this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Well let's see. In October of 2023 there were 735 billionaires in the US. Assuming each had only $1B and could make an average of 8% on that money (the stock market averages 10%) and we taxed them the equivalent of 6 of that percent, giving all of that to say the lowest income people in the US (so no overhead here to distribute it), the money could provide 735,000 people with a salary of $60k/year. They would still be billionaires drawing a salary of only $20m/year each. So three quarters of a million people, could have the average yearly income in the US and it would only mildly inconvenience 735 people.
Knowing that many billionaires have more than just one billion dollars and that other high earners, say people with $100m or more significantly outnumber them imagine how many people could share the prosperity. I didn't do that math but probably 3-5 million people I guess and it barely even effects the ultra wealthy.
The actual wealth of a billionaire is absolutely staggering.
Okay, so assuming the top end of your guesstimate of 5 million...so, the other 335 million people get a middle finger, or what?
"Guaranteed income" for 1.4% of the population, at most. Not quite how I'd define it.
But fuck the back of the napkin math, we've got solid numbers out there to use. The total net worth of all the billionaires in the US is about $5.2 trillion. And I'll use your 6% that's $312 billion a year. Now let's also make the massive assumption (in your favor) that we can wave a magic wand and convert that net worth directly into exactly that much cash, which you obviously never could in real life.
So, $312 billion a year. Spread evenly, that's literally less than $1,000 per person. Less than the stimulus we got during Covid, and you won't find anyone who claims they went from poor to not poor after getting that stimulus.
I find this ironic, since you seem not to understand just how little it actually is, compared to what the government already spends, and among a population of 340 million people.
Did you know the US spends about $1.2 trillion a year on welfare already? The above amount is about a quarter of that; even if we abandon the idea of "guaranteed income" completely and just used this hypothetical amount as additional welfare for the poor, their benefit amount would increase by 25% on average. Do you think anyone who is impoverished is going to be lifted out of poverty with that?
Billionaires are a boogeyman. They're not the source of poverty, and they literally don't have enough to forcibly push the poor out of poverty, regardless of whether you try it by 'skimming' off their average wealth appreciation, or if you take it all at once.
If half of the energy complaining about billionaires was put into reducing single parenthood, and all of the other things that we know have a DIRECT correlation, with poverty, WAY more poor would be not only lifted up, but with the right tools and education, they'd STAY up, on their own.
I think you missed the point. First, the back of the napkin exercise I conducted was merely to point out just how big of an impact can be had without even hardly inconveniencing just a handful of people. The people I was referring to, would still have a billion dollars and a 20 million dollar a year income from interest. Second, not ever person in the US is poor. We don't have to raise every single person in America out of poverty. Third, I Believe billionaires ARE the source of poverty. Fourth, I Believe you were off by three orders of magnitude. Six percent of 5.2 trillion dollars is actually $312 billion dollars, not million dollars. Fifth, I'm not suggesting that billionaires can just be taxed to the point that they alone can provide a salary to every person in America. What I'm suggesting, is if a system existed that was even slightly fair, billionaires wouldn't exist and hopefully neither would the working poor.
Which is to say, no real impact at all. There are 340 million of us, a plan that can potentially help less than 2% of them is no plan at all.
So you're not talking about UBI, but just another welfare program.
I redirect you to where I pointed out that the amount of yearly aid your plan produces is nothing compared to the $1.2 TRILLION the US already spends on welfare. It is completely naive to think that a slight increase in welfare spending is going to create the kind of change you're claiming it would.
You can believe it all you want, but the evidence simply does not support that conclusion. Go look up how many inflation-adjusted billionaires there were in the world a century ago compared to today, then go compare the incidence of global poverty back then to today, too. It's literally an inverse correlation.
My mistake, will correct my comment, but the point still stands, because $1000 isn't anything resembling life-changing money, either.
Not only can they exist, but it is literally inevitable, and moreso with each passing day, especially as the global population increases, more and more technology becomes more scalable, new technologies emerge, and more and more economy is globalized.
There are over 8 billion people on Earth today. One piece of software that catches on can produce $1 billion in profit in just a handful of years. OnlyFans was founded in 2016, less than a decade ago, and SIX years later, in 2022, it was valued at not $1 billion, but $18 billion.
Long-term poverty literally cannot be solved with an injection of funds alone--this is a very superficial take. The vast majority of poor people who win lotteries of multi-million amounts that can easily make one 'set for life', are broke again in just a few years. And you better believe government welfare isn't giving any poor person tens of millions of dollars.
On the other hand, simply being raised by two parents instead of one, makes a person up to FIVE TIMES less likely to be impoverished long-term in adulthood. If we reduced the single parenthood incidence by even just 5%, we'd reduce long-term poverty to a degree even completely liquidating all billionaires would not accomplish.
Billionaires are largely a boogeyman, and time and effort and resources spent complaining about them, if applied to creating the changes that we DO empirically know actually lift people out of poverty, would do a hell of a lot more good. That's what frustrates me.
Hating the rich is not the same as loving the poor.