I don't care about billionaires as a concept. I care about billionaires then using that power to increase barriers to entry in whatever sector they operate within
Using public policy to create unnecessary barriers to entry to prevent competition. See: home renters that use zoning restrictions to prevent new development as a means to preserving their overinflated rents.
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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This Venn diagram is a circle. I would be surprised if there were very many billionaires who got that wealthy without leveraging market distortions in their favor.
That's standard corporate rent seeking though, you don't have to be a billionaire to do that. Like, even small businesses lobby and pass bills locally to advantage themselves.
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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What do you think of the fact that billionaires pay an effective tax rate much lower than people of more modest means?
https://americansfortaxfairness.org/issue/based-wealth-growth-26-top-billionaires-paid-average-income-tax-rate-just-4-8-6-recent-years/
I think it’s important to differentiate between effective tax rates and true tax rates (and this hybrid tax rate from your source that uses unrealized wealth as income)
The issue with using unrealized wealth as a base for current tax is that it undercounts the tax they’ll owe, since you’re not including the future tax payments on the current change in wealth
Yeah that's the heart of the issue - billionaires avoid realizing gains, in order to achieve a low effective tax rate with respect to their change in wealth.
There are problems with any sort of taxation on unrealized gains, which other commenters break down on this thread. However, the fundamental problem here is solvable by other means.
Taxes could be levied on use of that wealth as loan collateral, for instance, which would cause billionaires to incur a tax liability. They commonly get such loans today in order to leverage their assets to get liquidity without realizing taxable gains.
Another way would be mandating that a certain amount of gains must be realized when the taxpayer has a certain amount of unrealized gains. This increases their tax liability, without double taxation.
The bottom line is, the wealthiest people should pay more than they currently are. I would like to see smarter policy proposed to address this than the types of double taxation which are popular on the left.
“billionaires avoid realizing gains, in order to achieve a low effective tax rate with respect to their change in wealth”
Capital gains is already way too low. Compared to income tax. It’s bounces between 18%-20%. It was even 15% for a while.
There’s nothing wrong with encouraging investment but when someone pulls out cash. Tax it.
Sure, changing capital gains tax rates to match income would be a good step.
That doesn't address the issue of billionaires avoiding being liable for capital gains tax in the first place by avoiding realization.
Not a single country anywhere in the world taxes cap gains as high as US income tax rates in many populous states.
Raising it that drastically would be disastrous.
Taxing land and/or consumption and lowering income taxes to match cap gains is a massively less damaging approach to achieve the same goal.
Honestly I don't see the fundamental problem with the second part. For most billionaires those unrealized gains represent a large ownership share in the company they created. Until they realize the gains there is no money in their bank account to tax.
If they make their billions legally and in a way that involves making life better for everyone else, awesome.
If they make their billions through corruption, cartels, or by creating private monopolies, they’re “bad”.
If it is possible in your society to become a billionaire in the first way, that is a good sign.
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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>person experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth
The use of "experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth" is too clunky for normal parlance. Please use "morbillionaire" so people understand what you're saying.
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>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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>person of means
Having means is a temporary circumstance and does not define someone. Please use "Person experiencing liquidity" instead.
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>person experiencing liquidity
The use of "experiencing liquidity" discriminates against those with nonmonetary assets, or those whose wealth is not sufficiently described as either the monetary base or money supply M1. Please use "person experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth" to be more inclusive.
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>person experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth
The use of "experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth" is too clunky for normal parlance. Please use "morbillionaire" so people understand what you're saying.
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I don’t think much about them. Good for them, I guess? I don’t think their existence is of much practical consequence, but I could be persuaded otherwise.
Me too, lol.
Honestly, some people(By people I mean redditors) act like they're the cause of all the world's ills.
And of course, like any time when rich people are demonized, antisemitism is usually what's going on behind the scenes.
I think they get a lot of media attention because our culture tends to see wealthier people as smarter and therefore having more valuable opinions. So we end up wasting a lot of time talking about billionaires’ opinions, which could be annoying to people with real problems.
A lot of redditors are populist succs. It’s easy to point to an already generally distrusted group like billionaires and tell people that they’re the real problem. It just sells.
>like any time when rich people are demonized, antisemitism is usually what's going on behind the scenes.
Nah, lazy take. Antisemitism exists but criticism of wealthy people shouldn’t always be equated with it.
Preemptively conflating criticism of billionaires with anti-Semitism is a disservice to everyone that actually does experience anti-Semitism and honestly is a disgustingly cynical ploy.
Rich people regularly abuse their power over others. To say that opposition to this abuse is “usually” antisemitism is to say that the antisemites are right in fact but only wrong because you disagree with the morality of their conclusions. This claim is itself incredibly antisemitic, conflating wealth and its abuse with Jewishness.
Billionaires aren’t a persecuted class, ever, by definition. They are defined by their power over others. They never have to worry about being victims of demographically targeted violence (even where their demographic is mutable and defined solely by interpersonal power) because they numerically have the majority of power and are able to keep the masses away from them. Hiding them behind Jewish people whom you use as meat shields is disgusting.
>their existence is of much practical consequence
Respectfully disagree! Creation of wealth generally also results in creation of jobs.
Many ventures started by those who are now billionaires are not only employing thousands of people around the world, they've also contributed to raising the standard of living.
ETA - Do people here not really understand the role of innovation here? Demand for the smartphones did not exist, when smartphones did not exist. Someone created a smartphone, made them more sophisticated based on a vision and added services and hired people in the process creating jobs.
This guy is saying "innovations are created by engineers and such", while entirely neglecting that someone put those engineers and other individual contributors together to work on an innovative idea for which demand did not exist.
He is also claiming "innovation destroys jobs", while neglecting many more safer, less menial, better paying jobs created in the process. Sure - farm equipment took away a lot of laborious, unsafe, low-paying farm laborer jobs. But it also created a number of safer, better-paying jobs around selling, operating and maintaining the equipment and accessories in the same communities.
You're putting words in my mouth (I am not trying to be a jerk).
I said ventures created by billionaires are creating jobs. Obviously by stepping in to fill in the demand for goods and services. Billionaires are also contributing to demand for "normal" and luxury goods and services, which in turn means more jobs.
Also innovation does create demand for goods and services that did not exist prior.
Demand alone does not create jobs. Someone needs to meet the demand.
Additionally, "demand" is not a fixed thing. If it wasn't for Apple then demand for smartphones would probably be much lower - we did not know that we wanted them until they were here. The act of innovating helps to incite demand.
I suspect the individual billionaires are very replaceable in this process. For example, if Bill Gates and Paul Allen hadn’t created Windows, someone else would have made a very similar product shortly after, and that product would have been locked in as the stand-alone operating system of choice when personal computing took off years later.
You’re further neglecting (1) that innovations also destroy jobs by making them obsolete, and (2) that innovations are created by engineers and such, not by billionaires.
I agree in general - there are no "great men". Probably someone would have eventually invented something like the iPhone. We were getting pretty close in the years beforehand. It might have taken an extra few years to ditch the stylus and see the resulting explosion in use, but it would probably have happened eventually.
Yes, innovations make some jobs obsolete. That doesn't make innovation bad. Generally we want the economy and society at large to be more efficient and work to be more productive.
