If the US confiscated all of the wealth of the billionaires in the US (which would absolutely wreck the economy as well as that wealth, since much of that their wealth is tied up in stocks)...it would fund less than a year of government spending and not even be able to pay for the $3.5T package that is currently being debated (maybe close...the most recent estimate wealth for US billionares is between $3T and $3.5T).
...and then we couldn't blame billionares for being the problem.
Lets ask this question in the other direction. How is it in most modern economies you are able to have good healthcare, a robust safety net, pretty decent infrastructure, the opportunity to further yourself via education without breaking the bank and still keep those economies trucking along while the US: the richest country on the planet can't seem to get this done? There is obviously some disconnect.
> Lets ask this question in the other direction. How is it in most modern economies you are able to have good healthcare, a robust safety net...
Because they tax the middle class intensively.
In particular they have tax regimes built more around the Value Added Tax (which taxes consumption) and less around the income tax (which damages incentives to save and invest and which is easily bypassed by billionaires who simply borrow the money they spend without realizing income). If anything, the Nordic states with their lauded safety nets are more market- and capital-friendly than the US, and less economic-interventionist, and happy to say so.
It's not all roses. Competent government still matters; there are plenty of debt crises and pension crises and the like in certain nations without it. Overall, families are somewhat less well-off financially, and high youth unemployment remains a chronic problem.
Politicians. College has gotten to expensive because the government is involved and has made it a priority for everyone to get a college degree...when many of the people going to college have no business being there. Give out money to kids to go to college...demand goes up...prices go up...give out more money...and the cycle continues.
Healthcare simply has too many hands in the pot. Government pays x amount but it costs hospitals 2x...so they charge 3x to insurance companies to make up the difference. It's insane, but making it "free" may not be what fixes it.
What safety net does the US not have? Over 60% of people paid no federal income tax last year and we have huge numbers of programs to help low income people.
The same reason the US can spend what it did on the war in Aghanistan and still end up with the Taliban taking control of Kabul as they're on their way out. Total incompetence, no decent end game, and human nature in people that they just won't be able to change. Just a bunch of people lining their own pockets along the way.
If the US has a culture of people making poor decisions for their own health, exploiting systems for their own benefit, and of government bureaucracies utterly failing to achieve the ends they're supposed to achieve with no accountability (and it does), no amount of tax revenue is going to suddenly provide everyone with world-class healthcare with no concern for their own money.
I'd love to never have to deal with my insurance company again, or take diagnostics or treatments without being able to find out how much I'll have to pay. I really would. I just have zero confidence that any of that would change no matter how much more of my money gets taken by the US government.
The US government spends as nearly much on healthcare as a national healthcare system costs in the UK as a percent of GDP. Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA are 1.5 trillion in spending. Or about 7% of GDP.
In normal years, NHS spending in the UK is 8% of GDP.
I am sure there are substantial coverage differences for a lot of procedures, but all the life threatening stuff for an entire population is handled for what the US spends on just the elderly and poor.
<raising hand> Ooo! Ooo! I know this one!!! I know this one!!!
Over the past 30 years, steady changes to regulations in healthcare, education and infrastructure have created a system where we pay HUGE premiums for similar services compared to almost every other countries.
It is the result of unabated, in-the-open, perfectly-legal, endemic corruption.
This should be a universal and bipartisan issue that unites people, but it isn’t.
We’re too stupid to stop fighting each other. We always take the bait from the armies of talking heads telling us how to think and who to hate.
In the lovely words of Amy Mann, “It’s not going to stop until you wise up”
As an aside, I think the biggest irony is commenting this on HN.
I know tons of SDEs that come from other countries because they get paid fractions of the salary they would get here.
I think we’re ignoring scale here. Is there a country with similar population levels that provides all that?
I’m Canadian and I am thankful for our benefits but our public services have been stretched for decades and I’m skeptical that our systems could handle 10x the population.
