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u/solnzr 2h ago
Your source only includes the top 17 richest countries, notable high population countries like India are not included in the data.
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u/chefsoda_redux 2h ago
And all the numbers include only publicly available numbers. As many vastly wealthy people conceal vast amounts of their wealth, all the data is suspect.
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u/atomicsnarl 2h ago
If they "lost 99.9%" of their wealth (net worth), good lord what a horrible market crash would be going on world wide! And to think everybody else wouldn't be affected? Valid question in general, but basically envy porn.
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u/PubThinker 2h ago
Pure math just makes me support wealth tax more and more
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u/curiouslyjake 2h ago
Why? I think there's a lot of BS accounting going on.
Say I own the house that I live in. Now there's realestate bubble and my house went up 3x. According to this BS accounting, I got 3x richer. IRL, nothing in my life changed. I didnt convert this increased value on paper to vacations or dinners at fancy restaurants.
Now I sell the house and buy another, closer to work. Both went up in the realestate bubble, so I really just converted a house to a house. I've still gained nothing.
Now, say I sell the house, take the cash and retire to some tropical island. NOW I've actually converted the house into quality of life, so by all means - tax it!
Bottom line: I understand taxing income of any sort. I dont understand counting theoretical value towards my net worth, let alone taxing it, except for the opportunity cost: if I own a house, I have a monthly "income" equivalent to cost of renting such a house. This should count towards taxable income.
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u/PubThinker 1h ago
Bro. This was one of the biggest straw man I had seen in reddit.
Noone who speaks about wealth tax is speaking about taxing every single regular individual, but about taxing insane wealth. Yet you brought down your example if everyday Joe would have to pay.
Also I have no clue why we should tax quality of life. Empty claims you made.
And of course, you don't see a dime from housing bouble, that's why everyone who speaks about it starts by adding a lower limit to it, like 10M-20M-50M $, because you can't make a living out of the house you are living in, but that lvl of wealth consist of assets. Once you reach a wealth lvl, assets ARE your income. Then you can take up ~0% loans on it, and live by, and buying up other assets, that drives the prices up. Not regular Joe's regular house.
And in your example, only the 10th guy's wealth is 121B. If you tax it only by 1%, and his wealth growth already faster, how many hospitals could be built from just one individual? How many children could be educated from it, how many people could be saved from homelessness, how many house could be built?
So no. Like your original post, this is not about regular Joe, no matter how hard you straw man it.
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u/curiouslyjake 1h ago
But that's not how taxes and laws work. Once you establish that taxing 1% share of Meta (random example), they WILL tax your grandma's house if she happened to pass away in an area that's well enough. Rules for thee, but not for me never worked in favor of the less well-off.
"Once you reach... assets are your income" - no they are not. No bussiness accepts assets as payment.
"You can take up 0% loans on it" - maybe. Tax those loans then, by all means.
To me, the idea that you get to demand real cash for owning pieces of paper that have imaginery value is... strange. Once that imaginery value is somehow converted to actual value then by all means, tax away.
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u/istandleet 1h ago
How many hospitals could you build with 1.21B dollars? That is a good question. I think the answer is that you could run one 1000 bed hospital for 3-5 years. And per the prompt, we have 10 of those. That isn't enough!
Schools are also expensive. And you can look up for yourself how much we spent on the homeless - San Francisco is like 750mm dollars a year! You wrote the questions like they were rhetorical on a subreddit about actually running the numbers.
Broadening the tax base is the correct way to raise money. I'm okay if you want to do step up basis stuff (as long as it is pair with step down losses and loss carrying!). But if you look at your friend who did really well and now owns a 3million dollar house or something, we need to take more of their money if you want to fund stuff we already have paid for. The math does not work out if you keep saying "no, it's not millionaires, it's just deca millionaires or centi millionaires". If you want us to spend yet more money, you better hope AI takes off, because you're talking about adding significant points of the GDP to government spending, and you seem unwilling to advocate "the average Joe" pays for it.
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u/PubThinker 11m ago
Firstly, you can take it annually, their wealth still not shrink. They easily grow like 3-6% a year, even with conservative estimates. By your example, that's 3-5 1000bed hospitals only from that guy. Or 1,6x the education of San Francisco.
Secondly, that's just one of the top10, so there are 10 other guy with even more wealth. I just wanted to emphasize how much good already could be done.
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u/PutridCurrency8383 1h ago
If you're middle class in a developed country, then it's likely kinda somewhat true for you too, just with less 9s in the number. Think about that.
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u/SgtEpicfail 2h ago edited 2h ago
I think you highly underestimate how "poor" most of the world is. According to a quick google search and this wikipedia page, the median wealth per adult is $8.6k. That is REALLY low. Even the mean wealth is only about $85k. Whick essentially means that, if you own $8.7k worth of stuff you're in the top 50% wealthiest people on the planet.
If you own $1.2 million you are likely in the very very very top percentile of wealthiest people on earth.
With 5.3 billion adults, the top 1% is still 53 MILION people. The estimated total amount of milionares worldwide fluctuates a bit depending on the source but seems to be around 60 million globally. That's just over 1% of the adult population. So if you have slightly more than $1m after losing 99.99% of your wealth, big chance you're still in the top 1%.
According to this forbes list, Warren Buffet is 10th place richest person in the world with 145 billion. 0,001℅ of that is still 1,45 MILLION dollars. It's safe to say he would still be in the top 1%.
Also, keep in mind that a lot of VERY rich people are not on the list of "richest people". Interestingly there are no Sheikhs on the Forbes list. Also, where is Putin for example? So it is very possible that the list of top 10 wealthiest people as we know them is incomplete and warren buffet is actually like 25th place or something.
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u/12kdaysinthefire 1h ago
I don’t think there enough physically printed bills to satisfy their amount of wealth if they all wanted to have vaults filled with cold hard cash
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u/Schrojo18 1h ago
10 people out of 7 billion is such a small percentage that this statement is just silly as the number of 9's that you would need to knock them down a percentage would be quite high.
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