or not that is a good idea, I don’t know.

I don't see how you came to your conclusion. Gov would tax you as they do now (including when you receive shares for instance), by asking you money. It is up to you to find it. If your assets are illiquid, then it is your problem not the government's one -- and in some cases it can indeed be quite unfair, e.g. for some startup employees.

Let's look at jeff bezos for example. He sells over a billion dollars worth of amazon stock each year [0] (those numbers have increased slightly since then actually).

Fine, he pays some of that to the government, and maybe sells slightly more. I don't see the problem.

If, in fact, your wealth only comes from ownership in a company and you have no other source of wealth, then yes you would be encourages to sell your shares to pay the wealth tax.

I don't see why this is a problem. That's kinda the point of a wealth tax, that yes you do get taxed on your wealth.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-bezos/bezos-is-sell...

Why should I be forced to sell shares of my company when no other individual that owns shares of whatever other companies is being forced to sell?! As you said, Bezos sells billion dollars worth of AMZN and pays taxes on that just as you and I would when we do. I am not sure I follow why we are trying to tax owning of shares of companies?! If you buy 100,000 shares of AMZN today, do you hope that IRS will come knocking on your door to take 1,000 or whatever number it is each year? If that is the case no one would ever buy any shares of any company...

> If you buy 100,000 shares of AMZN today, do you hope that IRS will come knocking on your door to take 1,000 or whatever number it is each year?

Yes, I would expect that if I had 100k shares of amzn (300 million dollars of net worth), and we implemented a wealth tax, the IRS would tell me "You have to pay us $300k or so" each year on that wealth. If that means I sell some stock, then sure. That means, btw, if I live 60 more years and gain zero more dollars of wealth, I still have 280 million dollars left of my original 300 mil. I still have plenty of shares left.

You clearly don't understand the point of a wealth tax or how the rate rises progressively with wealth it is if you don't understand why we'd be taxing ownership of wealth, and why this wouldn't negatively impact most people.

> If that is the case no one would ever buy any shares of any company...

I currently don't have over 50M of net worth. A wealth tax would not impact me, so I'd still buy stock just as I do now, with no difference. If my stocks did so well that I had millions of dollars, I'd now be able to pay a wealth tax, and have on problem with that. I'd also keep buying stocks if they got me from a net worth of almost nothing to $50M, and all I had to do was pay a small percentage each year along the way.

That's a wealth tax of 0.1%. On that level, it's probably a net-loss to the government just from the bureaucracy. I think we are talking here about order a couple percent, so >10 times more.

The parent example was of "100,000 shares of AMZN... taxed 1,000", which matches 0.1%.

I used that number since that was the number the parent comment saw as being obviously too much already, so I didn't need to use a higher number.

I do think 0.1% would already be pretty appreciable. That's already several 10s of billions a year. The current budget for all of the IRS is on the order of 10s of billions now, so I really doubt adding that new tax would be a net-loss.

And, of course, once you have a wealth tax and the sky doesn't fall, tweaking the number up over time is easier.

I might be parsing the original text wrong, but 1,000 out of 100,000 is 1%. Not 0.1% ?!?

Ah, yup, I'm an idiot. This is why my computer normally does math for me.

Exactly. Some people seem to believe that wealth in shares of a company are in some way different from other types of wealth. Just sell shares an you'll be fine with your taxes. By the way, if you're the controller of a company, you can sell shares without voting power (this has always been a possibility).

I have $1,000,000,000 in my checking account. This is my wealth. I am not going to be taxed a single penny on this money. Why tax my "shares" wealth and not my wealth from my checking account?

And if I have my shares, I don't want to sell them. I currently own X number of shares of dozens of companies, I don't have IRS breathing down my neck to sell them, why should Bezos have them breathing down his?! I pay taxes when I sell my shares, not just due to the fact that I own them...

> I have $1,000,000,000 in my checking account. This is my wealth. I am not going to be taxed a single penny on this

That's the point of a wealth tax, to in fact tax that checking account too. You seem to misunderstand how it would work and what the intent is. It doesn't treat your checking account differently from company ownership; both are wealth, a wealth tax suggests taxing both.

> I don't have IRS breathing down my neck to sell them, why should Bezos have them breathing down his?

You shouldn't if you're not wealthy (as in you have under 20 mil net worth). If you're wealthy, you can afford to pay a wealth tax, and your money will help those poorer.

Why shouldn't we be taking money from the rich and helping the entire country? Why should our country continue to have a wider and wider economic divide?

Anyway, the IRS absolutely would breath down your neck to give them money if you owed them taxes. If all your assets were stock, and you somehow triggered a large tax liability, you'd have to sell some stock to pay the IRS. That's already true. It's perfectly possible to trigger a tax liability larger than your liquid assets now, and have to sell stock to cover it.