Aside from all of the things that generally come up in this discussion (politicians, country size, melting pot, american dream, government bloat, etc), I think a pretty big contender is poorly written legislation on regulations.
Certain things are fairly obviously good to regulate in healthcare, whether that is for privacy, or price transparency, or making sure emergencies don't get turned away, but administration costs of running our healthcare network seems to have blown far and away the cost of the actual healthcare providers (doctors, nurses, surgeons, etc). There is so much paperwork and administrative work in healthcare and it just seems like so much of it could be trimmed away.
Legislation seems to be written with the good intentions of protecting patients, but if the administration costs (monetarily or bureaucratically) of complying aren't taken into consideration, that too can indirectly affect patients.
I'm neither in the medical field nor do I know how US healthcare regulations compare to other countries, but it just feels like the amount of healthcare administration has grown at a far greater rate than the actual healthcare providers.
At least in Europe, the middle-class pays much higher taxes than in the US, which funds much of that safety net. Contrary to popular belief, high-income earners in States like California already pay tax rates similar to Western Europe. Imposing European-style tax rates on the US middle-class is unpopular with both major political parties.
One could argue that the US is the richest country because of the way things are set up here, not in spite of it.
Also, as another commented noted, it's not all roses in those other "modern economies" you mention: France, for example, with its subsidized healthcare system has a public debt equal to 117.8% of its GDP. The US's deficit amounts to 15.2% of GDP in contrast.
Taxing billionaires out of existence isn't about solving funding problems, it is about muzzling their ability to throw their wealth at politics and distort democracy.
> which would absolutely wreck the economy as well as that wealth, since much of that their wealth is tied up in stocks
Yet somehow Mackenzie Scott is divesting billions and not crashing the economy.
And you just got done saying how they don't actually have that much, yet if they sold it all its so huge it would tank the economy. That is a case of Schroedinger's equity.
> ...and then we couldn't blame billionares for being the problem.
Of course we could, and would. The narrative would then just shift to be "because these ruthless bastards didn't pay their fair share when it counted and was needed, now we're in a situation that the problem is too big and it's too late....because of THEM. You are suffering because of THEM. Look at history as it's been done a number of times.
Right. People argue that we should take more than what we do but less than all of their wealth. The problem being, if taking all of their wealth wouldn't solve our problems, how would taking less of their wealth?
I personally think we should be taking more of their money, just describing what I think the "take all of their money" argument is doing.
No one, but its a common bad-faith take on arguments that the economic system should be reformed and that the existence of billionaires is a sign of the problems that should be fixed.
I've seen several people on forums/twitter (yes, real people not bots) advocating or doing the math on what we could do with the "1% wealth" ... there's also this
Personally I’m more interested in driving up the estate tax. The effect of generational wealth strikes me as particularly corrosive to a republic. The revenue raised is really only a minor side benefit.
If you make billions, fine. Pay income tax, but you can remain a billionaire. But your kids should not get to keep that. They’ll have to make do merely with millions.
You're right. The US government spends so much, and owes so much, that even raiding the wealth of the billionaire class probably wouldn't do much in the overall scheme of things.
But how much of US economic and fiscal policy has been influenced by billionaires (and "the rich" generally) to the detriment of the country's finances and those of everyday citizens? It's the policies that are the problem.
If you counted the costs of the tax loopholes designed specifically to benefit big corporations, real estate developers, Wall Street titans, the 1% of the 1%, etc., subsidies for the most powerful special interests, and regulations that actually stunt innovation and economic growth to protect large corporations, I suspect you'd be looking at many multiples of the wealth of individual billionaires.
In other words, to get one astronaut worth a cool $100 billion, the country probably "spends" many multiples of that.
Exactly the never ending quantitive easing has just been piling more and more money into the hands of the rich in the name of helping the poor. Heaven forbid we have some deflation, and assets cost less while wages get stronger.