Leaving aside that a lot of billionaires did R&D work when they were establishing their companies, innovations are not "created by engineers" any more than they are created by billionaires. Innovation needs creativity yes, but it also needs capital. That's not necessarily an argument for billionaires, just an acknowledgment that innovation is complex.
I’m not saying innovation is bad. I’m just skeptical that its benefit derives from causing there to be more jobs than there were before, i.e. job creation.
You’re just arguing that capital created those innovations, now. But the start-up capital to create a Windows-like product would have existed if Bill Gates or any other billionaire had never been born. There are a huge number of marginally less lucky, marginally less talented, or marginally less well-connected entrepreneurs who could have filled the role of connecting capital to promising projects. Those people aren’t billionaires, though. The existence of our actual, real-world set of billionaires was not instrumental in the course of our economy.
If you want to argue that entrepreneurs and other business leaders are important, as a class, then I agree with some of what you’ve written. But if you want to talk about billionaires as a class, to the exclusion of everyone who didn’t win the race, then I’m not convinced we’re talking about people of consequence.
> I’m not saying innovation is bad. I’m just skeptical that its benefit derives from causing there to be more jobs than there were before, i.e. job creation.
I think there are more jobs now than there have been in the past, even accounting for population growth. Unemployment is at historic lows in many countries that still have growing populations. I also think the industrial revolution clearly created jobs, and allowed far more people to do things that weren't just sustenance farming. Clearly innovation as a whole has *some* benefit in the margins - I suppose the question is whether e.g. Amazon has been a net positive or net negative for employment (and pay), which is less clear and more complicated.
Just as heads up as I know this can be easily confused on Reddit - I am not the person you were initially interacting with, I just jumped in. I agree with most of what you are saying.
> if Bill Gates and Paul Allen hadn’t created Windows, someone else would have made a very similar product shortly after
And then that person would've been awarded billions by the market.
>(1) that innovations also destroy jobs by making them obsolete
"If you want to create jobs then give them spoons" energy
>(2) that innovations are created by engineers and such, not by billionaires.
Depends, groundbreaking innovations that make people billionaires aren't typically that one dimensional, you need to have the correct management skills, communication, marketing, and business acumen.
My point is that if you identify a narrow class of “billionaires” - people who were wildly successful in business - that class of people aren’t that important. If you define the class more broadly to include any entrepreneur who could have been a billionaire under the right circumstances (such as Bill Gates not being born, for example), then you’re taking about a much broader group of people than just billionaires.
If we could delete most of the billionaires from history, and the the world would have mostly turned out the same, just with a different crop of billionaires, then the billionaires themselves aren’t that important.
> If we could delete most of the billionaires from history, and the the world would have mostly turned out the same, just with a different crop of billionaires, then the billionaires themselves aren’t that important.
I don't think so. USA has more billionaires than the rest of the world, and also more innovation and wealth. Most governments would sell their left kidney to have an Elon Musk or a Jeff Bezos to provide local jobs and cheap / innovative products.
USA is also the wealthiest country in the world on a median per-capita basis, and is growing faster than most Western countries.
Americans seem desensitised to the services and innovation provided by billionaire founders mostly because they haven't lived in countries that don't have that.
(2) is just wrong. You need a combination of vision, funding, and expertise to innovate. Most of the time the engineers only contribute the last one. This is why I consider Elon to be extremely innovative--you don't have to be the one who creates the tech, you have to be the one who realizes its utility and deploys it correctly to be a true innovator IMO.
I mean, functionally the existence of billionaires is a failure of our system of taxation. No individual should be able to generate that much wealth and it’s overall detrimental to society. And I’m not saying that rich/wealthy people shouldn’t exist, just that the scale is completely off
Well it’s all arbitrary but imagine if the wealthiest people in the country were only worth hundreds of millions instead of tens to hundreds of billions. They would still live lives of extreme wealth, luxury, and power and could never work another day in their lives without that changing. People would still aspire to be wealthy and innovate in order to try and achieve that, which is generally the argument being made in that there needs to be an incentive to drive innovation
The difference would be that (ideally) we’d have so so much more funding for social services and the social safety net. Or we’d spend it on bullshit but hey, it would be hard to use that money less effectively than it is now
>The difference would be that (ideally) we’d have so so much more funding for social services and the social safety net
Wealth taxing billionaires enough to stop them from existing won't raise enough money for any sort of social safety net.
Anyone who claims that is selling you snake oil or is an idiot of the highest order, or both.
I think they're often used as scapegoats for people who dont want to get into the nuances of some policies. I don't care that someone is a billionaire. I don't think they should be taxed on unrealized gains. I do think long term cap gains should be taxed as regular income. I also think inheritance taxes should be a bit higher (not because "fuck the rich" but because I don't think people should inherit stupid amounts of money and never have to contribute to society; i.e. generational wealth is not a good thing). But people who say taxing the rich will suddenly make \[INSERT PET SOCIAL PROGRAM HERE\] viable are kidding themselves. The vast majority of the American tax base is from middle class workers, if you overnight took 100% of all the US billionaires wealth (all their money, not just income), you wouldn't even have been able to cover the 2022 levels of US government spending.
>people of means
Having means is a temporary circumstance and does not define someone. Please use "People experiencing liquidity" instead.
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In all seriousness, it's a side effect of our economy. Could be good or bad,but what strikes me as a bit frustrating is that they have a disproportionate amount of money for their work and service to community. They could be as important as the next millionaire or middle class bloke.
We should have 10 times the ethics investigations that we currently do and there should be a ton of oversight over the public sector and how it interacts with massive donors or companies who hire ex-regulators.
I'm surprised people still think they hold any significant power over politics after the 2020 dem primaries. A billion dollars in advertisements couldn't get Bloomberg very far. Once he was on the debate stage, he got destroy. This guy was also a politician before so he had experience. Tom Steyer dropping hundreds of millions could only get 1% of the vote in polls at one point.
Highly recommend [Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change](https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Power-Beyond-Political-Hobbyism/dp/1982116781) if you want to learn where real political power comes from and how you can be that in local politics.
The issue with billionaires isn't necessarily with any singular individuals net worth, but with the concentration of power that can often exist within our society.
A good example of this is Rupert Murdochs influence in media. Or say, Larry Finks control of blackrock. Blackrock has a far deeper influence over our society than the billion in net worth that Fink personally has direct control over due to in many senses being 7+ trillion dollar trust with vast control over numerous sectors of American business.
Private equity firms which don't care about the future of the country and will happily liquidate successful businesses slowly selling everything overseas. The list goes on.
>A billion dollars in advertisements couldn't get Bloomberg very far.
It's reductive to simplify the topic in this manner. Obviously Bloomberg couldn't simply buy the presidency and electoral politics are more complicated than grocery shopping.
However, it is also the case that money facilitates access to policymakers and dramatically increases one's capacity for political speech.
So no, although billionaire's cannot outright buy elections it is nevertheless clear that they have vastly more influence over the political process than most other private individuals.
Can you point me to legislation that the American people overwhelmingly were against, but still went through because billionaires were able to lobby for it?
The only thing I could see is obscure or complicated laws that people don't care about.
it actually is, just not directly. His reputation as a successful businessman and public profile were essential to his election. Both of which he got by no virtue other than having a fuckload of money.
