The_Walrus wrote:
kitesandtrainsandcats wrote:
Tempus Fugit wrote:
Let's say there's a cap put at 1 billion. How would Jeff Bezos 181billion be whittled down to that?
Since a good chunk of Bezos' wealth comes from investments in wildly succesful businesses probably the fastest way is to have the government seize control of those businesses and void all stock for Amazon, Google, Uber, Twitter, the newsmedia ...
This would, admittedly, make Bezos poorer. It would also cause the biggest recession in history and probably have literally zero direct benefit.
Ultimately, rich people are not a problem. Inequality is not a problem. Poverty is a problem, particularly the most extreme forms. There are 7.8 billion people in the world today. Of those, about 7 billion are presently experiencing improvements in their standard of living.
When people talk about extreme wealth distribution, they generally seem to focus on taking money from the top few hundred or few thousand people in the world, and giving it to people around the mid-mark of the top billion. The thing is, those top few people's main expenditure is often charitable giving to people in the bottom billion. They also invest large amounts of money in developing countries. Frankly I'm not convinced that capping wealth would do anything to help anyone.
Billionaires tend to have a very egocentric world view, let's not flatter them further. Bezos is obscenely rich partly because he pays large numbers of people a pittance to work very hard indeed, doing antisocial shifts in warehouses. If you get sacked because you can't pack 120 items into boxes every hour for £9 an hour, he's not going to give a s**t. The guy thinks in spreadsheets, he doesn't care about people, the whole process is dehumanizing. Those same people often need to be part-supported by the State because they earn less than a living wage. It's exactly the same with the Walton family. So effectively everyone's taxes end up being used by Government to indirectly subsidize the profit margins of these guys while they continue to rake it in.
I am amused by your implication that inequality and poverty are in no way linked. That's a bit like denying the link between gun ownership and shootings.
Then there's the question of philanthropy. First off, can you provide any evidence that "those top few people's
main expenditure is often charitable giving to people in the bottom billion"??
Extent of charitable donations by the mega richSecondly, don't forget that very often charitable work by billionaires has a political agenda (and possibly a tax-dodging one as well). Most donations are conditional, very often they involve spending the cash with the donor's companies. Governments regularly do this as well, I'm not saying it's exclusive to the uber rich, but it's shady nonetheless. One of the things that really set MacKenzie Scott apart from most philanthropists was her willingness to donate to experts in their respective fields without attaching strings, rather than forcing a certain path with the money.
I don't think we should be taking away the ability to make money. I just think there's a point beyond which it becomes unreasonable and obscene when there are people starving, freezing to death, or unable to afford basic medication.
Oxfam poverty and inequality linkyWith that in mind I would like to see limits on obscene wealth, directly linked to spending to support the very poorest in society. A sliding scale on tax is part of that, and certainly in the UK I think the current % rates are about right, though the income bands to which the different rates apply might not be. [You have to be earning £120,000 a year to be in the top band]. There are c.310,000 people in the UK who earn over £160,000 a year. Does anyone really need to be earning that? Irrespective of how clever and talented they are? Couldn't they pay their staff and suppliers a bit more instead, and improve the average standard of living that way?
The easiest way to achieve that isn't to have a fixed cap, but a maximum earnings limit based on how well everyone else is doing. So maximum pay is a limit calculated using a multiplier from the median pay. At present median pay in the UK is around £30k. So let's say the multiplier is 5, assuming a typical company with typical wages, maximum earnings at Board level would be £150k. But if the Board want to pay themselves £200k that means the median pay has to increase to £40k. You can still be greedy, still get paid more than everyone else, but employees have to have a share of the success they contributed towards.
Rich people statsIn practice as I've outlined before, the better way of doing this isn't to target businesses, but politicians. Pin their wages to the national median wage with a multiplier and ban all forms of secondary income, and see how that pans out. It's an important distinction because politicians can also use social policy to raise median income, so children, pensioners, the disabled and the chronically ill will then be factored in. Most likely quite strongly factored in, as they'd be a "quick win" for the overall balance.
Last edited by Redd_Kross on 25 Nov 2020, 7:09 pm, edited 5 times in total.
24 Nov 2020, 8:42 am
