How rich is too rich?
How rich is too rich?
Where should society draw the line on extreme wealth? A fresh account sets out the logic and suggests how to redress inequality.
BOOK REVIEW
Where should society draw the line on extreme wealth? A fresh account sets out the logic and suggests how to redress inequality.
As soon as you hit 1B net worth, you get a diploma that says "Congrats, you won capitalism", and every penny headed for your accounts past that point gets diverted into a society welfare fund.
Could probably set the bar A LOT lower too.
You could live a decent middle class lifestyle with 4 million dollars and never work again. Let's be generous and say 10 million is the cap. There's no reason to get further, much less to a billion.
I was going to say something about "cost of living in an area" because 10M in WV is gonna go a lot further than 10M in NYC, but then I started wondering what kind of knock-on effects setting that hard cap would have? Would cost of living in NYC decrease because now the rich people can't be rich enough to comfortably afford it, or will it cause them to keep contributing to society for a paycheck because they don't want to move? Feel like this might be a good speculative essay subject for a financial policy class.
That’s just socialism. On Second Thought, let’s just do that.
I love how when this gets recommended the responses turn into trying to find the more exact correct amount to set the line at. Just like normal politics though, they get bogged down so much that what seemed like a simple answer turns into discuss,defer,delay, and the original point was missed.
If you’re trying to solve inequality through tax policy alone, I wonder what the effect would be of having the top tax rate vary with the Gini coefficient. The idea being that the wealthy can theoretically reduce their tax burden if (and only if) they figure out how to use their economic power to reduce inequality by other means.
1,250,000 is 5000$ per month for 20 years.
1,000,000,000 is 5000$ per month for 16,666 years.
There is a great essay that touches on this question:
https://www.philosophersbeard.org/2012/04/what-to-do-about-rich.html
I think when the interest your assets accrue annually exceeds what 90% of people make a year, you should just be cut off. Idk. Something.
It's more important to control trajectory than it is to control absolute wealth. Capital accumulation is how we got here, not people suddenly winning 1 billion dollars.
It's a good question... in computer terms, it doesn't matter how much storage space or processing power you have, you WILL find a way to use it.
Someone who makes $30,000 a year and is legit living paycheck to paycheck may be just as tight on money as someone earning $100,000 and living paycheck to paycheck.
The difference is scale.
The person making $30,000 is struggling to make car and insurance payments on an 11 year old Honda Civic.
The person making $100,000 is struggling to make car and insurance payments on their 2024 Porsche Cayenne.
The person making millions may be struggling (to remember) to pay their car and insurance payments on their Bugatti Veyron.
Okay but if the rich person misses their Porsche payments, they can buy a Honda Civic.
I don't know why you are even saying this. What is the point? "If a person spends lots of money on luxury items, they will have less disposable income." Okay? What does that contribute to the question of how our government policies regulate wealth?
I'm saying that expenses scale to wealth, so someone making a significant income may still struggle at the same level as someone with a low income.
Look at someone like Rudy Giuliani, who I feel safe in saying, nobody feels sorry for that sad fuck. He's having trouble paying for ANYTHING. Hope he's cutting out that avocado toast. ;)
The person making $100,000 is struggling to make car and insurance payments on their 2024 Porsche Cayenne.
I get the idea of what you're saying but for many geographies your dollar figure doesn't match. Up your number to maybe $175k for somewhere like NYC or other large urban centers for it to be accurate.
Oh, definitely. You could even scale rent.
Someone making $30K with 3 room mates is struggling to come up with their share of the rent.
Someone making $100,000 with no room mates, is struggling to pay their $4,000 rent.
But at some point, personal expenditure (not expenses geared to bussiness making more money) maxs out. Only so much food you can eat, only so much time you can spend in a day, only so much housing space you can occupy with out that 5th house basically becoming a investment property.
the spend X persons money games show that eventually its a job to find a ways to spend it. there is a limit when it comes to homes and cars.
The person making billions is struggling to pay the officials off that enabled them to continue to make billions.
If you have a bloated program that sucks up all your ram on unnecessary processes because it was poorly developed your computer would care and especially if you go to scale, a billionaire costs more and takes more computing power than a finely tuned family living off of 40000 a year because the billionaire wastes everything since it means nothing but that family makes sure every Lil bit is used to its fullest. Billionaires break the computer
The person making 100,000 is either living in LA/NY or financially lazy. The person making 30,000 doesn't have room to manuever.
Clearly we should rebalance things so everyone has room to manuever. The US GDP evenly split among adults is ~138,000 dollars. Take a bit off the top to run the country and we're left with about 106,000. It's blindingly clear we're grinding the working class to the bone for the benefit of the few. Not the country or the people.
And justifying it with, but that guy with a million dollars spends it all! Just doesn't cut it. He doesn't need it and he doesn't need the things it buys.