I think it just comes down to where do you get the most bang for your buck. Money sitting in a bank/stocks (billionaires), or money in the pockets of people willing to spend it (everyone else).
> If the US confiscated all of the wealth of the billionaires in the US (which would absolutely wreck the economy as well as that wealth, since much of that their wealth is tied up in stocks)...it would fund less than a year of government spending and not even be able to pay for the $3.5T package that is currently being debated (maybe close...the most recent estimate wealth for US billionares is between $3T and $3.5T).
That is so deceptive. You are assuming that everyone else won't be paying their taxes. Everything would be paid for but we could use the "confiscated" wealth for additional stuff. Not that I am necessarily for or against wealth redistribution.
Nobody is saying the wealth should be used to fund the government. The american taxpayers do that. The additional money could be used for other stuff.
This isn’t about the billionaires. What is an immense amount of money for individuals (100 billions) really isn’t that significant for a Western government like the United States.
Seizing Bezos/Gates wealth would have very little impact on the overall health of the country, the government is working with trillions already
Why is this fallacy used EVERY single time someone points out the absurdity of liquidating every billionaire.
I would make the same claim. I'm not rich. I just don't want people with "good intentions" creating "bad consequences" because they don't understand fundamentals.
Billionaires at least introduce a diversity of perspectives & approaches.
Such diversity is usually missing from the mandarin class of ivy-leaguers & federal-government-lifers for which Vox's 'explanatory journalism' manufactures consent.
It was created in 2020 to give grants for COVID-related research. Its big selling point was that it would give out money fast: very little paperwork to fill out, and yes/no decisions made within 48 hours. They were surprised to discover that even researchers at top universities were having a hard time getting funding out of the usual institutions like the NIH, which were adapting very slowly to the pandemic. They seem to have done very well in speeding up research, at least with the amount of money they had, just by giving out the funding in a way that few-to-none of the existing institutions would.
> The Buffett Rule is named after American investor Warren Buffett, who publicly stated in early 2011 that he believed it was wrong that rich people, like himself, could pay less in federal taxes, as a portion of income, than the middle class, and voiced support for increased income taxes on the wealthy.
I dont see much of your bullet-item beliefs from billionaires like:
* Winfrey
* Dorsey
* Soros
* Steyer
* Benioff
* Bloomberg
* Simons
* Sussman
* Pritzker
* Buffett
* Scott
* Omidyar
* Williams
* Kardashian
* Lucas
A few of them support IP protections, at least at current levels supporting their sources-of-wealth, but not your other examples. (And whether they support IP any more than the average voter, or union-member, is unclear.)
Maybe partisanship "from where [you're] standing" is blinding you to the social & political programs of many billionaires?
If you interact with some top tier wealthy people, 0.9% wealthy to the 0.01%, you really quickly see that they have very little understanding of a number of issues that "middle-class" people face (let's ignore that "middle-class" is insanely broad, for the sake of the uber-wealthy, middle class is basically the 1% and poorer).
They often have a hyper inflated sense of individual accomplishment; they're usually "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" people (while unaware of the true meaning of that phrase) and they usually despise any attack on their sense of control, including the narrative that they are "self-made".
They generally have a remarkably homogeneous set of values and promote the same sets of policies and programs on a national scale. They use their influence to tip the scales on a very select group of issues and "personal interest" problems, but they also espouse broadly libertarian approaches to their holdings and wealth, all while insisting they are remaining apolitical.
What they do for PR stunts is usually belied by large scale tax evasion, extremely intensive lobbying, aggressive litigation, and monopolistic capture of whole markets if need be to protect their wealth. Many of which is of questionable legality, but perhaps of even more questionable morality and ethics.
I'd say the main issue is that not a single one of them cares about our problems and never will, even if they have a charity that makes them look like saviors.
Who should save us then? Young activists with nothing to offer but righteous ignorance? Cynical politicians, who believe nothing but their focus groups? Our well appointed chattering class whose hatred towards billionaires is obviously rooted in envy?
