> income tax

They don't get money through income! They get most of it through capital gains or unrealized capital gains which are taxed at special low rates and zero rates respectively.

It's transparently self-serving and completely indefensible -- though I'm sure you'll try.

Capital gains taxes are applied to capital gains income and are included in the stats above.

Top 1% of the US holds 30% of the country's wealth

Bottom 50% only 2% of wealth

50% of the economy my ass, these takes don't even pass basic accounting logic these days

If we limited individual wealth to $999 million--just outright capped it, and enforced that--it would not impact these people in the slightest.

What it would impact is how easily these people could influence the political system and get themselves out of trouble.

At $400 billion net worth, Elon Musk could retire one hundred thousand times. He literally wrote multi-million dollar checks to various politicians and ran an illegal pay-for-votes scheme in Pennsylvania. And he'll face zero consequences for it.

But what do you do with tesla/amazon/etc. then? Force elon to sell of his shares? Take them? What if the price drops? Give the shares back?

It's not like he has all that in money in his bank account, it's ownership of companies, their value is not real until someone else is willing to pay.

The tax is his shares, those shares become public assets, the government and (ostensibly) the citizens finally get a say in what the hell is happening with that guy.

So to recap:

You have a vendetta against a guy, for grievances, some legitimate, and want the law to change, specifically to get him, because you hate what he says. You also want to nationalize his businesses, that he built, that he did not have to build, that now employ 140,000 people, that he did not have to employ, with those 140,000 people almost all being high income earners paying higher tax rates when they may not have otherwise, out of your hate.

I would call that greed and a despicable position.

On that note, it's also completely pointless. If you were to literally liquidate every billionaire in America, every single one, and somehow got current market rates for every single stock share, 100% tax rate beyond $1B... we would cover the deficit for 3 years. With everyone else still paying taxes. Then we're back to square one, running a $2T deficit every year with no billionaires to liquidate. It's entirely catharsis that accomplishes nothing. If such a tax were even passed, we wouldn't make it to the next election cycle before it's a problem again.

> If we limited individual wealth to $999 million--just outright capped it, and enforced that--it would not impact these people in the slightest.

It would certainly impact their willingness to do the company-building that creates all those innovations and jobs.

With such a rule, Tesla wouldn't exist, no electric cars, no SpaceX, no cheap advanced launch tech; basically most of the modern world would be choked in the crib by taking away the incentive to build it.

If some person isn't willing to do company building because they are already at the cap so it won't make them any more money, that just means that someone else will do that. We have a planet of 8 billion humans; there's no shortage of human talent.

This is an untested assumption, as it takes quite a bit of CapEx without return to start a rocket company, or a tunnel boring company, or a car company.

From experience, there is a huge shortage of human talent.

Some people really are exceptional and there are very few of them.

How many Einsteins do you think are just kicking around? How many Robin Williams's or Tom Hanks's?

How many Kobes? We know not many because there's a huge search to find more.

There aren't 20 more Elons waiting in the wings there. Or 20 more Jensens. And so on.

It's actually far more rational as a society to pay the one guy who can create 100B his 10B for it.

I did a bit of mild googling.

1% of Americans control 30% of the wealth of the nation, and apparently 12% of property.

It's more than reasonable that people with that much wealth to their name pay the vast majority of the taxes, as it used to be.

From a nation building perspective, there's no reason to allow a couple hundred people to wield 52,000,000,000,000$ worth of assets. It means the economy has gotten far too clumpy and needs some redistribution. This isn't even really all that anti-capitalist. Capitalism can't survive long term without budding up against a government that regulates it.

1% of Americans would be over 3 million people, not a couple hundred.

.1% hold 12.6% of national wealth so that's 300,000 people. It tends to clump at the top, apparently.

In any case, it seems a bit bizarre to me that the wealth is distributed so unevenly. Do you believe those 3 million people work so hard that their value is that much higher than the combined output of 297 million people?

To be in the top .1% you need a wealth of about $60m, certainly nothing to be worried about, it gives you a very nice standard of living.

But it's a lot nearer to someone at the 90%ile wealth of about $2m than the kind of power that those with $1b, let alone centi-billionaires, have. You're talking top level entertainers (actors, sportmen etc)

Good point, maybe the more important statistic is that there's 900 billionaires in America, representing about 7 trillion in collective wealth. The USA GDP is 30 trillion... the situation just seems inherently wrong to me.

You are comparing a stock to a flow. Billionares in the US don't make $7 trillion per year. They accumulated that wealth over their lifetimes. If you want to compare apples to apples: The net worth of the US (as much as that concept can make sense) is around $176 trillion. That includes $269 trillion in assets and $123 trillion in debts.

Sure, all I'm saying is it's bizarre that the country allows its resources to be allocated so inefficiently.

> How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share?

How exactly do you propose that they pay their fair share when they literally do not have the money or assets to do so? Are you proposing modern day slavery? Perhaps people selling their family? I'm curious what happens if you take this line of thought to it's actual conclusion.

How about instead of taxes, we have a $10,000 per year subscription fee to live in society.

Maybe different depending on area, like $20,000 a year to live in NYC but only $2,000 per year to live in a rural village.

If you can't afford the fee that's OK, it just means you have to live outside of the developed areas and don't benefit from any services provided by the government. But you are free to set up a tent in the woods and live off the land.

Would this mean that a person that makes 50k/y most pay 20% of their income while a billion$ company still pays 10k? I don't think this helps with wealth inequality.

The solution is obvious and simple: Tax wealth not work.

Even if you were to liquidate every billionaire in America, at a 100% tax rate above $1 billion, and were able to sell the shares at current stock prices without a collapse, you would pay for the government deficit for... 3 years. Because their combined wealth, on paper, is $7T while we're running over $2T shortfalls every year.

3 years of not taking out debt, while still needing everyone else to pay current rates. Then you're back to square one. Sans billionaires and sans any major capital investment anywhere.

Now explain the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

If they are only taxed at an effective rate of 3%, there is something being taxed.

I don't think people should be able to vote on massive tax increase laws, if it doesn't also increase their own taxes in some way.

Well, it depends. One possible answer is that we should make sure that everyone is wealthy enough to pay taxes by redistributing the wealth. ~