this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Do billionaires actually have billions of dollars cash?
This implies it's income, although if it's taken as assets + unrealized gains then that would be very cool. Each year, anyone with cash + assets over $999,999,999 will get a bill from the IRS for the entirety of the overage. That would put sell pressure on real estate and stocks while funding (hopefully) social programs. Sounds like a good solution.
Either they are billionaires or they are not billionaires. Which is it?
If it's all stock options, then redistribute their stock options.
The way net worth works, if I understand it correctly, is like this:
Take Bob for example. If Bob has $100M in his checking account, 4 houses worth $100M each, and 500,000 shares of NILE (the company he owns) which are each worth $1,000 each, then it's said his net worth is a billion dollars. He's Bob the Billionaire.
Say he starts selling his NILE shares, but he has so much that each sale puts downward pressure on the price (and spooks investors) so that instead of cashing out for the full $500M he only gets $400M for the sale. Then his net worth is $900M and he's no longer a billionaire.
Or say Costa Rica invades his country and both the stock market and real estate markets crash. He's not Bob the Billionaire anymore, he probably has just the $100M now.
After writing that example it seems a better threshhold would be $100M, lol. Here's a good visualization of the resources under the control of Jeff Bezos.
The first question is why the fuck does Bob have four houses, and the second would be how is it that people like Bob are easily able to become billionaires only since the Reagan administration? Certainly Bob did not actually work for this money, all those shares, for all four of those houses. That amount of wealth is far beyond what any reasonably productive person could possibly earn. The only possibilities for him to have all of that is either through nepotism, inheritance, or corruption. If he is gaining that wealth by being given stock options and then borrowing money against those stock options and then using tax write-offs to not pay that money back, then Bob is stealing from his company, the country, and his employees.