But that's rare now. And with a wealth tax that would still be rare. Most people with 20MM+ net worth have liquid assets, or the ability to easily liquidate assets.

You're arguing about an edge case that almost certainly doesn't effect you in any way.

I'm not the one you're asking. But here's my take:

To some degree, wealth taxes break down the idea of private property ownership. "Your right of ownership is secured by law, but if you own too much, we'll take some of it away." I know that's not the way it's sold. But that is one aspect of the reality of it. I am in favor of the continued existence of private property rights, and for that reason I don't like a wealth tax.

Also, such things tend to grow with time. You're going to tax those with more than a billion dollars? Seems OK, no relevance to me, and those people can afford it. You need more money this year, and you're going to tax those with more than 10 million? Well, I don't have that, either, but it's getting closer. Need still more money, and so you're moving it to a million? I might, by then, especially if inflation kicks back up.

On the other hand, you could make a reasonable case that the existence of a wealth disparity of the magnitude that exists today is a threat to our society, especially if it can be inherited.

So I lean against a wealth tax, but I can also see reasons for it...

Hard to value creating expensive compliance and easy game-ability.

Not easily convertible to cash.

Doesn't fix the government's spending pattern or plug its budget hole unless it resorts to full on expropriation.

Not competitive.

I heard an idea: "you must declare all your assets, if an asset is found that you're not claiming, it becomes government property".

So if you try to game the system by not claiming a vacation home, it just becomes public property.

Thoughts?

still very gameable.

The LLC with the innocuous name of 123 Main St LLC which is the owner of the property at 123 Main St definitely has an owner, and it might not be a tax resident because the LLC is owned by 123 Main St Limited in the Cayman Islands and the ultimate beneficial owner, who is still unknown at this point, may not be an American to begin with.

So just applying heuristics to "hey that house doesn't appear in our tax records get it boys" would create more problems than you think.

And this also circles back to "not competitive". If your country has problems with expropriation people will stop coming there, and others will leave.

But also note, the US constitution does protect against expropriation in the 5th amendment. When rich people start being the subject of civil asset forfeiture the 5th amendment will suddenly start applying again.

1 and 2 are easily surmountable. I wouldn't even call those challenges. (We've had property taxes for decades.)

3 and 4 are the real problems with a wealth tax.

The fundamental issue is that the government spends too much money. The politicians and the voters who support them refuse to support cuts in the magnitudes necessary to bring that situation back in hand. Many don't even believe it is a problem. On top of all that, the programs they refuse to cut, at every governmental level, are exactly the programs that suck up the most money. Medicare, Military, Police and Fire, on and on.

99.999% of all voters are like the family in the financial advisor's office who are willing to cut the trips to Starbuck's or go to a cheaper gym. So they feel they are being responsible. But they tell the financial advisor that the kids' private school tuition and the $50,000 cars they drive are not up for discussion. (Lord help you if you have the temerity to bring up the biggest issue of all, the $500,000 house they live in. You better have you kevlar on for that discussion.)

What can you do with people like that?

Yes, 1 and 2 would seemingly apply like property tax, but it gets much more complex than having an appraiser come out.

My guess: because they hope to be wealthy some day.

There are other reasons to oppose them like they historically bring in very little money, they're a pain in the ass to administer, capital flight. Some evidence for this are parts of Europe is abandoning their wealth taxes.

If you want to raise money or reduce inequality there are better ways to do it. Income tax, capital gains, inheritance, etc...

> Some evidence for this are parts of Europe is abandoning their wealth taxes.

That's not evidence. We have right-wing parties in Europe too. They introduce right-wing policies when they have power, such as the above.

Do you think that successful policies are as likely to be rolled back as unsuccessful ones?

What kind of strange reasoning is that? Policies are enacted for multiple reasons, very often without any concrete evidence that it's better or worse.

That's very reductive. You should know that the Federal Income Tax that was first collected in 1913 had a top bracket of 7%. Today, the minimum bracket is 10% and the average middle class citizen pays around 12-18% of their income to the IRS.

So sure, the wealth tax would only be on "the rich" when it first starts out but I guarantee you the middle class will be hit by it eventually.

Most people are already hit by "wealth taxes", except they are regressive - it's called "property tax".

Surely property tax is trivially easy to justify? It usually is collected by the municipality and pays for things that have ongoing operating costs— roads, fire department, schools, etc. How else should those things be paid for?

From the other taxes? Germany has vanishing property taxes compared to the US. Better roads and schools, no question.

I don't know how it works in Germany, but here in Canada, one of the big issues with that is that income taxes are only collected at the provincial and federal level. Now, a chunk of that money gets sent down to lower levels of government— Waterloo region where I live recently received $600M from upper levels of government for a light rail system that is now built and operating, and the current budget shows 27% of revenue coming from "provincial and federal grants".

