I was exaggerating to make a point on a different comment you made about "government bad". I forgot I was on the internet for a second and couldn't use rhetoric. Rest assured, if you want to take the money from Bezos and invest it in Medicare for All and expanding fiber internet to rural Appalachia, I am 110% onboard.
> You still haven't explained exactly how you would make this happen. Forced stock sales? Government mandated price caps on stocks? What? Is Bezos supposed to write a check for $130B? You realize it's not sitting in cash in a bank account, right?
Assume that Congress can edit a database of every citizens' net worth by legislative fiat. Answer the question about how lessening economic inequality is going to negatively impact the average American.
> But more importantly, you are the one proposing a radical change to the status quo. The onus is on you to prove, not only that the change is not harmful (not at all apparent from historical evidence) but that it will provide some benefit that will outweigh the cost to implement it. I mean a benefit besides "It makes me feel bad when people are richer than me, and I'll get to enjoy some schadenfreude if they get knocked down a peg".
Disagree. I'm proposing a return to a previous status quo that was more broadly equitable. The onus was on the neoliberals to prove the changes they were making in the 80s and 90s weren't harmful. Turns out they were. Again, you are reducing my argument down to my feelings, but I don't personally give a fuck if Jeff Bezos is a ba-zillionaire, so it's not really hitting home - I'll be fine either way. I just think it's bad for society generally when a few jerks with money get to have private space programs in a country with millions in poverty and homeless. I'm not a huge fan of bloody prole revolutions or fascist coups, personally. That's just me.
> What you are proposing is not the New Deal, nor the Marshall Plan, nor any economic policy that has been tried in the US before. The New Deal did not involve confiscating 73% of the wealth of billionaires (or the inflation-adjusted equivalent). It did not involve taxing unrealized gains on stocks. The US has never had a wealth tax before. Most countries that have had one ended up repealing it because it's expensive to enforce compared to the amount of revenue it brings in and wealthy people, unsurprisingly, are quite capable of moving to another country that doesn't have a wealth tax.
Again, I'm not proposing any specific remedy, so you are assigning an argument I haven't made. I'm totally fine with re-appropriating the money, but you seem to really hate the idea of giving the government having any ability to direct funds. I'm diagnosing the problem, and asking what you think would be the negative impact if we simply took away 73% of the wealth each billionaire holds, which you won't answer, because you know the answer is "nothing bad". Many countries aren't the United States. If the billionaires want to try offshoring their money and renouncing their citizenship, I'll trust the (ideally, re-empowered) Treasury and the State of New York to get our money.