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If you bring up UBI, or other reforms, you'll inevitably get someone who brings up: "voting yourself someone else's money".
You could convince me, except that things have gotten to an absurd state.
I look at some graphs of wealth inequality and it is unimaginably shocking. I never dreamed it could be this bad. More than 50% of the US wealth is owned by 5% of the people. [1] 35% is owned by only 1% of the population.
This image from this article also tells the story.
I'm not going to argue how accurate those numbers are. Rather, I will extrapolate the trend.
Let's continue the current trend to its logical absurd conclusion. The entire planet is owned by one single person. You (and everyone else) are one of the wage slaves in the bottom 99.99999999 % of the population (at least 8 decimal places). [7.5 billion people, minus that one person who owns everything, then divided by 7.5 billion people.]
Naturally, we should respect property ownership. Somehow this one person deserves and "earned" the wealth of the entire planet through his hard and diligent efforts and deserves to own everything and everyone. It is absurd on its face.
At this logical endpoint, it clearly seems that the rest of the planet should seize the wealth of the one person.
Wealth transfer has already happened. And is still happening. Republicans are just fine with this as long as it is all trickling upward.
Yes, "voting yourself someone else's money" involves taking away some of the absurd amounts of wealth hoarded up by a few. Amounts of individual wealth that one person couldn't spend in a lifetime; then leaves to others, who themselves can't spend it in their lifetime.
Not as a proposal, but just to make a point, hypothetically, if all of these people who exceed this threshold had their net worth capped at $100 Million, they would still be just fine. Yes, really! They would still live in fabulous homes, drive fabulous cars, and eat whatever they wanted, travel wherever and whenever they wanted -- for the rest of their natural lives.
In case my "one man owns the world" didn't get the idea across, I'll be more blunt. Any time too few people have owned way, way too much, and too many had nothing, there is always an uprising. I'm not proposing an uprising. I'm merely warning it is inevitable. Hopefully not in my lifetime. Maybe it would be better to solve this peacefully where the wealthiest, while heavily taxed, still end up, after taxes, fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of most everyone else. I'm not proposing reducing all the rich people's wealth to some cap. Just that they should pay their fair share. Why are they the ones who get the tax cuts?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 27 2020, @10:26PM
Wealth inequality is a frivolous and error-prone way to look at the problem. For people not in the top 10% or so, most of their wealth is in income not assets, homes or otherwise. None of that gets counted. Second, the wealth at the top is grossly overvalued. We don't even know there has been a change in wealth inequality to be honest, because we have no idea what assets are really worth. A classic example is the current valuations of high tech companies. Is Tesla really worth twice as much as Toyota, for a glaring example? Is Apple really a two trillion dollar company? Is the US high tech industry really worth more than the stock markets of all of Europe?
Income is paid on the spot while valuations of rich people assets is often delayed for years until recession hits. Notice too that this level of supposed inequality is supposedly comparable [inequality.org] to the run up to the 1929 stock market crash, another era of extremely bogus asset valuations.
To be fair to the fantasy scenario, this person is probably a skynet-style AI with the military power to kick the asses of the 7.5 billion people. Yes, they fucking earned that and you will get burned, if you try stealing their assets.
Here's my take. You want to reduce wealth inequality? Save money. Get your friends and family to save money too. You can start by spending less than you get.
I get that not everyone has the circumstances to do so - expensive medical conditions or whatever. But most people don't fall into that tiny category. There's no point to talking about wealth inequality in the US, when more than half [cnbc.com] of the US can't be bothered to save enough for a minor auto repair. It's quite clear just what priority they gave wealth. If it's not important enough to the average US citizen to have shares in Apple or whatever, then it's not important enough to me.