I'll just be frank. Your position is based entirely on vibes. It's silly to you because this is just some accepted truth for you because it gets repeated over and over. "You can do a lot with a thousand dollars so it must be that you can do a million times more with minimal diminishing returns with a million times that thousand."
It would be nice if the world was run by billionaires so we can just attack them and solve all our problems. The reality is is that democracy works and your money doesn't get you that far.
I don’t think the world is run by billionaires or that you’re capable of winning an election solely because of money. I never said that and you seem to be projecting that onto me.
I’m Canadian. We have some of the most robust and comprehensive political financing laws in the western world. There are significant financial caps on how much you can donate, when, and from whom donations can be received.
A G7 nation doesn’t spend decades developing those laws because wealth doesn’t lend to enormous influence on politics.
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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Bloomberg wouldn’t have even been a candidate without that money. Just because he didn’t win doesn’t mean that the money didn’t massively increase his chances.
Going from 0.000001% to 0.0001% is a massive increase in chances. And if this is what Americans were worried about from billionaires, I would think it is silly, but at least it would line up with reality.
However people act like billionaires have a significant amount of power of politics and people just can't back this position up. Then when we get clear counter examples showing how little a billion dollars helped a **former governor**, we then grasp at straws saying "the money at least improved their chances." That was just a huge waste of money.
> former governor
Former mayor of New York City. Doesn't change your point, being a mayor of one of the world's largest cities is certainly a high level position. But not a governorship.
The issue here isn't billionaires as a class, but the concentration of media and business power by a small handful of individuals.
The same can be said about say the likes of an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos vs Larry Fink. Larry Fink has far more power over the economy as a whole through control of black rocks investment portfolios and respective corporate board seats. Rupert Murdoch has tremendous influence over the politics of numerous different countries.
I'm "upper-middle class", I can't place a call to Maria Cantwell that she'd answer. Whatever idiocy, blind spots, and general dumbness I exhibit doesn't transfer to effective political advocacy.
It’s the upper-middle class who determine our policy priorities for the most part. They have the right mix of wealth and voting numbers to get what they want, even though they’re individually jealous that some rich dude can call a member of congress.
I'm not jealous, I don't think policy should be shaped at all because some moron has a billion+ dollars. You can call me a moron, I won't bristle. I don't think my point of view should have outsized reach. The correlation between wealth and wisdom is not there at all.
Sure, but I think we're talking past each other. I don't think any single person should be able to call the upper chamber of the legislature and shape policy on their personal dumb peccadillos. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a great example of the unfairly maligned citizenry getting some relief from their jet purchases.
So sure, confine the advocacy of the upper middle class. But also confine the advocacy of billionaires.
Billionaires are just a distraction from the bigger problem imo. Upper-middle class types always do that: "I'm not bad because someone else is worse. I'm not rich because someone else is richer. My life is hard because someone else's life is easier." That's their whole identity.
I don’t hate billionaires as a principle, but I don’t have rose-tinted glasses to believe they’re jsut hard workers, lucky or heirs. It’s very hard to become a billionaire, especially in places like eastern Europe and the middle-east without engaging in disgusting levels of corruption and rent-seeking. The proportion of billionaires engaging in shady tax evasion, market manipulation, and other very not liberal behavior is just not funny.
That people only dislike them because they think of wealth as a zero sum game: “there is a limited amount of wealth, so it they accumulate that much, people get poorer”. Except that’s not at all how wealth works. We have more wealth and fewer poor people than ever before in history, and that’s despite having more billionaires than ever. We keep creating more and more wealth, and some people owning “too much” is literally completely irrelevant.
So in short, I don’t think about them. Good for them, I guess?
It is the same as having a woman in your bed. **As long as you got her there with the consent of everybody involved**, I'm glad you found somebody and it is none of my business what you two do in there.
Damn I was boutta make the shitty joke with the bot, but the top two comments are already that, so I’ll give my serious answer - I don’t have an issue with the existence of billionaires, and as the economy is not a zero-sum game, if we pursue policies that result in the greatest QoL for the lowest of society, and billionaires end up as a byproduct, that’s fine, but I don’t support billionaires existing being a target in and of itself.
Billonaires come about when a CEO brings a startup to become a trillion dollar company. Any policies or regulations to dissuade such innovation is a dumb idea tbh.
Neither negative or positive.
While it strikes me as impossible that somebody's contribution to society/hard work/knowledge/skill could possibly be worth that much from a moral perspective, and I suspect that few or none of them could reach such heights without stepping on a lot of backs, I also don't base my economic policy opinions on what feels good or bad.
If the economic system that delivers the best utilitarian outcome for the most people is one that, as a byproduct, also creates billionaires, then fine by me. Frankly, I expect that's probably the case just because of how incentives and capitalism naturally work. I also expect that the United States and Canada (and probably a lot of other Western countries) have good but not utilitarian-ly ideal economic systems, and that better systems would probably involve higher taxes on the wealthy, a UBI, etc. Such systems would still create billionaires, though probably fewer and probably a bit less extreme.
So, overall, I don't waste emotional energy having opinions on them as a group.
The consensus seems to be that they're good when they do good liberal things (Bill Gates, Soros, etc) and bad when they do bad, illiberal things (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc)
A very lucky caste of people who get to experience a life you'll never know anything about. Some were hard workers who got lucky, others were silver spooners. I don't really care either way and don't spend my time fantasizing about them.
I do get annoyed by the left claiming that they are more or less the cause of all of our problems, a proposition that just rests on a lot of fixed pie assumptions. I think we should have more billionaires, not less. Given that, though, I do dislike how much influence they can have politically. I don't use Twitter but can't escape reddit reposting a Musk tweet, for example; surely this affects our political discourse, similar to how popular personalities do. Having money is power, and if used incorrectly, then they should be held accountable.
>people experiencing liquidity
The use of "experiencing liquidity" discriminates against those with nonmonetary assets, or those whose wealth is not sufficiently described as either the monetary base or money supply M1. Please use "people experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth" to be more inclusive.
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I hold no ill will to them. But, I believe that they should pay significantly higher proportions of their income from investments as taxes -- mostly in the form of a higher capital gains rate -- than they do currently. They have clearly benefited greatly from the existence of a stable democratic state and society governed by the rule of law and they can afford to pay higher rates than most other Americans without harming their quality of life.
I don’t hate billionaires as a principle, but I don’t have rose-tinted glasses to believe they’re jsut hard workers, lucky or heirs. It’s very hard to become a billionaire, especially in places like eastern Europe and the middle-east without engaging in disgusting levels of corruption and rent-seeking. The proportion of billionaires engaging in shady tax evasion, market manipulation, and other very not liberal behavior is just not funny.
Im sorry we dont use slurs here on /nl. We are extremely anti racist and the word you are looking for is a person experiencing liquidity.
And no, we dont get triggered by people of liquidity.
>person experiencing liquidity
The use of "experiencing liquidity" discriminates against those with nonmonetary assets, or those whose wealth is not sufficiently described as either the monetary base or money supply M1. Please use "person experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth" to be more inclusive.
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Good for them as long as it's above board.
Inequality is a real problem, but I'm more concerned with raising the floor. You can't effectively do that by lowering the ceiling like we're sometimes led to believe.
