You can’t even spend a billion dollars with the most ridiculous luxury items you can think of. Spending that much in a lifetime for things you would even remotely appreciate would feel like work.
The only difference having billions of dollars makes instead of only a few millions in a rich person’s life is that it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions. Which is something nobody should be allowed to do to begin with.
Meanwhile had that billion dollars been distributed to the worker class through fair wages or even to the consumers through fair prices it would have contributed to the economy and the well-being of everyone. Having to tax it to avoid seeing that money sit in some asshole’s offshore bank account is a failure of the system to properly distribute wealth when it is generated to begin with and even that isn’t being done right now.
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is about 1 billion.
And the prediction is that we’ll have a few trillionaires soon. The difference between 1 billion and 1 trillion is about 1 trillion.
Personally I’m hoping we see a couple multi trillionares. Rapidly followed by their assets depreciating into worthlessness and the USD becoming worth less than monopoly money.
Even worse than that, with just $100 million in a risk-free CD making 3% APY, one receives $3 million per year from interest alone.
Nevermind how to spend a billion dollars in one lifetime, how do you spend three million dollars in one year?
Any wealth above $100 million should be taxed at the end of each fiscal year. Nobody could reasonably need more than that. Of course, it would be complicated by carving out exceptions for real assets. Anyone with that much money would just buy a new yacht every September to avoid it, but that should still be taxed as capital gains.
it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions.
Most conservative americans seem to believe “freedom” includes permitting the wealthy to rig the game in their own favor. They don’t seem to consider the ways in which that infringes on everyone else’s freedom.
That’s why “anarcho-captialism” and even “libertarian-capitalism” are both farces. There’s no room for liberty under plutocracy. Only the financial oligarchs have any degree of freedom in those systems, which is no better or different than an aristocracy, just without the overt nepotism (the nepotism becomes covert instead, by mislabelling generational wealth as a “meritocracy”).
Meanwhile had that billion dollars been distributed to the worker class through fair wages or even to the consumers through fair prices it would have contributed to the economy and the well-being of everyone.
I agree, but too many people only measure the success of an economy by top-down metrics such as GDP, gross revenue, stock market growth, etc. They ignore factors such as cost of living, wage stagnation, median income, RIFs, and the job market in general, social mobility, cost of healthcare and education, etc., leading to such buffoonery as claiming “unemployment is good for the economy” and “deflation is bad for the economy.”
And then they come back with stupid arguments like “econ 101, bro.” Classical economic theories are a soft science at best, arguably even a pseudoscience, and yet finance bros treat it like it’s a hard science. They cite them like scripture, or like laws of physics, but they’re not nearly so immutable or infallible. Especially when they focus solely on supply-side and neoliberal economics, which were clearly developed with an agenda.
Even Adam Smith gets quoted out of context, while ignoring the fact that he was opposed to many of the ideas his work is often used to rationalize.
A billion dollars buys you power. That kind of money gets you a seat at the table.
How many “billionaires” actually have a billion dollars to spend though? They usually are “worth” a billion dollars through stocks they can’t sell, with a couple of million in the bank
Aaaannnd the inevitable arrival of the “nothing we can do about it guyz, it’s hopeless, we just need to accept it.”
It takes a different form from time to time, but the ubercapitalist cultists always show up in these threads.
This is like saying “they don’t actually have that much oxygen. They’ve got it compressed in massive liquefied tanks. You can’t breathe liquid oxygen, so it doesn’t really count as breathable air. So nevermind that a billionth of the population controls 50% of the oxygen on the planet because the actual gaseous air they breath on the day to day is just an extremely comfortable level of oxygen.”
Except that they do just that by borrowing money against their stocks, which also incidentally allows them to avoid paying taxes. That’s how Musk bought Twitter.
Yup, their latent wealth grows faster than what they borrow to use as actual spending, they literally don’t spend money, they accumulate it
I think it might be a good idea to tax loans like this as income, but I’m not an economist and am not sure what the follow on effects would be. I feel like if there were exceptions it might be used as a loophole, but if there aren’t it might affect poorer people trying to get loans for housing.
‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’
Half of America’s trailer-park residents pass out because he dared to attack our beloved billionaires. “But what about when we become billionaires!?!”
The reason we have had to deal with this over the centuries is half our population is authoritarian. The idea that someone can punch up as a violation of the laws of man.
Because of what seems to be uniquely an American ideology: they too could be a billionaire someday, so therefore an attack against billionaires is an attack against them.
It’s not an accident, but intentionally taught propaganda to keep the masses from ever banding together and rising up. Imagine if they’d told all the peasants in 18th century France that someday, they might become royalty too!
It’s not. On some level it’s in many, many people.
A while ago, Poland wanted to introduce extra property tax on the owners of three and more properties. The idea was to combat “investors”, and flippers. The Polish Internet lost its god damn mind.
Of course, a lot of the noise must’ve been sponsored, but regular people, people who can barely afford the mortgage rates for a single apartment started shouting against that property tax, as if they were at any risk of getting hit by it.
“In his own words,” the article title says, as if we should be shocked or upset by it.
A person cannot earn a billion dollars on his labor, it’s impossible. The only way one becomes a billionaire is by stealing from the ones who did the hard work and enriching yourself off their labor. Billionaires are leeches, every single one is a disease on humanity. There are no good billionaires, they should all be shot and have their assets redistributed.
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Get rid of hunger and billionaires or we eat them.
agreed
Why are people still campaigning for him? The election is over, he is mayor, he will hopefully raise taxes and expand public transportation.
He’s one of the few sources of positivity for US news stories lately.
As long as he actually follows through with something. Otherwise we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment. I like to plan for the worst case scenario.
