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Protestation (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Not sure why you're getting down voted. The OP wasn't explicitly about the US but Bernie Sanders got 13M votes in the 2016 primary and he is very clearly in support of taxing the wealthy. That sure is a lot of "insane" people isn't it?

What is unreasonable is assuming that taxing wealthy individuals is, on its own, enough to solve all these other social problems. There just aren't enough billionaires for that to work.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

What is unreasonable is assuming that taxing wealthy individuals is, on its own, enough to solve all these other social problems

Let's just take Jeff bezos.

His net worth rose about $70b last year.

There are about 250 million adults in the US. The US poverty rate is about 12.5%, that's about 31 million adults.

At a flat tax rate of 50%, that's about $1100 per person in poverty per year. That's just one billionaire.

How Many Billionaires Are in the United States? America is home to 759 billionaires. The estimated that U.S. billionaire total wealth was a combined $4.48 trillion as of November 2022, an amount that grew grown a staggering 50% since before to the pandemic.

To put in perspective, $2.25t / 3 years / 31 million adults in poverty is about $24,000 / year for each adult.

For an individual, the poverty line in the US is about $15,000.

If we focused on taxing billionaires the way we used to, we may not be able to fix everything, but we could certainly afford to bring every single person in the US out of poverty. Saying it's not a solution is not correct.

Edit: I'm not saying that it's simple and easy as that. I'm just saying that the math is there. If we gave people an amount of money per year based on their income, from money that is directly taken from billionaires at a high tax rate, we'd find that a lot of our social problems fix themselves.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

It’s about priorities. Money is information about how we prioritize distribution of material and labor. If we prioritize housing and feeding everyone, the money will go there. Right now we prioritize the supremacy of a small number of individuals and their “right” to own personal armies navies and air forces.