I would say we are better off sticking with the billionaires. They have competence on their side at least.
What is it with this "billionaire hate" narrative? What have billionaires done besides create enormous wealth for their country and themselves? How is that a bad thing?
I think there are 2 questions that do deserve discussion and debate:
1. Whether a society should be structured to allow billionaires at all; and,
2. Whether the existence of billionaires is actually helpful/creating a net benefit for everyone else.
The debate originates out of the dominant ideological form of liberalism in Western liberal democracies, Rawlsian liberalism, and, in particular its idea of the "difference principle", which argues that inequality can exist so long as democratic institutions are accessible and enabling upward social mobility, and so long as the majority of the benefits from government actions/programs/policies benefit the most worse off populace the most.
In a sense, the debates around wealth, and especially the extremely wealthy, start when there is the popular sense that that "difference principle" is failing or no longer operating as it should be. Billionaires begin to be seen as extractive rather than as a benefit for a country.
"To Giridharadas, the real “stepping up” would come from billionaires renouncing the use of loopholes to evade taxes that weaken government’s revenue and ability to respond"
I'm not sure... would the US covid situation be better if Amazon spent less on building out their infrastructure and instead sent more money to the Trump administration?
Yea, go ahead and start your decent into hating successful people. I have 0 doubt if you got rid of billionaires, problems would remain and then you would go after millionaires...
The biggest irony is that you'll chase the most productive and brilliant people away. Think of how many great scientists and intellectuals came from the Eastern bloc... or Germany during the rise of Hitler. They literally expelled some of their most brilliant and successful people, making the US (or whatever country they fled to) stronger.
The real problem is that legal work isn't being rewarded. Simply letting your money or real estate idle is a much better bet than actually investing it in an economy with slow population growth.
Readit News
...and then we couldn't blame billionares for being the problem.
Because they tax the middle class intensively.
In particular they have tax regimes built more around the Value Added Tax (which taxes consumption) and less around the income tax (which damages incentives to save and invest and which is easily bypassed by billionaires who simply borrow the money they spend without realizing income). If anything, the Nordic states with their lauded safety nets are more market- and capital-friendly than the US, and less economic-interventionist, and happy to say so.
It's not all roses. Competent government still matters; there are plenty of debt crises and pension crises and the like in certain nations without it. Overall, families are somewhat less well-off financially, and high youth unemployment remains a chronic problem.
Healthcare simply has too many hands in the pot. Government pays x amount but it costs hospitals 2x...so they charge 3x to insurance companies to make up the difference. It's insane, but making it "free" may not be what fixes it.
What safety net does the US not have? Over 60% of people paid no federal income tax last year and we have huge numbers of programs to help low income people.
If the US has a culture of people making poor decisions for their own health, exploiting systems for their own benefit, and of government bureaucracies utterly failing to achieve the ends they're supposed to achieve with no accountability (and it does), no amount of tax revenue is going to suddenly provide everyone with world-class healthcare with no concern for their own money.
I'd love to never have to deal with my insurance company again, or take diagnostics or treatments without being able to find out how much I'll have to pay. I really would. I just have zero confidence that any of that would change no matter how much more of my money gets taken by the US government.
The US government spends as nearly much on healthcare as a national healthcare system costs in the UK as a percent of GDP. Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA are 1.5 trillion in spending. Or about 7% of GDP.
In normal years, NHS spending in the UK is 8% of GDP.
I am sure there are substantial coverage differences for a lot of procedures, but all the life threatening stuff for an entire population is handled for what the US spends on just the elderly and poor.
Over the past 30 years, steady changes to regulations in healthcare, education and infrastructure have created a system where we pay HUGE premiums for similar services compared to almost every other countries.
It is the result of unabated, in-the-open, perfectly-legal, endemic corruption.
This should be a universal and bipartisan issue that unites people, but it isn’t.