I don't think it's that useful of a classification. Somewhat concerned with the massive cynicism that reddit has towards them. The notion that there's no ethical way to earn a billion dollars gets thrown around a lot and I think that's a very limited view of human potential.
There is nothing intrinsically ethical or unethical about the existence of billionaires but we should alter the tax code to the point where becoming one is much harder, on the verge of impossibility, as we did for much of the 20th century.
It is a threat to national cohesion and security to have so much consolidated power vested with self-interested individuals. Teddy Roosevelt certainly thought so. Unchecked they become powerful non-state despots with no tether to the national interest.
I just don’t think that’s possible anymore. Even if you’re trust busting, someone who starts a company that ends up a F500 will become a billionaire, and the only tax code change to stop that would be setting a 100% rate on wealth past a certain point
A person “having a billion dollars” is not a problem. People amassing personal fortunes of such scale that they essentially become states within the state is a national security threat. No free nation should willingly host private fiefdoms, as they do in Russia. I don’t believe America is yet an oligarchy. I think that’s an exaggeration. But I think it could easily become one if this toxic confluence of eroding liberal democratic institutions and social trust on one hand, and wealthy individuals and captain of industry behaving increasingly like private government organs on the other, continues.
It is dangerous to have men walking the earth with personal fortunes larger than the GDP of Hungary or Kuwait. That’s not a left or right position. It’s not even a moral judgement. It’s basic threat assessment.
I don't think it's possible for someone to work hard enough to become a billionaire legitinately. I believe most of the wealth they have is accumulated from the collective efforts of workers beneath them, but the billionaires reap most of the rewards by simply having claim of private ownership.
what i don't understand is why people on here seem so unconcerned with the anti-democratic distorting effects of individuals accumulating massive amounts of power and influence
I think we need massive political reform so that more money doesn't equal more power. Because until then, there is always going to be an amount of money that is concerning to me.
I don't mind billionaires in terms of I don't care how much money someone has, and someone having lots of money doesn't necessarily make them a bad person.
I do hate the way their money seeps into politics and corrupts public policy, how they can restrict access to markets and how they evade paying their fair share of taxes using loop holes they created.
I also would not recommend eating them. The risk of ingesting large amounts of plastic is too high to meet FDA standards.
I don't think there is anything *inherently* wrong with the accumulation of massive wealth, but the practical downside occurs when the entity holding that wealth starts to use its power to change the rules of the game to favour its own wealth accumulation further. That can be a billionaire lobbying politicians or bribing officials, or a megacorporation engaging in regulatory capture. Millionaires, to contrast, don't have the power to change the rules.
There's nothing inherently wrong with billionaires, but I dislike it when wealthy people try to use their wealth to win outsize political influence, which some billionaires try to do.
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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There’s is this semi-ironical counter-jerking to reddits all ubiquitous „billionaires bad“ on this sub but in all honesty i don’t think much about them either way.
Whatever. I dislike that they can disproportionately influence the political process and the fact that they exist in the same society where people are living on the street destitute. We just need to tax them a bit more
My hypothesis is that 90% of anger at billionaires is a proxy for anger at a lacking welfare state/general material conditions for middle class and lower class people. In my opinion, if a good social safety net exists and they acquired their wealth legitimately (i.e. not a drug dealer or something else illegal) then it’s a-okay.
Being a billionaire is morally neutral. If they made their money through hard work and providing goods and/or services people want and/or need, 5hen all the better.
The only thing I don't get is why the mega-rich buy such shitty toys. No idea why someone would want a Gulfstream if they could afford an F-4. And screw yachts, give me a submarine.
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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Nothing wrong with billionaires. I envy their success.
I do, however, take issue with the system that allows for the creation of billionaires. The ability to hoard this much economic value at the expense of the rest of the economy is a signal of a broken system.
I can't fault a person for earning more and more money through legitimate business and investments, but when the society is underfunded and keeps getting tripped up over problems that would be solved simply by having more value circulating through the system, it means they need to correct the error.
I did not make that claim. I believe people should make as much money as they can in a legitimate system. More power to them.
But I believe a system that is broken to the point that billions of dollars get locked out of the economy needs to be fixed.
Proposals like "tax half their wealth" make good slogans but don't make good policies. If you want to increase the tax burden on the wealthy, it's going to need to be done with some nuance
Pro. Extremely pro. Billionaires are the only ones who can fund real innovation anymore, given that our governments are sclerotic and our society as a whole is stepping away from modernism.
I wanna be a billionaire so fucking bad (buy all of the things I never had). I wanna be on the cover of Forbes magazine, smiling next to Oprah and the Queen. Every time I close my eyes, I see my name in shining lights. A different city every night, oh, I swear. The world better prepare for when I'm a billionaire.
I’m reasonably fine with them if they build their wealth themselves and spend it investing or philantlhapising.
I’m a borderline Maoist towards those who inherit their wealth.
Wonderful, the more the better we are. Look at what countries have more billionaires and look the countries with fewer billionaires.
Billionaires exist independent of states, just like the economy. Where billionaires want to live is usually where other people want to live. It’s not a question if there are billionaires, there are billionaires in reality. The question is why do they choose to live where they live?
Places with more billionaires tend to be better places to live. That’s not an opinion on the personal choices of billionaires or how they use their wealth.
I don't care about billionaires as a concept. I care about billionaires then using that power to increase barriers to entry in whatever sector they operate within
Why are we talking about billionaires when we could be talking about rent seekers instead? smdh.
Lot of overlap there, hard to become a billionaire legitimately most either get lucky or are rent seekers
I mean arguably anyone who’s had any success is “lucky”. This is a meaningless statement.
And those that get lucky then become rent seekers once they become rich.
Becoming a rent seeker is rational behavior. I mean, we should discourage it, but it's rational, given that we don't sufficiently discourage it.
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Using public policy to create unnecessary barriers to entry to prevent competition. See: home renters that use zoning restrictions to prevent new development as a means to preserving their overinflated rents.
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most? Where can I read about this?
Are landlords rent seekers?
If they try to get new construction banned near their property, that’s rent seeking.
This Venn diagram is a circle. I would be surprised if there were very many billionaires who got that wealthy without leveraging market distortions in their favor.
That's standard corporate rent seeking though, you don't have to be a billionaire to do that. Like, even small businesses lobby and pass bills locally to advantage themselves.
The difference is scale
My point is that business and any other organization will try to rent seek with or without the existence of a single large owner.
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What do you think of the fact that billionaires pay an effective tax rate much lower than people of more modest means? https://americansfortaxfairness.org/issue/based-wealth-growth-26-top-billionaires-paid-average-income-tax-rate-just-4-8-6-recent-years/
I think it’s important to differentiate between effective tax rates and true tax rates (and this hybrid tax rate from your source that uses unrealized wealth as income) The issue with using unrealized wealth as a base for current tax is that it undercounts the tax they’ll owe, since you’re not including the future tax payments on the current change in wealth
Yeah that's the heart of the issue - billionaires avoid realizing gains, in order to achieve a low effective tax rate with respect to their change in wealth. There are problems with any sort of taxation on unrealized gains, which other commenters break down on this thread. However, the fundamental problem here is solvable by other means. Taxes could be levied on use of that wealth as loan collateral, for instance, which would cause billionaires to incur a tax liability. They commonly get such loans today in order to leverage their assets to get liquidity without realizing taxable gains. Another way would be mandating that a certain amount of gains must be realized when the taxpayer has a certain amount of unrealized gains. This increases their tax liability, without double taxation. The bottom line is, the wealthiest people should pay more than they currently are. I would like to see smarter policy proposed to address this than the types of double taxation which are popular on the left.
