Bernie Sanders: "top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 95%"

[Mithrae]

We have billionaires in Canada. They're allowed to donate $1,750 total annually to political campaigns. Same as me.

Corporations and unions cannot donate.

Most countries have pretty strict limits.

That sure helps in terms of overt political bribery in Canada; but it doesn't prevent Canadian billionaires from exerting overt influence in less developed countries like India or the USA (Elon Musk was South African once); it doesn't mitigate the less overt but more pervasive billionaire-friendly propaganda of the mass media they own (Rupert Murdoch was an Australian once); it doesn't do anything about the absurd environmental impacts of superyachts and any other form of consumption; it doesn't prevent billionaires' disproportionate and perverse influence on markets such as housing in particular; and it doesn't prevent the ongoing compounding problem of trillionaires in the next decade or two. Money is power, so extreme concentration of wealth is an extreme concentration of power: It might be more limited and exercised less obviously in cases where such obvious and reasonable legal restrictions such as those are in place, but it would be particularly naive to imagine it doesn't exist just because of those limits.

 

[Mithrae]

Bernie is a grievance monger. Same as Trump. A rational, intellectual argument on taxation can be had. Screaming "billionaires shouldn't exist" is mindless hateful division.

Why do you believe that it's acceptable for any person to accumulate that much wealth from our societies and planet?

It's a pretty safe guess that there is no person on this planet who is more than three or four times more talented than the average for their field (human brains and bodies are subject to biological limits) and no person who is more than three or four times more hard-working than the average (a week has only so many hours). But even we go way out on a limb and imagine a superman who is both ten times more talented and ten times more hard-working than others, what this mythical creature could have actually earned by their own efforts would still cap out at about a hundred times the average, somewhere in the order of $20 million in the USA. Without this superman, we might more reasonably suppose that there just possibly might be one or two truly exceptional folk who've actually earned $2 or $3 million by their own efforts.

All the rest is wealth accumulated from their societies and their environment; thousands of years of prior technological innovation which make Facebook a possibility, tens of millions of viewers which make professional basketball a lucrative career possibility, coincidences of geology and millions of dollars of government infrastructure that make it valuable to 'own' land that you never produced... the protection of a military and international treaties, the stability of economic regulation and central banking, the availability of an educated workforce, communications networks for advertising, infrastructure for distribution, consumers with disposable income, the list of societal and environmental contributions to rich peoples' wealth goes on and on.

I'm not saying that's always or entirely a bad thing, but it is a fact that far too few people even understand, let alone acknowledge, instead subscribing to the utterly ridiculous myth of the 'self-made man.'

So I'm curious... is there any kind of upper limit you would consider for how much wealth individuals 'should be' allowed to extract from their societies, or just as much as they can possibly grab going into the hundreds of billions and soon trillions of dollars?



The most common justification and as far as I know the only one which has any kind of merit is based on incentivization... but that pretty much caps out somewhere around $10 or $20 million at current monetary values, beyond which further wealth has little or no appreciable effect on quality of life (weighed against rapidly-increasing adverse ecological and societal consequences). This isn't benign - billionaires' wealth was distributed towards them and away from the rest of us by a system designed to do so, and not only deprives society of a lot of potential good from increasing investment in science, education, healthcare and so on but very often actively contributes to harm.

 

[Allan]

Why do you believe that it's acceptable for any person to accumulate that much wealth from our societies and planet?

It's a pretty safe guess that there is no person on this planet who is more than three or four times more talented than the average for their field (human brains and bodies are subject to biological limits) and no person who is more than three or four times more hard-working than the average (a week has only so many hours). But even we go way out on a limb and imagine a superman who is both ten times more talented and ten times more hard-working than others, what this mythical creature could have actually earned by their own efforts would still cap out at about a hundred times the average, somewhere in the order of $20 million in the USA. Without this superman, we might more reasonably suppose that there just possibly might be one or two truly exceptional folk who've actually earned $2 or $3 million by their own efforts.

All the rest is wealth accumulated from their societies and their environment; thousands of years of prior technological innovation which make Facebook a possibility, tens of millions of viewers which make professional basketball a lucrative career possibility, coincidences of geology and millions of dollars of government infrastructure that make it valuable to 'own' land that you never produced... the protection of a military and international treaties, the stability of economic regulation and central banking, the availability of an educated workforce, communications networks for advertising, infrastructure for distribution, consumers with disposable income, the list of societal and environmental contributions to rich peoples' wealth goes on and on.

I'm not saying that's always or entirely a bad thing, but it is a fact that far too few people even understand, let alone acknowledge, instead subscribing to the utterly ridiculous myth of the 'self-made man.'

So I'm curious... is there any kind of upper limit you would consider for how much wealth individuals 'should be' allowed to extract from their societies, or just as much as they can possibly grab going into the hundreds of billions and soon trillions of dollars?



The most common justification and as far as I know the only one which has any kind of merit is based on incentivization... but that pretty much caps out somewhere around $10 or $20 million at current monetary values, beyond which further wealth has little or no appreciable effect on quality of life (weighed against rapidly-increasing adverse ecological and societal consequences). This isn't benign - billionaires' wealth was distributed towards them and away from the rest of us by a system designed to do so, and not only deprives society of a lot of potential good from increasing investment in science, education, healthcare and so on but very often actively contributes to harm.

