Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

“Billionaire Jeff Bezos could personally pay for enough vaccines for the whole world, yet he would rather spend his wealth on a thrill ride to space. COVID-19 is turning the gap between rich and poor into an unbridgeable chasm” - millionaires.

Millionaires could personally alleviate so much suffering in the world, yet they would rather buy... Nice houses, cars, and whatever else millionaires buy. You could extrapolate this argument all the way down even to those in objectively unfortunate circumstances. It's turtles all the way down.

These pleas seem motivated more out of virtue signaling than anything else.

I mean the politicians would love this because they understand it is not about owning things but about having control. And then they could control the most.

The scary part to me is the amount of people who think this same way as you.

If we as humanity just confiscate others wealth, then the world will be better. Forgetting there has to be those in charge of confiscating it.

No, the problems in our society will not be solved that way. People get a president like trump because they deserved it, and then they got a president like Biden, because the people still haven’t learned and still get what th wet deserve.

really? you think land reform and mechanization in russia, china, and former colonies had nothing to do with that? wage raises and other victories of labor organizing? welfare and schools and transit and healthcare and other public services? most of the poverty in the world that one can say has been lifted probably comes directly from all those efforts.

it's easy to miss that viewpoint in america, where our wealth came from the homesteading of an entire continent (made available by genocide, pretty redistributive) and then food and manufacturing exports to a bombed-out world (implementing those reforms and supported by intentional redistributive funding from us) which turned around over decades and provided us manufacturing services to supply our consumption. when you don't look more than two steps ahead it looks like pure entrepreneurship. but you have to remember most of humanity doesn't live in the core of this empire, where land was free and consumption markets were far away.

Billionaires are a very different animal. They have armies of lawyers and financial managers that help them navigate the movement of wealth through the global system to avoid taxation. They avoid recognizing income at all opportunities and strategically use debt to provide for themselves without exposing themselves to tax consequences that would come from getting the money they want to spend. They can traverse the globe looking for the most favorable taxation rates to maximize their wealth.

There’s been a lot of “tax billionaires” and “billionaires shouldn’t exist” rhetoric without much substance to how to actually achieve that goal. Billionaires aren’t just going to say “aww, shucks, guess we’ve got to pay up” when governments decide to up their taxes. They’re going to react in ways that are both hard to predict and harder to stop. Capital flight is a real threat and will require a massive, coordinated effort on the parts of all the nations that comprise the global financial system to curtail. The efforts towards a minimum corporate tax rate are a good start, but that’s only one step of many that are necessary before “tax billionaires” becomes a realistic target.