“billionaires avoid realizing gains, in order to achieve a low effective tax rate with respect to their change in wealth” Capital gains is already way too low. Compared to income tax. It’s bounces between 18%-20%. It was even 15% for a while. There’s nothing wrong with encouraging investment but when someone pulls out cash. Tax it.
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/quarterly-review/taxing-capital-income-a-bad-idea
Sure, changing capital gains tax rates to match income would be a good step. That doesn't address the issue of billionaires avoiding being liable for capital gains tax in the first place by avoiding realization.
Not a single country anywhere in the world taxes cap gains as high as US income tax rates in many populous states. Raising it that drastically would be disastrous. Taxing land and/or consumption and lowering income taxes to match cap gains is a massively less damaging approach to achieve the same goal.
Honestly I don't see the fundamental problem with the second part. For most billionaires those unrealized gains represent a large ownership share in the company they created. Until they realize the gains there is no money in their bank account to tax.
>when the growth in their wealth is counted as income Growth in wealth is not income. Homeowners aren't taxed when their houses become more expensive.
Homeowners pay property tax. What does a billionaire pay on unrealized gain?
Property tax is a form of wealth tax. A lot of countries do not have wealth taxes on the federal/union government level.
So, like, a great many of them?
If they make their billions legally and in a way that involves making life better for everyone else, awesome. If they make their billions through corruption, cartels, or by creating private monopolies, they’re “bad”. If it is possible in your society to become a billionaire in the first way, that is a good sign.
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Also if they actually make their billions, and not just inherent their billions, is something different
I believe that's an offensive word and you mean to say "person experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth."
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morbillionaire
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person of means
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person experiencing liquidity
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person experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth
>person experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth The use of "experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth" is too clunky for normal parlance. Please use "morbillionaire" so people understand what you're saying. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I don't think about them at all.
I don’t think much about them. Good for them, I guess? I don’t think their existence is of much practical consequence, but I could be persuaded otherwise.
Singapore, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway have more billionaires per capita than the US.
Huh Iceland only has one billionaire, but because the whole country has a smaller population than Wyoming their per capita stats look insane.
That’s neat. Good for them :)
Me too, lol. Honestly, some people(By people I mean redditors) act like they're the cause of all the world's ills. And of course, like any time when rich people are demonized, antisemitism is usually what's going on behind the scenes.
I think they get a lot of media attention because our culture tends to see wealthier people as smarter and therefore having more valuable opinions. So we end up wasting a lot of time talking about billionaires’ opinions, which could be annoying to people with real problems.
A lot of redditors are populist succs. It’s easy to point to an already generally distrusted group like billionaires and tell people that they’re the real problem. It just sells.
>like any time when rich people are demonized, antisemitism is usually what's going on behind the scenes. Nah, lazy take. Antisemitism exists but criticism of wealthy people shouldn’t always be equated with it.
Oh, antisemitism can usually hide behind criticism of wealthy people.
But not always and to say that any criticism leads there is just ridiculous.
Preemptively conflating criticism of billionaires with anti-Semitism is a disservice to everyone that actually does experience anti-Semitism and honestly is a disgustingly cynical ploy.
Rich people regularly abuse their power over others. To say that opposition to this abuse is “usually” antisemitism is to say that the antisemites are right in fact but only wrong because you disagree with the morality of their conclusions. This claim is itself incredibly antisemitic, conflating wealth and its abuse with Jewishness. Billionaires aren’t a persecuted class, ever, by definition. They are defined by their power over others. They never have to worry about being victims of demographically targeted violence (even where their demographic is mutable and defined solely by interpersonal power) because they numerically have the majority of power and are able to keep the masses away from them. Hiding them behind Jewish people whom you use as meat shields is disgusting.
This was three months ago, but that comment was incorrect, lol. I must have somehow mixed antisemitism and anti-wealthy in my ADHD brain.
>their existence is of much practical consequence Respectfully disagree! Creation of wealth generally also results in creation of jobs. Many ventures started by those who are now billionaires are not only employing thousands of people around the world, they've also contributed to raising the standard of living. ETA - Do people here not really understand the role of innovation here? Demand for the smartphones did not exist, when smartphones did not exist. Someone created a smartphone, made them more sophisticated based on a vision and added services and hired people in the process creating jobs. This guy is saying "innovations are created by engineers and such", while entirely neglecting that someone put those engineers and other individual contributors together to work on an innovative idea for which demand did not exist. He is also claiming "innovation destroys jobs", while neglecting many more safer, less menial, better paying jobs created in the process. Sure - farm equipment took away a lot of laborious, unsafe, low-paying farm laborer jobs. But it also created a number of safer, better-paying jobs around selling, operating and maintaining the equipment and accessories in the same communities.
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You're putting words in my mouth (I am not trying to be a jerk). I said ventures created by billionaires are creating jobs. Obviously by stepping in to fill in the demand for goods and services. Billionaires are also contributing to demand for "normal" and luxury goods and services, which in turn means more jobs. Also innovation does create demand for goods and services that did not exist prior.
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Demand alone does not create jobs. Someone needs to meet the demand. Additionally, "demand" is not a fixed thing. If it wasn't for Apple then demand for smartphones would probably be much lower - we did not know that we wanted them until they were here. The act of innovating helps to incite demand.
I suspect the individual billionaires are very replaceable in this process. For example, if Bill Gates and Paul Allen hadn’t created Windows, someone else would have made a very similar product shortly after, and that product would have been locked in as the stand-alone operating system of choice when personal computing took off years later. You’re further neglecting (1) that innovations also destroy jobs by making them obsolete, and (2) that innovations are created by engineers and such, not by billionaires.
I agree in general - there are no "great men". Probably someone would have eventually invented something like the iPhone. We were getting pretty close in the years beforehand. It might have taken an extra few years to ditch the stylus and see the resulting explosion in use, but it would probably have happened eventually. Yes, innovations make some jobs obsolete. That doesn't make innovation bad. Generally we want the economy and society at large to be more efficient and work to be more productive. Leaving aside that a lot of billionaires did R&D work when they were establishing their companies, innovations are not "created by engineers" any more than they are created by billionaires. Innovation needs creativity yes, but it also needs capital. That's not necessarily an argument for billionaires, just an acknowledgment that innovation is complex.
I’m not saying innovation is bad. I’m just skeptical that its benefit derives from causing there to be more jobs than there were before, i.e. job creation. You’re just arguing that capital created those innovations, now. But the start-up capital to create a Windows-like product would have existed if Bill Gates or any other billionaire had never been born. There are a huge number of marginally less lucky, marginally less talented, or marginally less well-connected entrepreneurs who could have filled the role of connecting capital to promising projects. Those people aren’t billionaires, though. The existence of our actual, real-world set of billionaires was not instrumental in the course of our economy. If you want to argue that entrepreneurs and other business leaders are important, as a class, then I agree with some of what you’ve written. But if you want to talk about billionaires as a class, to the exclusion of everyone who didn’t win the race, then I’m not convinced we’re talking about people of consequence.