The thing is, that money which comes from the upper levels is extremely subject to the whims of those governments; it can fluctuate wildly depending who comes into power and what their priorities are. So without some guarantees around it, I can understand the municipalities wanting a stable source of income over which they have some agency, and out of which they can reap immediate benefit from growing the local economy.

Anyway, I'd love to hear from someone in Germany how this is resolved there; but I'd assume there'd need to be some pretty structured, long-term agreements around minimum amounts, percentages of new growth, and so on.

Schools are funded from the federal, state and local level, plus non-government sources (churches etc.). Police is state level, AFAIK. Fire department is paid for by an extra tax on fire insurance (so, I guess you could argue it's a property tax via extra steps), and state funds. For streets, it depends, cities pay for city streets. Autobahn is mostly federal, others are state, federal.

For the taxes, it's complicated, because there are some taxes for which the cities and states can decide the amount, and others (for example VAT), from which they get a certain fraction, but the amount is decided on the federal level.

Edit: Let me add: Property taxes are very strangely regressive. You pay it whether you rent or own, and there is a minimum apartment cost, so you'll always pay, while a low income might not be taxed at all. Then, often, there is a sudden jump from apartment complex to SFH.

Doesn't everyone?

Plus, there's other reasons to be skeptical of wealth taxes, capital flight is a real thing.

Isn't that just another myth peddled by wealthy groups? This was a pretty good study and didn't find that effect[1].

Just on the face of it, sure if you're wealthier you have greater ability to move but that also means you probably like where you are because you chose to be there. Most of my high school friends dispersed around the country solely for job opportunities, not because they wanted to be somewhere.

[1] https://minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2011/02/documents...

> The New Jersey millionaire tax experiment offers a potent testing ground, given the magnitude of the policy change and the relative ease of relocating to a different state tax regime without leaving the New York or Philadelphia metropolitan areas. Using a difference-in-difference estimator, we find minimal effect of the new tax on the migration of millionaires.

>capital flight is a real thing.

Can anyone provide some examples of it happening in an economy like ours?

Not sure if "France" is an "economy like yours" but they have definitely suffered from capital flight following a wealth tax hike[0][1].

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1268381

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonhartley/2015/02/02/frances-7...

That's why you pair them with capital controls, to keep that from happening. This, unfortunately, requires significant cooperation from the international community, and ought to be done before any wealth tax is imposed.

BTW, have you seen how expensive it is for high net worth individuals to renounce US citizenship?

> Doesn't everyone?

God I hope not. How empty would we all be if we all wanted to have more money than the next guy.

> capital flight is a real thing

Yep, that's why all of the rich people have left New York and California.

You think rich people are paying those kind of taxes? Why wouldn't they leave if this wealth tax were suddenly imposed upon them?

> You think rich people are paying those kind of taxes?

Judging by the amount of wealth in New York and California: obviously yes.

> Why wouldn't they leave if this wealth tax were suddenly imposed upon them?

Because they want what the taxes get them.

Equally as valid to say you are in support because you believe you will derive additional benefits financed by taxes you will never have to pay.

So what?

I hope to be wealthy and not pull up the ladder behind me.

Also called "American dream".

A famous formulation of that is: "John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

So tired of reading this quote every time taxes come up like it's some profound statement. I see it so often to ridicule "silly poor people voting for lower taxes".

It's possible for someone to think that it's unfair for some people to pay a huge amount of taxes unfairly, without they themselves thinking "one day I'll be rich".

I think it's more than just "one day I'll be rich"; it's part of the mythos of where wealth comes from. If your starting point is the American Dream, that wealth comes purely from a combination of ingenuity, luck, and hard work, either from the individual or one or more previous generations, then it's easy to see being asked to pay away a share of it as unfair. But if you see wealth as something that arises at least in part from the opportunities afforded by the structures and services within a society, then it's reasonable to expect that the society is owed back a portion of it, in part to maintain those services for the benefit of others coming later.

And fairness aside, there's the purely pragmatic concern that multi-generational wealth concentration is bad for almost everything— bad for democracy, bad for fairness in media, bad for civil unrest, etc etc. Is taxing wealth an effective way to manage this? Maybe, maybe not. But anyone who wants to critique it should probably be willing to support _some_ plan for controlling wealth inequality over the long term.

It's a fallacy to believe that making the rich less rich makes the poor less poor. There are a lot of things in between which must go right.

It is typical of Americans because most of their families came to the country with the allure of becoming wealthy. So it was important for them to tell themselves this story.

And probably that was the secret to America’s success: people seeing themselves as future winners and not permanent victims.

I mean it makes sense socialism removes any real chance of your country being successful so if you think your country has a chance accepting defeat would be horrible.

