Those are just round zeros. You could obtain that much money in some African countries over the last 50 years for a few dollars. The latest cryto coin could give you that many coins. But these are numbers trying to represent wealth.
Any cap you put on the top could have the effect of reducing the value of a currency meaning the buying power doesn't change. A billion cap would make your million dollar house worth $100. However you slice it you are poor and someone else is rich.
Re:Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
by sam0x17 on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @01:11AM
(#31749342)
A much more reasonable proposal would simply be to ensure that billionaires actually pay the ~25%-35% everyone else pays and to put a $ cap on itemized deductions so that billionaires find it vanishingly difficult to write off 100% of their taxes. Same thing should go for corporations. Right now the standard for FANG-like companies is to achieve a $0 tax bill at the end of the year. It's disgusting when those same companies have employees making minimum wage as 1099 workers and paying a double digit percent of those wages in federal income tax.
The problem with billionaires though is they typically make and hold their money through assets, so what we really need is a bunch of reforms on how we tax assets. Namely, it should be such that if you have more than $1B in assets, taxes eat away at it pretty swiftly until it is back down to something reasonable. I think that's something we all can get behind.
This is rhetoric that tries to confuse two totally different scenarios in order to convince the majority to oppose something that only hurts a tiny minority. Saying "one person should not have 5 generations worth of wealth" is not the same thing as saying "people should not make a middle class salary". They aren't even similar. If there was any place on earth where $1,000,000,000 was comparable to $500/month in any way, you might have a point.
> Does someone earning more than you hurt you?
Yes. Without a doubt. Wealth is freely convertible to and from political power, so outsized wealth translates into outsized political/lawmaking power, which affects us all.
Let's make an extreme example if you don't believe me: Should sextillionaires exist? Do you think that maybe, just maybe, someone having $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 might have a negative effect on other people's lives?
> Also… do billionaires employ people?
Some do, some don't. Some non-billionaires employ people, some don't. Employment was around long before billionaires. It's not a requirement.
To me, wealth should be like the speed of light. There should be a limit, and it should be increasingly harder and harder to approach (but never achieve) that limit as you get wealthier. Not sure how you'd actually implement such a Lorentzian economic speed limit, but it seems fair to me. Make the limit high enough where at 99% of it, you can have your needs and your family's needs fully met in the most expensive neighborhood on earth, or whatever.