I do think billionares are undertaxed, but mostly because they can easily get around the tax system itself. The personal wealth comparison seems flawed though because it's treating wealth as if it's just bank accounts of cash and we're discussing how much everyone has to spend on consumption. But at even millionaire levels of wealth most of it is in real estate and ownership of companies. And at that point disallowing certain levels of wealth just means you can't have your business grow above a certain size and still keep it, or keep your family's real estate if the market has grown substantially around you. Fixing the tax system either at the base or with a progressive wealth tax as a hack on top may be a better solution.

> you can't have your business grow above a certain size

I don't think any business should be allowed to grow above a certain size. I believe it's a massive net negative for society. I'd support a taxation system that prevents such an occurrence or nationalisation where the service is vital and economies of scale are beneficial.

When they reach a certain size businesses begin to distort the functioning of the free market. At this scale their sudden downfall would destabilise large sections of the economy. Therefore profit is siphoned into private hands until such an event whereupon society foots the bill.

A network of smaller businesses precludes this from happening. Any failure that affects enough of them to cause the same level destabilisation is likely to be a societal issue rather than mismanagement and would therefore be more deserving of public funds.

Smaller businesses also have less influence over politics.

> I do think billionares are undertaxed

How does politicians profiting from them solve anything.

I'm surprised this has to be explained, but taxes aren't paid to politicians. You're not likely to get a good answer when your question is not founded in good faith.

Practically, though, politicians determine how, when, where, and why the money is spent. Just because it sits in a bank they don't directly control doesn't mean they don't determine the fate of those collected taxes.

Is that substantially different for taxes collected from billionaires vs taxes collected from ordinary people? If not, I don't see how this is relevant to discussing billionaires being undertaxed. It's shifting a conversation about the fairness of the tax system into a discussion about general problems with the tax system. If there are reasons to lower taxes, that should be applied to every equitably.

My comment that you replied to is calling out whywhywhywhy's comment as bad faith because it's conflating tax collection with corruption, but says nothing that's specific to taxing billionaires. Your comment also doesn't say anything regarding taxing billionaires specifically.

I like roads and schools.

I went to a tax funded school, I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone, just a place where more effort was spent holding people back than lifting people up.

By building systems where teachers are not held accountable for output of their work you just have a broken system that doesn't help anyone.

Roads are a very small amount of tax money, not worth mentioning.

I've had the experience of both tax funded and private schooling.

Without the tax funded school I, and the vast majority of my peers there, likely wouldn't be literate or numerate. I wouldn't have been in a position to win the lottery of a private school bursary.

The quality of the teachers at the the private school was certainly a little better but the worst were about as bad as any public school and the best not much better. The main difference was simply the level of funding.

> By building systems where teachers are not held accountable for output of their work you just have a broken system that doesn't help anyone.

I've found that teachers are the biggest critics of these systems. Rather it's the general public and administrators that have decided the role of the teacher is to do little more than act out a pre-defined curriculum with zero individual agency. In such an arrangement there's no individual output to judge.

Those choices aren't a feature of tax funded schooling. They're administrative/societal decisions to structure schooling in a particular way. It does not follow that schools must be structured this way if funded through taxes.

> Roads are a very small amount of tax money, not worth mentioning.

On a state level they're roughly ~6% of total expenditure. 3% greater than policing or prisons and only 3% lower than healthcare or education. Total expenditure >$200 billion total in 2019[0].

I don't think I've ever met a person who believes their roads to be particularly well maintained, which would point to a much larger figure being required to adequately maintain the infrastructure. It should also be noted that the $200b figure is pre-infrastructure bill.

[0] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

Everybody does. But--speaking from the US perspective--most taxes don't go to those things.

The manner in which those taxes are distributed is a choice made by a person. Convince your countrymen to vote for people who will direct taxes towards those things. While not an easy feat, the way things are today are not the way they must be tomorrow.

> Everybody does.

Then we're in agreement that taxes are a necessity. Can we also agree that taxes should be collected fairly (even if we might disagree on what a fair balance might be)?

You'd also have difficulty spending/losing 100 mil though. And at that amount it's hard to gauge wealth. If, for example, Musk were to sell all of his stock they'd take a massive nose dive. I feel after 100 mil money is more or less just a number.

> Unless you do really stupid things with that money it’s almost impossible for a billionaire to get poorer.

"Really stupid things" like buying a social media company?

That is like the average FAANG-wealthy programmer buying a modest house with a loan. It has little effect on his wealth outside of the egregious display of his behavior.

His behavior can impact Tesla share prices, if it's bad enough. That has a large and direct impact on his wealth.

That is literally what I said, so yes, I agree. But the fact he bought a social media company does not impact it, outside of him using it to amplify his visibility.

It already has. Tesla is underperforming the S&P 500, as well as their competitors like GM and Ford. It’s on track for its wort year ever. Tesla brand perception has dramatically tanked for 50% of the market since Musk bought Twitter, where he seemingly spends all his time there trolling. People are wondering who the hell is running Tesla since Musk tied himself to Tesla’s branding and image, but now he’s suddenly completely MIA.

The billionaires today are a different bunch than the “billionaires”[0] when I was a kid.

You’d think they would have risen up and stopped these new people from becoming rich. How hard could it have been?

[0] don’t righty know if anyone was a billionaire in the 70s

> use a brand new luxury car as a dinner table … every day… and still be making more money than you can spend

Just because you own a company doesn't mean you have instant access to its value in cash.

A billionaire will have an extensive amount of credit - Amex alone will probably let you put millions on one of their charge cards without any questions asked - and the ability to have nearly instant access to enormous amounts of cash.

credit needs to be paid back, no?

Sure. With the "making more money than you can spend" profits.

If Musk wants to spend $100M tomorrow on a frivolity, he can.

Banks won’t do same day spot loans collatoralized by equity? Since when?

Loans need to be paid back in the future, with intrest, or did you think it's free money?

Are we moving the goalposts from “access to cash” to “unlimited gifts of cash with no obligation”?

If you

> use a brand new luxury car as a dinner table … every day

then you will have to find a way on how to repay that money back to the bank.

I thought the assertion was that equity ownership can't be used for liquidity. Apologies if you were just saying wealth doesn't mean you can spend money without net worth declining.

We live in a renteer economy. Nobody owns anything, nobody has money, it's all about credit lines and liquidity.

And Elon literally was able to leverage billions of dollars to buy out Twitter (and then saddle Twitter itself with most of that debt because leveraged buyouts are a thing). He wasn't able to leverage that kind of money because his creditors think he'd do a so much better job at running the company. He was able to do it because they figured he'll be able to make sure they'd gain more from giving him the money than holding onto it. It's not a meritocracy.

Heck, ultimately this is what political power boils down to: not how much you have but how much you can do. And billionaires can do a lot more than a single person with a net worth closer to the median. Framing that in terms of purchase power is just a visual shorthand that's easier to understand without unravelling how the entire system operates.