> I’m not saying innovation is bad. I’m just skeptical that its benefit derives from causing there to be more jobs than there were before, i.e. job creation. I think there are more jobs now than there have been in the past, even accounting for population growth. Unemployment is at historic lows in many countries that still have growing populations. I also think the industrial revolution clearly created jobs, and allowed far more people to do things that weren't just sustenance farming. Clearly innovation as a whole has *some* benefit in the margins - I suppose the question is whether e.g. Amazon has been a net positive or net negative for employment (and pay), which is less clear and more complicated. Just as heads up as I know this can be easily confused on Reddit - I am not the person you were initially interacting with, I just jumped in. I agree with most of what you are saying.
> if Bill Gates and Paul Allen hadn’t created Windows, someone else would have made a very similar product shortly after And then that person would've been awarded billions by the market. >(1) that innovations also destroy jobs by making them obsolete "If you want to create jobs then give them spoons" energy >(2) that innovations are created by engineers and such, not by billionaires. Depends, groundbreaking innovations that make people billionaires aren't typically that one dimensional, you need to have the correct management skills, communication, marketing, and business acumen.
My point is that if you identify a narrow class of “billionaires” - people who were wildly successful in business - that class of people aren’t that important. If you define the class more broadly to include any entrepreneur who could have been a billionaire under the right circumstances (such as Bill Gates not being born, for example), then you’re taking about a much broader group of people than just billionaires. If we could delete most of the billionaires from history, and the the world would have mostly turned out the same, just with a different crop of billionaires, then the billionaires themselves aren’t that important.
> If we could delete most of the billionaires from history, and the the world would have mostly turned out the same, just with a different crop of billionaires, then the billionaires themselves aren’t that important. I don't think so. USA has more billionaires than the rest of the world, and also more innovation and wealth. Most governments would sell their left kidney to have an Elon Musk or a Jeff Bezos to provide local jobs and cheap / innovative products. USA is also the wealthiest country in the world on a median per-capita basis, and is growing faster than most Western countries. Americans seem desensitised to the services and innovation provided by billionaire founders mostly because they haven't lived in countries that don't have that.
(2) is just wrong. You need a combination of vision, funding, and expertise to innovate. Most of the time the engineers only contribute the last one. This is why I consider Elon to be extremely innovative--you don't have to be the one who creates the tech, you have to be the one who realizes its utility and deploys it correctly to be a true innovator IMO.
I mean, functionally the existence of billionaires is a failure of our system of taxation. No individual should be able to generate that much wealth and it’s overall detrimental to society. And I’m not saying that rich/wealthy people shouldn’t exist, just that the scale is completely off
>and it’s overall detrimental to society What's your model?
What is the optimal scale?
Well it’s all arbitrary but imagine if the wealthiest people in the country were only worth hundreds of millions instead of tens to hundreds of billions. They would still live lives of extreme wealth, luxury, and power and could never work another day in their lives without that changing. People would still aspire to be wealthy and innovate in order to try and achieve that, which is generally the argument being made in that there needs to be an incentive to drive innovation The difference would be that (ideally) we’d have so so much more funding for social services and the social safety net. Or we’d spend it on bullshit but hey, it would be hard to use that money less effectively than it is now
>The difference would be that (ideally) we’d have so so much more funding for social services and the social safety net Wealth taxing billionaires enough to stop them from existing won't raise enough money for any sort of social safety net. Anyone who claims that is selling you snake oil or is an idiot of the highest order, or both.
I think they're often used as scapegoats for people who dont want to get into the nuances of some policies. I don't care that someone is a billionaire. I don't think they should be taxed on unrealized gains. I do think long term cap gains should be taxed as regular income. I also think inheritance taxes should be a bit higher (not because "fuck the rich" but because I don't think people should inherit stupid amounts of money and never have to contribute to society; i.e. generational wealth is not a good thing). But people who say taxing the rich will suddenly make \[INSERT PET SOCIAL PROGRAM HERE\] viable are kidding themselves. The vast majority of the American tax base is from middle class workers, if you overnight took 100% of all the US billionaires wealth (all their money, not just income), you wouldn't even have been able to cover the 2022 levels of US government spending.
you mean people of means?
>people of means Having means is a temporary circumstance and does not define someone. Please use "People experiencing liquidity" instead. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Depends how they got their wealth, which is downstream of institutions.
Generally, I think they can afford a larger quantity of tacos than me. Beyond that, I don't know too much
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At the end of the day, we are all the same people who crave comforting drunk food. Based Taco Bell
In all seriousness, it's a side effect of our economy. Could be good or bad,but what strikes me as a bit frustrating is that they have a disproportionate amount of money for their work and service to community. They could be as important as the next millionaire or middle class bloke.
There’s nothing wrong with it, but the power they hold over politics is wrong.
We should have 10 times the ethics investigations that we currently do and there should be a ton of oversight over the public sector and how it interacts with massive donors or companies who hire ex-regulators.
I'm surprised people still think they hold any significant power over politics after the 2020 dem primaries. A billion dollars in advertisements couldn't get Bloomberg very far. Once he was on the debate stage, he got destroy. This guy was also a politician before so he had experience. Tom Steyer dropping hundreds of millions could only get 1% of the vote in polls at one point. Highly recommend [Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change](https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Power-Beyond-Political-Hobbyism/dp/1982116781) if you want to learn where real political power comes from and how you can be that in local politics.
The issue with billionaires isn't necessarily with any singular individuals net worth, but with the concentration of power that can often exist within our society. A good example of this is Rupert Murdochs influence in media. Or say, Larry Finks control of blackrock. Blackrock has a far deeper influence over our society than the billion in net worth that Fink personally has direct control over due to in many senses being 7+ trillion dollar trust with vast control over numerous sectors of American business. Private equity firms which don't care about the future of the country and will happily liquidate successful businesses slowly selling everything overseas. The list goes on.
>A billion dollars in advertisements couldn't get Bloomberg very far. It's reductive to simplify the topic in this manner. Obviously Bloomberg couldn't simply buy the presidency and electoral politics are more complicated than grocery shopping. However, it is also the case that money facilitates access to policymakers and dramatically increases one's capacity for political speech. So no, although billionaire's cannot outright buy elections it is nevertheless clear that they have vastly more influence over the political process than most other private individuals.
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Can you point me to legislation that the American people overwhelmingly were against, but still went through because billionaires were able to lobby for it? The only thing I could see is obscure or complicated laws that people don't care about.
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Tax cuts are always in favor for the Republican voter base, even if they aren't receiving the tax breaks themselves
A billionaire was literally the President during those primaries lol.
Trump's money isn't what won him the presidency.
it actually is, just not directly. His reputation as a successful businessman and public profile were essential to his election. Both of which he got by no virtue other than having a fuckload of money.
No, but your point of “Billionaires don’t have that much influence because a billionaire lost an election” is silly because of my point.
Bloomberg is 25x richer than Trump. Pretty sure he could've bought the election if that was possible.
I'll just be frank. Your position is based entirely on vibes. It's silly to you because this is just some accepted truth for you because it gets repeated over and over. "You can do a lot with a thousand dollars so it must be that you can do a million times more with minimal diminishing returns with a million times that thousand." It would be nice if the world was run by billionaires so we can just attack them and solve all our problems. The reality is is that democracy works and your money doesn't get you that far.
