Political Memes

The question above was whether or not billionaires should exist, NOT how do we solve poverty or hunger or anything else.

And my point is that the former is a complete waste of time and energy, because a society with any size gap of wealth between the poorest and the wealthiest, but also a society with no one in poverty, is absolutely more desirable than a society with less or even no wealth gap, but which has people in poverty.

I think you keep approaching this incorrectly. You simply equate the number of billionaires with the number of poor or something like that. That is not HOW billionaires cause poverty.

But the fact that this demographic's growth in numbers is negatively correlated with the incidence of poverty, is a pretty big wrench in the assertion that their existence causes poverty.

You've assumed that billionaires cause poverty, but I'm a step before you. I'm not convinced their existence has a significant causal relationship with poverty, not least because of the above.

At the very least, the above fact needs to be contended with, before moving further. You need to explain, or at least hypothesize, how it can be true that billionaires' actions increase poverty, if as the number of billionaires goes up, poverty goes down.

I'm reminded of when anti-porn activists would claim in the earlier days of the Internet that the proliferation of Internet porn would cause rape and sexual assault to spike massively. There are still such activists out there, still making that same argument, despite the fact that all the data shows that as Internet porn became more widespread, the incidence of sexual crimes actually DEcreased. In fact, "plummeted" would be a fair description, imo.

Most of the changes you are suggesting can’t be legislated.

That's true. A top-down approach won't solve these problems, as they're largely cultural and self-perpetuating (find a girl who got pregnant at 15/16, and chances are good that her mother was under the age of 20 when she got pregnant with her daughter, as well). Education/awareness/outreach and similar, are the only real way to get there, but it needs to be a true, concerted, dedicated, continued effort, and right now, there's only pockets of it scattered around, far as I can tell.

As a grim example, in the 1960s, the Moynihan Report was put out by a guy who was essentially freaking out over the current incidence of 'fatherlessness' in the black population, and calling for action to be taken. Today, we know more than ever about how much worse off kids are (financially, to my point, but also in many other ways) who aren't raised in stable, two-parent homes are, and today, there isn't a single racial demographic in the US that doesn't have a higher rate of single parenthood than the black population did at the time of that Report. And yet, today, despite everything, even beginning to talk about these issues is political suicide, no one will even touch the topic.

What I'm trying to say is that we've got much bigger fish to fry, if the goal is reducing/eradicating poverty. And if indeed y'all care more about whether someone should be "allowed" to have a net worth beyond some arbitrary point, than that, then all I have to say is that you've lost the plot.