So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?
Yes.
Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.
Seriously.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
I actually saw a really good visual representation of how large a billion actually is in comparison to the poor, the middle class, the rich, and the wealthy… I am legit going to find it again and post a couple of the visuals:
What folks tend to think a chart like that would look like, verses…
A more accurate one to visualize just how big of a margin there is:
That dark green bar on the right is the 1%. Literally off the scale. A tax will hardly dent it, but it will mean the world to those who are considered the poor; fast food workers and struggling college students among them.
homura 