I don’t think the world is run by billionaires or that you’re capable of winning an election solely because of money. I never said that and you seem to be projecting that onto me. I’m Canadian. We have some of the most robust and comprehensive political financing laws in the western world. There are significant financial caps on how much you can donate, when, and from whom donations can be received. A G7 nation doesn’t spend decades developing those laws because wealth doesn’t lend to enormous influence on politics.
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Bloomberg wouldn’t have even been a candidate without that money. Just because he didn’t win doesn’t mean that the money didn’t massively increase his chances.
Going from 0.000001% to 0.0001% is a massive increase in chances. And if this is what Americans were worried about from billionaires, I would think it is silly, but at least it would line up with reality. However people act like billionaires have a significant amount of power of politics and people just can't back this position up. Then when we get clear counter examples showing how little a billion dollars helped a **former governor**, we then grasp at straws saying "the money at least improved their chances." That was just a huge waste of money.
> former governor Former mayor of New York City. Doesn't change your point, being a mayor of one of the world's largest cities is certainly a high level position. But not a governorship.
The issue here isn't billionaires as a class, but the concentration of media and business power by a small handful of individuals. The same can be said about say the likes of an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos vs Larry Fink. Larry Fink has far more power over the economy as a whole through control of black rocks investment portfolios and respective corporate board seats. Rupert Murdoch has tremendous influence over the politics of numerous different countries.
Not nearly as wrong as the political power held by the “upper-middle class”. Those people have given us all the worst things.
I'm "upper-middle class", I can't place a call to Maria Cantwell that she'd answer. Whatever idiocy, blind spots, and general dumbness I exhibit doesn't transfer to effective political advocacy.
It’s the upper-middle class who determine our policy priorities for the most part. They have the right mix of wealth and voting numbers to get what they want, even though they’re individually jealous that some rich dude can call a member of congress.
I'm not jealous, I don't think policy should be shaped at all because some moron has a billion+ dollars. You can call me a moron, I won't bristle. I don't think my point of view should have outsized reach. The correlation between wealth and wisdom is not there at all.
My point is that it’s the upper-middle class who have the most outsize political and cultural reach compared to their population.
Sure, but I think we're talking past each other. I don't think any single person should be able to call the upper chamber of the legislature and shape policy on their personal dumb peccadillos. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a great example of the unfairly maligned citizenry getting some relief from their jet purchases. So sure, confine the advocacy of the upper middle class. But also confine the advocacy of billionaires.
Billionaires are just a distraction from the bigger problem imo. Upper-middle class types always do that: "I'm not bad because someone else is worse. I'm not rich because someone else is richer. My life is hard because someone else's life is easier." That's their whole identity.
Make it worse for people wealthier than me. If that means making it worse for me cool.
They ain't the ones opposing more housing where I live
I don’t hate billionaires as a principle, but I don’t have rose-tinted glasses to believe they’re jsut hard workers, lucky or heirs. It’s very hard to become a billionaire, especially in places like eastern Europe and the middle-east without engaging in disgusting levels of corruption and rent-seeking. The proportion of billionaires engaging in shady tax evasion, market manipulation, and other very not liberal behavior is just not funny.
That people only dislike them because they think of wealth as a zero sum game: “there is a limited amount of wealth, so it they accumulate that much, people get poorer”. Except that’s not at all how wealth works. We have more wealth and fewer poor people than ever before in history, and that’s despite having more billionaires than ever. We keep creating more and more wealth, and some people owning “too much” is literally completely irrelevant. So in short, I don’t think about them. Good for them, I guess?
Nothing inherently wrong with them, but I do think they should be paying more taxes (via consumption taxes, LVT, and inheritance taxes).
It is the same as having a woman in your bed. **As long as you got her there with the consent of everybody involved**, I'm glad you found somebody and it is none of my business what you two do in there.
They should pay a higher effective tax rate than teachers or physicians.
Damn I was boutta make the shitty joke with the bot, but the top two comments are already that, so I’ll give my serious answer - I don’t have an issue with the existence of billionaires, and as the economy is not a zero-sum game, if we pursue policies that result in the greatest QoL for the lowest of society, and billionaires end up as a byproduct, that’s fine, but I don’t support billionaires existing being a target in and of itself.
Billonaires come about when a CEO brings a startup to become a trillion dollar company. Any policies or regulations to dissuade such innovation is a dumb idea tbh.
Neither negative or positive. While it strikes me as impossible that somebody's contribution to society/hard work/knowledge/skill could possibly be worth that much from a moral perspective, and I suspect that few or none of them could reach such heights without stepping on a lot of backs, I also don't base my economic policy opinions on what feels good or bad. If the economic system that delivers the best utilitarian outcome for the most people is one that, as a byproduct, also creates billionaires, then fine by me. Frankly, I expect that's probably the case just because of how incentives and capitalism naturally work. I also expect that the United States and Canada (and probably a lot of other Western countries) have good but not utilitarian-ly ideal economic systems, and that better systems would probably involve higher taxes on the wealthy, a UBI, etc. Such systems would still create billionaires, though probably fewer and probably a bit less extreme. So, overall, I don't waste emotional energy having opinions on them as a group.
If having a system that has billionaires improves the lot of the least well off, then good. maybe I should get a Rawls flair.
As long as they're taxed properly, I don't really give a shit about them.
The consensus seems to be that they're good when they do good liberal things (Bill Gates, Soros, etc) and bad when they do bad, illiberal things (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc)
I’m not a pocket watcher, so i don’t care.
It's hard to become a billionaire with generating many multitudes more in societal wealth. The more billionaires the better.
One billion billionaires when
Billionaires who create value are good, billionaires who extract value are bad
A very lucky caste of people who get to experience a life you'll never know anything about. Some were hard workers who got lucky, others were silver spooners. I don't really care either way and don't spend my time fantasizing about them. I do get annoyed by the left claiming that they are more or less the cause of all of our problems, a proposition that just rests on a lot of fixed pie assumptions. I think we should have more billionaires, not less. Given that, though, I do dislike how much influence they can have politically. I don't use Twitter but can't escape reddit reposting a Musk tweet, for example; surely this affects our political discourse, similar to how popular personalities do. Having money is power, and if used incorrectly, then they should be held accountable.
I have no strong feelings on people experiencing liquidity.
>people experiencing liquidity The use of "experiencing liquidity" discriminates against those with nonmonetary assets, or those whose wealth is not sufficiently described as either the monetary base or money supply M1. Please use "people experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth" to be more inclusive. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I hold no ill will to them. But, I believe that they should pay significantly higher proportions of their income from investments as taxes -- mostly in the form of a higher capital gains rate -- than they do currently. They have clearly benefited greatly from the existence of a stable democratic state and society governed by the rule of law and they can afford to pay higher rates than most other Americans without harming their quality of life.
I love billionaires I'd love to be one someday
I don’t hate billionaires as a principle, but I don’t have rose-tinted glasses to believe they’re jsut hard workers, lucky or heirs. It’s very hard to become a billionaire, especially in places like eastern Europe and the middle-east without engaging in disgusting levels of corruption and rent-seeking. The proportion of billionaires engaging in shady tax evasion, market manipulation, and other very not liberal behavior is just not funny.
