In 2019 the US federal budget is $4.407 trillion. [1]

The combined wealth of America's top 400 billionaires in 2017 was 2.7 trillion.

If the social democrats got their dream and took all of their money we could fund the government for only about seven months. When will D.C. and the American people realize that tax rates aren't the problem?! It's the spending stupid!

Edit: Yep, keep downvoting facts people. That will surely save us.

[1]: https://www.thebalance.com/current-u-s-federal-government-sp...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/sep/...

I feel this abolish billionaires movement needs some tweaking.

History has many examples of people changing the world for the better and getting filthy rich doing so. If we start wealth taxing these people to limit their resources you are limiting their ability to push boundaries and hopefully advance society.

Where I feel the issue sits is with dynastic wealth. Just because grandpa did something, great grandchildren 10 generations on shouldnt be expected it's their right to be sitting on massive trusts of assets.

And I think this limits society if we let capital accumulate for a bunch of reasons but mainly 1) we become a divided society with little social mobility, 2)we lose innovation as people sit on assets and industries reduce competition. And poor people don't have the access to time or resource to innovate themself and 3) most importantly if we let small groups of elites run the country they stop caring about services that matter to most people. Things like schools and hospitals become cost lines to be reduced because they or their kids will never use the public system so that increasing teacher ratio, or longer waiting lists become less meaningful.

In a just society the only way you can get rich is through voluntary interaction by adding value to world. In our society you can get rich through legislation, which has created the wealthy parasitic class that earns a living by preventing competition.

To target all the rich is to loot and destroy your society. To target the wealthy parasitic class would be a revolution frankly.

This is a very stupid idea that will no doubt get a lot of attention for the author by people who will explain in great detail how stupid it is. I wonder if that was the intent?

There is zero chance of this ever happening. It is not worth the time to read about it.

Edit: Seriously, this is populist clickbait drivel the Times is running so the broke millennial demographic can drool over revenge fantasies of smashing the bourgeoisie while the Times and their cadre of surveillance partners figure out how to get them to buy a Lexus. Ignore it.

Putting aside moral issues, taxes don't redistribute wealth. They just give it to the government.

How is the government going to be suddenly better at managing money? What leadership controls this new spending? What makes them so much better? This is the day 2 stuff that never gets any thought, and yet is the critical piece of this theory.

The rich should be the ones who are the most concerned with runaway wealth inequality, because the historical endpoint of that line usually isn't pretty for anyone. (But can be especially bad for the rich)

https://aeon.co/essays/history-tells-us-where-the-wealth-gap...

Real question: If I start a business and people love my product so much so that I become a billionaire. Am I a bad person?

Abolish billionaires. Okay, and then what? These ideas never seem to consider what the next steps are. Wealth and inequality will always exist no matter how hard you try to eradicate it. It is fortunately or unfortunately depending on your viewpoint, a fundamental part of the human condition.

The only viable stable long-term solution is focusing on uplifting the masses from the bottom up such that, even the poorest classes of people can have a basic standard of living. This of course entails some kind of universal basic income, which will definitely be difficult to achieve, but it is far more realistically achievable than just "abolishing billionaires". Violent and angry rhetoric like that may feel good and be great for garnering support, but is a road that leads ultimately to ruin.

The existence of billionaires is about distribution of agency. Right now agency is distributed in an extreme and convoluted way. How can you have universal basic income without fixing the other end of the spectrum? The power to invest resources, to effect meaningful material change in our world, is being concentrated in the hands of very few.

I don't think this should be flagged. Individual comments, yes, but the post itself, no. This is a discussion our society needs to have - we need to weight the pros and cons of allowing unlimited accumulation of wealth and power by individuals.

Can we start maybe with the basic stuff?

Tax profits and capital gains as much as we tax income. If there are 3 dominant companies dont allow 2 of them to merge. U know, the basic stuff.

Solution is simple. The more money you have, the greater is your responsibility towards others (beings and nature).

Taking things out by force (from anyone and anything) is never a solution, because everything is relative in this world, including your wealth.

The concentration of the vast majority of wealth in the hands of a small number of people is obviously an unbalanced and unjust system that can't continue to work.

I'm ready to quit hacker news if we can't have substantive discussions.

So the billionaires are the ones causing all your problems?

There is an effort to push communism without calling it communism.

When you ban the rich(or for that matter tax them so heavily they are no longer billionaires) and also raise minimum wage. Everyone ends up in the middle class. That's called communism.

When you have equality of outcome, the 180 IQ software developer who is extremely successful gets the same pay as a 80 IQ. What's the incentive to work or do anything more than that 80 IQ person? ~10% of the population has an IQ below 80. If I don't get my Mclaren and private jet, why bust my ass?

The problem with communism that you lose your purpose. Then you must have work camps; where you are forced to work. It's the only way for communism to work.

As Lenin said - steal the stolen

I don't know if calling it a 'revolution' is the best idea - it seems like they always end up devouring their children. Marxist 'eat the rich' types of revolutions are pretty recent, too - traditionally it seems like a frustrated upper middle class is what aristocrats and overreaching executives really have to fear. Also, I never miss a chance to trot out this quote:

"Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes."

- Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

Since most governments are also billionaires, maybe we could abolish them too.

You know, there are a lot of problems with your logic. I'm a product of a Jesuit University where I was forced to write paper after paper on topics around morality, good, evil, justice, and similar themes. Justice has a lot of different potential definitions - many (most) of which wouldn't define "adding value" as a "just" way to get rich. A different definition of "just" might more likely define a massive distribution of wealth to some individuals as morally unjust based on outcomes. With such a logic targeting the rich would be morally justified - even if illegal and involving killing or death.

The Jesuits are a very serious bunch of guys - many have died for their beliefs. And just because they are Catholic doesn't mean that they agree with Catholic policy - though they recognize that it has the weight of established policy (as Pope Francis has said more than once as he defended things I know he disagrees with.)

You’re a bad person if you don’t give most of it away. Nobody needs a billion dollars.

>the man who dies leaving behind many millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during life, will pass away " unwept, unhonored, and unsung," no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him. Of such as these the public verdict will then be : "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."

—Andrew Carnegie

No, not in the least. But you do then question the context which allows a few to accumulate so much wealth while simultaneously observing a significant proportion of the population with stagnant levels of wealth.

Of course not. Is the owner of a monopolistic company a bad person? No. Is it good for society to allow a company to become a monopoly? No.

Under current Democratic party norms: yes.

It seems to me like the answer is obviously "no", and that nobody outside the extremes in all these wealth disparity conversations even suggests such a thing, so I wonder if you had a more subtle question in mind along similar lines.

No, but you shouldn't even be able to become a billionaire in the first place. That capital should be reinvested into society, not held by an individual.

No you are not a bad person.

If you knew for a fact that you would never make more than $100million no matter how successful it was would you still try to start a business?

Personally, I don't go so far as to advocate abolishing billionaires, but I do favor a very high tax bracket like 80 or 90 percent to fund basic redistribution. This would not abolish billionaires, but would make it harder to become a dollar billionaire.

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton answered: "Because that's where the money is."

Seems like Elon Musk is a "good" billionaire for instance. The people who want to get rid of billionaires don't seem very well informed and use it as some kind of catch-all to explain where all their issues come from. It's very much disconnected from reality.