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Erm, how about the wealth/money controlled by the Federal government? That's much bigger than anything shown here.
And, in theory at least, belongs to and serves the people as a whole. Not one single solitary exclusive and extraordinarily privileged human being.
Why not?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absolutely it. Any taxes on just the ultra wealthy raise so little money for the rest of the population that any large scale money raising requires taxes on doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners, etc. Pro-government spending advocates don’t like to emphasize this because people become a lot less supportive of these things when they see members of their own community getting hit.
It would certainly help if the ultra wealthy and global corporations would just pay their fair share rather than use possible combination of barely-legal structures to avoid being taxed, bribe officials to create special exemptions, offload money to tax heavens and scare-monger about losing jobs whenever an actual tax increase is due. The USA cannot even properly finance the IRS to go after the super wealthy tax chea…
do you know of any societies that managed to sustain a dynamic where that's not the case?
I literally cannot think of any at all. Just some very brief temporary aberrations.
I disagree on the the thrust of the argument - that people (including comparatively wealthy individuals like doctors and lawyers) oppose changes to tackle wealth inequality because they don’t understand the gulf of wealth between them and the ultra rich. In my experience it has nothing to do with that - rather these people know that they will ultimately end up as the main target for any such law, not these billionair…
Having a big pile of leverageable assets, even if you have little income, gives you a lot of insulation from many of the costs and risks we all come across in life. For example, freedom from paying rent, freedom from having to obtain and service debt, and freedom from having to worry about job security.
Meanwhile your doctors and lawyers give 40% of their income to the state and still have student debt, mortgages, may be forced to live in a high CoL area, and may have to live with high stress.
And every day people don't really understand wealth. There's a dumb competition advertised on TV here in the UK where you can win a £3M ($4.2M) house on the coast, and a sports car. While it's glamorous, upending your life to move to live in this home is deeply impractical for most people. The cost of maintaining and protecting it would likely cost the entirety of a median UK salary. That's not freedom.
A society that is extreme in one category is likely to be extreme in other categories as well.
Nice graphic, but also a bit misleading. Bezos would never be able to immediately realise that amount of assets in to useful cash. So saying no human deserves this amount of wealth is kind of already fulfilled? He may have 2 or 3 billion as cash maybe.
What's "cash"? A marketable security? I'm insanely poor by these standards but wealthfront will front me hard cash using my account as collateral with one click i think up to 30%. Super cheap interest rate. Bezos has way more favorable banking. Even if he was 'only' worth $10-15 billion I bet he could get 2-3 billion in hard cash overnight. He might not hold a lot of cash, but he doesn't need to he can get it immedia…
Tons of private equity M&As have happened at much larger valuation.
Missing: median US Black household wealth, $24,100; median US Hispanic household wealth, $36,100. Numbers as of 2019. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...
Lifetime budgetary impact by race: White: +$200,000 Black: -$751,000 Hispanic: -$588,000 Puts your numbers in perspective Source: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2014-BUD/pdf/BUDG...
no hits on the numbers you provided.