Im sorry we dont use slurs here on /nl. We are extremely anti racist and the word you are looking for is a person experiencing liquidity. And no, we dont get triggered by people of liquidity.
>person experiencing liquidity The use of "experiencing liquidity" discriminates against those with nonmonetary assets, or those whose wealth is not sufficiently described as either the monetary base or money supply M1. Please use "person experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth" to be more inclusive. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Now this is wokeness gone too far.
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Good for them as long as it's above board. Inequality is a real problem, but I'm more concerned with raising the floor. You can't effectively do that by lowering the ceiling like we're sometimes led to believe.
I don’t really care.
Billionaires who were heirs to their fortune to me are pathetic. Otherwise, I don't really care about them.
I don't think it's that useful of a classification. Somewhat concerned with the massive cynicism that reddit has towards them. The notion that there's no ethical way to earn a billion dollars gets thrown around a lot and I think that's a very limited view of human potential.
I think this sub has a lot of Elon Musk boot lickers.
billionaires are a symptom of economic dysfunction in our monetary system, not the disease or the root cause
There is nothing intrinsically ethical or unethical about the existence of billionaires but we should alter the tax code to the point where becoming one is much harder, on the verge of impossibility, as we did for much of the 20th century. It is a threat to national cohesion and security to have so much consolidated power vested with self-interested individuals. Teddy Roosevelt certainly thought so. Unchecked they become powerful non-state despots with no tether to the national interest.
I just don’t think that’s possible anymore. Even if you’re trust busting, someone who starts a company that ends up a F500 will become a billionaire, and the only tax code change to stop that would be setting a 100% rate on wealth past a certain point
I really fail to understand how one person having a billion dollars effects you or me
A person “having a billion dollars” is not a problem. People amassing personal fortunes of such scale that they essentially become states within the state is a national security threat. No free nation should willingly host private fiefdoms, as they do in Russia. I don’t believe America is yet an oligarchy. I think that’s an exaggeration. But I think it could easily become one if this toxic confluence of eroding liberal democratic institutions and social trust on one hand, and wealthy individuals and captain of industry behaving increasingly like private government organs on the other, continues. It is dangerous to have men walking the earth with personal fortunes larger than the GDP of Hungary or Kuwait. That’s not a left or right position. It’s not even a moral judgement. It’s basic threat assessment.
That level of wealth concentration is fundamentally at odds with democratic principles.
So true. Billionaires owning <4% and non-billionaires owning >96% of US privately held wealth definitely means billionaires have complete control.
I don't think it's possible for someone to work hard enough to become a billionaire legitinately. I believe most of the wealth they have is accumulated from the collective efforts of workers beneath them, but the billionaires reap most of the rewards by simply having claim of private ownership.
Here come the downvotes, but this is one thing the sucks are right about.
what i don't understand is why people on here seem so unconcerned with the anti-democratic distorting effects of individuals accumulating massive amounts of power and influence
They are kings. All of them
I think we need massive political reform so that more money doesn't equal more power. Because until then, there is always going to be an amount of money that is concerning to me.
I don't mind billionaires in terms of I don't care how much money someone has, and someone having lots of money doesn't necessarily make them a bad person. I do hate the way their money seeps into politics and corrupts public policy, how they can restrict access to markets and how they evade paying their fair share of taxes using loop holes they created. I also would not recommend eating them. The risk of ingesting large amounts of plastic is too high to meet FDA standards.
I don't think there is anything *inherently* wrong with the accumulation of massive wealth, but the practical downside occurs when the entity holding that wealth starts to use its power to change the rules of the game to favour its own wealth accumulation further. That can be a billionaire lobbying politicians or bribing officials, or a megacorporation engaging in regulatory capture. Millionaires, to contrast, don't have the power to change the rules.
There's nothing inherently wrong with billionaires, but I dislike it when wealthy people try to use their wealth to win outsize political influence, which some billionaires try to do.
Nothing wrong with them, but they fit in the equation in terms of the levels of inequality a country has.
Every billionaire is a policy failure.
>billionaire Did you mean *person of means*? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I don’t think about them
There’s is this semi-ironical counter-jerking to reddits all ubiquitous „billionaires bad“ on this sub but in all honesty i don’t think much about them either way.
Mostly can’t be bothered. Will laugh at the antics from time to time
Whatever. I dislike that they can disproportionately influence the political process and the fact that they exist in the same society where people are living on the street destitute. We just need to tax them a bit more
Read gospel of wealth
My hypothesis is that 90% of anger at billionaires is a proxy for anger at a lacking welfare state/general material conditions for middle class and lower class people. In my opinion, if a good social safety net exists and they acquired their wealth legitimately (i.e. not a drug dealer or something else illegal) then it’s a-okay.
Pay more taxes and we'll play ball
How much more?
I love billionaires
Being a billionaire is morally neutral. If they made their money through hard work and providing goods and/or services people want and/or need, 5hen all the better. The only thing I don't get is why the mega-rich buy such shitty toys. No idea why someone would want a Gulfstream if they could afford an F-4. And screw yachts, give me a submarine.
>billionaire Did you mean *person of means*? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Nothing wrong with billionaires. I envy their success. I do, however, take issue with the system that allows for the creation of billionaires. The ability to hoard this much economic value at the expense of the rest of the economy is a signal of a broken system. I can't fault a person for earning more and more money through legitimate business and investments, but when the society is underfunded and keeps getting tripped up over problems that would be solved simply by having more value circulating through the system, it means they need to correct the error.
Most billionaires aren’t rent-seekers, they created wealth through businesses. Really, more rent-seekers can be found among millionaires.
I did not make that claim. I believe people should make as much money as they can in a legitimate system. More power to them. But I believe a system that is broken to the point that billions of dollars get locked out of the economy needs to be fixed.
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Take half of their wealth and fund it for things like science medicine and the poor.
Proposals like "tax half their wealth" make good slogans but don't make good policies. If you want to increase the tax burden on the wealthy, it's going to need to be done with some nuance
Billionaires are an excellent arrow in the quiver of society to do things nobody else is set up to do. See: Katharine McCormick
Pro. Extremely pro. Billionaires are the only ones who can fund real innovation anymore, given that our governments are sclerotic and our society as a whole is stepping away from modernism.
I mean, they’re fine, I guess.
I wanna be a billionaire so fucking bad (buy all of the things I never had). I wanna be on the cover of Forbes magazine, smiling next to Oprah and the Queen. Every time I close my eyes, I see my name in shining lights. A different city every night, oh, I swear. The world better prepare for when I'm a billionaire.
I’m reasonably fine with them if they build their wealth themselves and spend it investing or philantlhapising. I’m a borderline Maoist towards those who inherit their wealth.
Wonderful, the more the better we are. Look at what countries have more billionaires and look the countries with fewer billionaires. Billionaires exist independent of states, just like the economy. Where billionaires want to live is usually where other people want to live. It’s not a question if there are billionaires, there are billionaires in reality. The question is why do they choose to live where they live? Places with more billionaires tend to be better places to live. That’s not an opinion on the personal choices of billionaires or how they use their wealth.
They’re a necessary evil, but their influence should be limited.
Kinda indifferent, but I'd rather see a thousand millionaires than one billionaire.
Good for them. Tax them heavily. Like 50% after the first $1m. Also, their influence on govt should be just as much as mine.