Doesn't the truth of this hang on what the definition of "success" is? Is ability to produce the occasional Mark Z or Jeff B "success"? Or is success just an upward slope on broad economic indicators like GDP?

I think the picture looks quite different if you look at things like quality of life indicators— and then it's (surprise!) nations like Denmark and Switzerland which top the list. I suspect it would be even more stark if you were able to measure class mobility— the number of people who have at least +x% inflation adjusted net worth over their parents at the same age.

So yeah, it's a little bizarre (and a very US-centric view) to just assume that "success" on a national level and socialist policies are mutually exclusive.

Denmark and Switzerland are objectively capitalist systems and have little to no state control of the means of production.

Okay, but that's moving the goalposts. For the purposes of this discussion, most Americans who pull the alarm on "socialism" do so when things like wealth taxes (or single-payer healthcare, or free tuition) are mentioned.

Among other things I guess “wealthy” is an easily movable goal post...

This seems to be a classic problem in American political discourse, people immediately discount solutions for very serious problems that exist right now, due to (often extremely shaky) hypotheticals that might some day come to pass (usually with a massive heaping helping of slippery slope fallacy).

I disagree. We have evidence of this happening repeatedly. Income tax being the prime example.

I believe the problem is this: we hardly ever describe the end state. We don't define a metric that we look to achieve and then what we change about the policy when we've achieved it. So what happens is bloated bureaucracies become established and fight for self preservation, even if the mission they were on is complete.

Well, as long as there is no definition of “wealth”, there is a slippery slope.

Is having saved 200.000$ in 30 years (not so bonkers) being rich?

Would you consider volontarily contribution instead?

Possibly not what you mean but I very strongly believe tax rates should he a minimum where you can set your own (and displayed publicly) tax rate above a certain level for your income.

Both physically and online, as someone who grew up not poor but far far from rich i.e. I've still only been abroad from the UK twice in my (so far short) life, I am absolutely sick of rich people saying "I'd pay more tax if I could" as a throwaway gesture. I increasingly think an underlying motive of why I study fairly intensely is just to end up better than those who were born better than me.

If you really believe that, put your money where your mouth is.

Oh please. Of course they don't meant that. Because you can totally give money to the government. https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.h...

What they actually mean is "I wish you made me pay more". Because they can't bring themselves to write a check to -give- it away, but -do- feel they should have to pay more. Part of that is the social aspect; why should I, as a rich person, be paying more than other people of similar wealth? But I support all of us paying more.

Saying "I wish you made me pay more" while then turning around and hire the best tax accountants to avoid paying even one cent, and lobbying, funding and grooming politicians that will block any wealth taxes, is just adding insult to injury and insulting hypocrisy.

Well, it's the same motivation, isn't it? "All my peers are doing this - I would be a sucker not to do the same". It's that feeling of being taken advantage of that they want to avoid.

Let's be clear, there are three kinds of mindsets here:

"I don't want to be taxed at all" - lots of lobbying and such to keep taxes on the rich low, and lots of loopholes.

"I think people of my bracket should be taxed higher, but I am going to avail myself of every existing loophole and itemization I can" - doesn't want to feel like a sucker, but agrees people in their bracket, themselves included, should pay more.

"I think people of my bracket should be taxed higher, and I'm going to give money away anonymously or similar to put my money where my mouth is, even if others of my bracket are not" - a unicorn.

This is very similar to saying that charities should deal with these issues (homelessness, drug additction, etc) not the government. Charities rely on donations. I strongly think that the government should be dealing with these things.

I think I should be taxed more but I also don't think that me voluntarily paying 1% more tax will change anything. However everyone playing 1% more tax will so fundamentally change everything that it's worth doing.

I don't say "I'd pay more tax if I could" I say "I should pay more tax and so should everyone else earning as much as me"

>I increasingly think an underlying motive of why I study fairly intensely is just to end up better than those who were born better than me. You might want to consider the fact then that social mobility is generally higher in countries with higher tax rates.

Well define not wealthy, if you have over $90,000 net worth you would be in the top 10% already.

This is not accurate. For the US, [0] shows the 90% percentile to be $1.2 million net worth.

This data is sourced from the federal reserve's survey [1].

[0]: https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/

[1]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm

Well I never said it was for the US, instead it's globally. If you are in the US you would have even more advantages.

The article this comment section is on is entirely about the united states and the wealthy in the context of the united states.

You would have had to make it explicitly clear that you were talking about something other than the rest of the comments (the whole world) for your comment to be read as such.

Anyway, comparing wealth between the developed world and the developing/less-developed nations is tricky, and needs to be done with care. I don't think using that number in this context is useful.

Wealthy = enough money to lobby

400k per year income could be 0 saved if one has enough expenses.

so could 1 billion per year.