As soon as you hit 1B net worth, you get a diploma that says "Congrats, you won capitalism", and every penny headed for your accounts past that point gets diverted into a society welfare fund.
Could probably set the bar A LOT lower too.
this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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I'd draw the line around 20 million or so. I think that's reasonable.
20 to 50 millions ought to be more than enough. A billion is an amount that no longer makes any sense (assuming we're in euros/dollars).
I'd also say that after you get out of the low tens of millions you are, by definition, a fucking asshole. You can't get that much money except by exploiting others. In my mind a highly skilled individual could personally create 20 million in economic output.
Where does that put entertainers, professional athletes, and lottery jackpot winners? I hear that Taylor Swift is a billionaire solely through her music sales and performance income.
Taylor Swift is an extremely odd case and might be one of the least ass-hole-y billionaires out there. But, given her level of wealth, why is she still charging for shows? Are all the people who work for her millionaires? Are all the roadies and stage hands and audio techs and venue greeters getting a fair portion of the revenue generated for their relative labor? Is there a compelling reason she shouldn't've started giving away massive amounts of charity after she could afford her first mansion?
My main point about all billionaires being assholes is that at a certain point the wealth is so worthless to you personally and so valuable to the people around you that hording it means you're an asshole - you're greedy enough that number-goes-up is more important than the well being of those around you and those that helped you accumulate your wealth.
With $20 million I could still buy and control my local city council. /s
You could live a decent middle class lifestyle with 4 million dollars and never work again. Let's be generous and say 10 million is the cap. There's no reason to get further, much less to a billion.
I was going to say something about "cost of living in an area" because 10M in WV is gonna go a lot further than 10M in NYC, but then I started wondering what kind of knock-on effects setting that hard cap would have? Would cost of living in NYC decrease because now the rich people can't be rich enough to comfortably afford it, or will it cause them to keep contributing to society for a paycheck because they don't want to move? Feel like this might be a good speculative essay subject for a financial policy class.
I love how when this gets recommended the responses turn into trying to find the more exact correct amount to set the line at. Just like normal politics though, they get bogged down so much that what seemed like a simple answer turns into discuss,defer,delay, and the original point was missed.
If you’re trying to solve inequality through tax policy alone, I wonder what the effect would be of having the top tax rate vary with the Gini coefficient. The idea being that the wealthy can theoretically reduce their tax burden if (and only if) they figure out how to use their economic power to reduce inequality by other means.
How would you pinpoint the reduction of inequality to one person?
You wouldn’t—they’d have to work together. (Something they do seem capable of, when there’s profit in it.)
I don't understand, so is it like the lower the inequality, lower taxes for the wealthiest?
Right.
If they can proactively reduce inequality, fine; otherwise taxation will do it for them.
Interesting, but wouldn't the lower tax rates that they earn end up counteracting the gains they made?
Partly—but depending on how much you want to prioritize redistribution vs revenue, you could adjust the tax/Gini curve to set the equilibrium wherever you want.
1,250,000 is 5000$ per month for 20 years.
1,000,000,000 is 5000$ per month for 16,666 years.
There is a great essay that touches on this question:
https://www.philosophersbeard.org/2012/04/what-to-do-about-rich.html
It's more important to control trajectory than it is to control absolute wealth. Capital accumulation is how we got here, not people suddenly winning 1 billion dollars.