Because in US politics, we generally have three types of politicians: MAGA, corporate Republicans, and corporate Democrats.
Mamdani represents a possible fourth way, a way that (hopefully) values workers over capital.
When he says “billionaires shouldn’t exist” he is re-affirming his commitment to this fourth way, and that is a important positive sign.
Because politicians like John Fetterman exist and people are paranoid that Mamdani will turn out like him. In other words now that he is in pull the ladder up behind him.
So these posts are people trying to assuage their own worries?
He’s absolutely right. Hoarding wealth is a mental illness, we just turn a blind eye to people who have it because what they’re addicted to is what society runs on.
Amen to that
Maybe a single person shouldn’t have enough wealth to rival a country? It’s almost like that gives them more power than the government that is supposed to keep them in check.
Individuals having the ability to operate private space programs is insane.
I also can’t think of a more insane pick than to let that individual be Elon Musk. Really shows how billionaires fail their way to the top.
At the end of the day I think billionaires owning space companies undermines the pursuit of humans going into space and studying space in general as it is difficult enough to justify to the average person normally that space exploration is important but when you have the people leading the pursuit of it hoarding enough wealth to lift an astounding amount of people out of poverty, then the association of those people with space exploration threatens to make space exploration a target of populist austerity sentiment unfairly because by its very nature it is a loud thing that draws lots of attention.
This is true, and very many self-proclaimed leftists already argue against it as such. “How dare you fund NASA when poverty has not yet been eradicated by a utopian society!!”
We’d still be living in mudhuts with outhouses if it were up to these people.
There aren’t any good billionaires. They get rich leeching off everyone else’s work, suppressing wages and compensation, and avoiding taxes on their insane wealth. On top of that, a seemingly normal person is likely to become a complete PoS when they no longer have to face any consequences for being a PoS because of their wealth.
not saying shes a good one and i am not a fan, but i dont think taylor swift did that did she?
Once you get rich enough you pretty much don’t have a choice. Your investment portfolio is based on companies making the line go up. That line goes up because they get tax breaks from trump, they cut or suppress employee wages and benefits, they enshittify, they get AI and fire people, etc. In her case there’s also the absurd ticket prices and fees people have to pay to see her concerts. You cannot be a billionaire with clean hands, you’re skipping out on taxes, nobody “earns” a billion dollars.
Okay so she didnt do wage theft
So we can ignore the rest…?
They become very much like that kid in Twilight Zone’s It’s a Good Life
The way I see it, billionaires are best understood as an autonomous cancerous process of money hoarding money, the human being who is the billionaire at the center of it hardly has any agency, just raw and pure complicity in the growth of the cancer enveloping them in a replacement of their human identity with an approximation of one constructed from financial abstractions.
Billionaires think they are making more and more important choices as they get richer but what really is occurring is they are becoming less and less a relevant part of the money they hoard in terms of what actions that entity of money takes and why it does so.
To be a proud billionaire is to be a proud insect host for the paratisoid wasp that is wealth hoarding. It is a strange and disturbing ideology from the perspective of an insect to take pride in being the vessel for a process that will most certainly annihilate you from within.
I like the way you write, good style 💜
I have a secret hope that they use it to fly the fuck away from earth forever
I work for a small city that’s an enclave for the super-rich. Literally every household is multi-millionaires (I don’t live there, of course).
When we butt heads with a resident, it’s a challenge because most of our residents have a larger budget and pool of resources than the city. My favorite example was when a resident tried to build a retaining wall in a drainage easement for a new home that would result in a street behind them flooding any time it rained. When we told them no, they tried to buy the Engineering firm we hired to review their development.
the only way to make sure we don’t have trillionaires is to make sure that we don’t have billionaires.
I totally agree with the no billionaire concept - but I don’t even think that is the point of contention. I hate that we have been spinning on this for a decade. The real issue his HOW we do it from both a strategic and execution perspective
Do you implement changes slowly to minimize resistance? Do you do a lot at once to ensure changes don’t stall? Do we have an income tax? How do we tax non-liquid assets? What if those assets are held outside the US? And so on…
Most people don’t want billionaires. Let’s shift the discussion so that is the assumption we are starting with - and now we just have to implement.
For starters: Stop allowing people to borrow money against securities. Most wealthy people live and invest on borrowed cash which compounds their wealth. It’s a strategy that only works if you have a lot of money.
Changes in tax laws need to happen. People using the borrowing strategy above pay very little income tax. They often get tax breaks for the interest on the loans. Their real income is capital gains which gets taxed at near poverty levels. Someone making 40,000-85,000USD gets a marginal tax rate of 22%. Capitals gains tax is 15%.
I love it. This should be the discussion.
Billionaire math
Average USA billionaire has about $7b in wealth.
2026 * 365 = 739,490
$7,000,000,000 / 739,490 = $9,465.98
You would need to make $9k per day, for 2026 years, to catch up to the average billionaire wealth right now.
It’s estimated in 2026 that it would cost $37b to end world hunger until 2030.
Also note that Musk, Bezos, and other extreme billionaires are up to 100x of the average here ($700b for Musk). Who is making $900k per day?
This is not natural, it’s not rational, and it’s completely bullshit. You can come up with whatever distraction you want (“wealth & income aren’t the same”), but we should be taxing every dollar above $1b at 99% or higher.
30 years * 365 day = 10,950
$1,000,000,000 / 10,950 = $91,324.20
I could easily live off of $91k per DAY for 30 YEARS.
If you put these numbers against a human time scale we can understand, I don’t see the argument for this level of wealth, especially not as people go hungry, without clothes or food, and children die.
A bit of context, because $9k per day sounds “not too bad” to some. It means you have a yearly income 3.4 million a year, for 37 generations of working people.
Fuck yeah, math homie. Thank you.