We’re too stupid to stop fighting each other. We always take the bait from the armies of talking heads telling us how to think and who to hate.
In the lovely words of Amy Mann, “It’s not going to stop until you wise up”
There's millions of reasons why that isn't happening in the US. Billionaires are almost certainly not one of those reasons.
The US subsidizes so much for other countries. Without the US, these other countries wouldn't be able to have the same success.
Just look at the numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_...
As an aside, I think the biggest irony is commenting this on HN. I know tons of SDEs that come from other countries because they get paid fractions of the salary they would get here.
I’m Canadian and I am thankful for our benefits but our public services have been stretched for decades and I’m skeptical that our systems could handle 10x the population.
Certain things are fairly obviously good to regulate in healthcare, whether that is for privacy, or price transparency, or making sure emergencies don't get turned away, but administration costs of running our healthcare network seems to have blown far and away the cost of the actual healthcare providers (doctors, nurses, surgeons, etc). There is so much paperwork and administrative work in healthcare and it just seems like so much of it could be trimmed away.
Legislation seems to be written with the good intentions of protecting patients, but if the administration costs (monetarily or bureaucratically) of complying aren't taken into consideration, that too can indirectly affect patients.
I'm neither in the medical field nor do I know how US healthcare regulations compare to other countries, but it just feels like the amount of healthcare administration has grown at a far greater rate than the actual healthcare providers.
Also, as another commented noted, it's not all roses in those other "modern economies" you mention: France, for example, with its subsidized healthcare system has a public debt equal to 117.8% of its GDP. The US's deficit amounts to 15.2% of GDP in contrast.
> which would absolutely wreck the economy as well as that wealth, since much of that their wealth is tied up in stocks
Yet somehow Mackenzie Scott is divesting billions and not crashing the economy.
And you just got done saying how they don't actually have that much, yet if they sold it all its so huge it would tank the economy. That is a case of Schroedinger's equity.
Of course we could, and would. The narrative would then just shift to be "because these ruthless bastards didn't pay their fair share when it counted and was needed, now we're in a situation that the problem is too big and it's too late....because of THEM. You are suffering because of THEM. Look at history as it's been done a number of times.
Who is arguing for the government to do so? Certainly not anyone with real power in the US.
I personally think we should be taking more of their money, just describing what I think the "take all of their money" argument is doing.
No one, but its a common bad-faith take on arguments that the economic system should be reformed and that the existence of billionaires is a sign of the problems that should be fixed.
I've seen several people on forums/twitter (yes, real people not bots) advocating or doing the math on what we could do with the "1% wealth" ... there's also this
https://youtu.be/XX0u08Gb2Gc
Which got through countless producers and two hosts without so much as a "?" from anyone.
If you make billions, fine. Pay income tax, but you can remain a billionaire. But your kids should not get to keep that. They’ll have to make do merely with millions.
But how much of US economic and fiscal policy has been influenced by billionaires (and "the rich" generally) to the detriment of the country's finances and those of everyday citizens? It's the policies that are the problem.
If you counted the costs of the tax loopholes designed specifically to benefit big corporations, real estate developers, Wall Street titans, the 1% of the 1%, etc., subsidies for the most powerful special interests, and regulations that actually stunt innovation and economic growth to protect large corporations, I suspect you'd be looking at many multiples of the wealth of individual billionaires.
In other words, to get one astronaut worth a cool $100 billion, the country probably "spends" many multiples of that.
That is so deceptive. You are assuming that everyone else won't be paying their taxes. Everything would be paid for but we could use the "confiscated" wealth for additional stuff. Not that I am necessarily for or against wealth redistribution.
Nobody is saying the wealth should be used to fund the government. The american taxpayers do that. The additional money could be used for other stuff.
Seizing Bezos/Gates wealth would have very little impact on the overall health of the country, the government is working with trillions already
I would make the same claim. I'm not rich. I just don't want people with "good intentions" creating "bad consequences" because they don't understand fundamentals.
Such diversity is usually missing from the mandarin class of ivy-leaguers & federal-government-lifers for which Vox's 'explanatory journalism' manufactures consent.
* IP laws should me maximized to protect the "owners"
* consumer protection laws should be minimized to remove corporate responsibility
* taxes should be minimal
* worker protections should be almost non-existent
Basically libertarianism or "fuck you, got mine".
https://future.a16z.com/what-we-learned-doing-fast-grants/
It was created in 2020 to give grants for COVID-related research. Its big selling point was that it would give out money fast: very little paperwork to fill out, and yes/no decisions made within 48 hours. They were surprised to discover that even researchers at top universities were having a hard time getting funding out of the usual institutions like the NIH, which were adapting very slowly to the pandemic. They seem to have done very well in speeding up research, at least with the amount of money they had, just by giving out the funding in a way that few-to-none of the existing institutions would.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffett_Rule
> The Buffett Rule is named after American investor Warren Buffett, who publicly stated in early 2011 that he believed it was wrong that rich people, like himself, could pay less in federal taxes, as a portion of income, than the middle class, and voiced support for increased income taxes on the wealthy.
* Winfrey
* Dorsey
* Soros
* Steyer
* Benioff
* Bloomberg
* Simons
* Sussman
* Pritzker
* Buffett
* Scott
* Omidyar
* Williams
* Kardashian
* Lucas
A few of them support IP protections, at least at current levels supporting their sources-of-wealth, but not your other examples. (And whether they support IP any more than the average voter, or union-member, is unclear.)
Maybe partisanship "from where [you're] standing" is blinding you to the social & political programs of many billionaires?
They often have a hyper inflated sense of individual accomplishment; they're usually "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" people (while unaware of the true meaning of that phrase) and they usually despise any attack on their sense of control, including the narrative that they are "self-made".
They generally have a remarkably homogeneous set of values and promote the same sets of policies and programs on a national scale. They use their influence to tip the scales on a very select group of issues and "personal interest" problems, but they also espouse broadly libertarian approaches to their holdings and wealth, all while insisting they are remaining apolitical.
What they do for PR stunts is usually belied by large scale tax evasion, extremely intensive lobbying, aggressive litigation, and monopolistic capture of whole markets if need be to protect their wealth. Many of which is of questionable legality, but perhaps of even more questionable morality and ethics.
I get the same impression reading private-school-educated Vox writers.
I would say we are better off sticking with the billionaires. They have competence on their side at least.
1. Whether a society should be structured to allow billionaires at all; and,
2. Whether the existence of billionaires is actually helpful/creating a net benefit for everyone else.
The debate originates out of the dominant ideological form of liberalism in Western liberal democracies, Rawlsian liberalism, and, in particular its idea of the "difference principle", which argues that inequality can exist so long as democratic institutions are accessible and enabling upward social mobility, and so long as the majority of the benefits from government actions/programs/policies benefit the most worse off populace the most.
In a sense, the debates around wealth, and especially the extremely wealthy, start when there is the popular sense that that "difference principle" is failing or no longer operating as it should be. Billionaires begin to be seen as extractive rather than as a benefit for a country.
I'm not sure... would the US covid situation be better if Amazon spent less on building out their infrastructure and instead sent more money to the Trump administration?
The biggest irony is that you'll chase the most productive and brilliant people away. Think of how many great scientists and intellectuals came from the Eastern bloc... or Germany during the rise of Hitler. They literally expelled some of their most brilliant and successful people, making the US (or whatever country they fled to) stronger.
The real problem is that legal work isn't being rewarded. Simply letting your money or real estate idle is a much better bet than actually investing it in an economy with slow population growth.
Do you have anything that points to a majority of billionaires doing this?
https://advisor.visualcapitalist.com/asset-class-risk-and-re...
Letting your money sit idle has had much worse performance.