Most of these billionaire's wealth is unrealized gains in stock growth. How do you propose capping that?

 

[Mithrae]

Most of these billionaire's wealth is unrealized gains in stock growth. How do you propose capping that?

Let's suppose for the sake of argument that I don't have a good answer. It seems the argument would then be "After a few minutes/days of thought I haven't come up with a perfect solution, so let's just pretend that there isn't a problem," is that it?

Even under the most charitable (and absurd) assumption I could possibly grant you - that literally no-one on earth has a good answer to that question - the fact is that we had to decide to go to the moon before we worked out how it could actually be done. Human ingenuity is an incredible thing given a little direction and motivation. If you were implicitly trying to tell me (or rather, trying to avoid actually saying) that humans aren't clever enough to develop a model for a functioning modern society without extreme upwards concentration of wealth and power, I reckon that would be more of a burden of proof for you to clear than for me.

And even if you somehow met that burden of proof it still wouldn't change the brute facts that A) virtually all billionaire wealth is unearned and accumulated from society and environment, and B) that extreme concentration of wealth and power not only deprives the rest of us but also tends towards adverse societal and environmental consequences.

 

[ataraxia]

Most of these billionaire's wealth is unrealized gains in stock growth. How do you propose capping that?

I think capital gains rates like those in the 1950s and 60s would be helpful. That was, incidentally, also the time the middle class in this country was created. And their elimination coincided with the erosion of the middle class. Interesting, no?

 

[CaughtInThe]

It's funny that the people bringing home $2,000 (net) in their paychecks every two weeks are fighting so hard for the people who bring home $465,000 (net) in their paychecks EVERY TWO WEEKS.

And they're doing all that work for free.

 

[ataraxia]

It's funny that the people bringing home $2,000 (net) in their paychecks every two weeks are fighting so hard for the people who bring home $465,000 (net) in their paychecks EVERY TWO WEEKS.

And they're doing all that work for free.

Ever since Nixon’s Southern strategy, the GOP learned it could exploit their racism to advance plutocracy on their backs. It’s worked great so far, and shows no signs of stopping now.

“From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
-Kevin Phillips, chief campaign strategist for Richard Nixon, 1970

Lee Atwater, chief campaign strategist for Ronald Reagan, explains how this strategy was expanded during the Reagan era;

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 [...] and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster...

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Southern strategy - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Now with Trump, it’s on steroids.

 

[CaughtInThe]

Ever since Nixon’s Aouthern strategy, the GOP learned it could exploit their racism to advance plutocracy in their backs. It’s world great so far, and shows no signs of stopping now.

“From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
-Kevin Phillips, chief campaign strategist for Richard Nixon, 1970

Lee Atwater, chief campaign strategist for Ronald Reagan, explains how this strategy was expanded during the Reagan era;

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 [...] and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster...

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Southern strategy - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Now with Trump, it’s on steroids.

They spelled out what they were doing then and they've even spelled out what they're trying to do now.

Maybe they should have kept it a secret.

 

[Allan]

I think capital gains rates like those in the 1950s and 60s would be helpful. That was, incidentally, also the time the middle class in this country was created. And their elimination coincided with the erosion of the middle class. Interesting, no?

You'd still have people worth hundreds of billions in unrealized gains.

 

[ataraxia]

You'd still have people worth hundreds of billions in unrealized gains.

Meh- I think it would be OK then. Reasonable compromise. It would not be as ridiculous a situation as we have now.

 

[CaughtInThe]

I know tons and tons and tons of MAGAs down here in the South and I can guarantee you that tons and tons of them struggle to pay their bills.

You can't make this shit up.

 

[Michael Cole]

Eh, young people seem to be equally enchanted with MAGA talk.

Young people are young people.

Agreed, and comparing the two is interesting.

The common stereotype of the liberal college student and the MAGA steel worker holds true with regard to Trump tariffs. Anyone who stayed awake through 1st year economics understands tariffs and their economic effects. I would assume these same "liberal students" would also understand that limiting wealth to less than one billion dollars would result in individuals moving all their wealth, except maybe one billion, out of the reach of the US government. The country would become poorer, just as it will if Trump's tariffs ever take full effect. So, the stereotype of the educated young liberal fails here.

I'm not sure what young liberals are thinking right now. Not that I've looked really hard, but the townhalls making headiness involve more mature voters; I don't see many young people active here.

Bernie was drawing large crowds recently. Anger was palpable and justified, as it is in townhalls. But "eat the billionaires" is just a bumper sticker slogan. He may as well be chanting "waste, fraud and abuse." Indeed, he is, from the other extreme.

Tax the rich, feed the poor, until there are no poor no more, makes for great songwriting (written and performed by wealthy capitalists), but while "tax the rich, feed the poor" should be the default setting, the object should be, "teach and help the poor to succeed, until there are no poor no more."

Bernie's ideas are economically impossible. I would hope young college students know this, but that's the problem with stereotypes. I don't think Bernie has much appeal with anyone, myself.

 

[Michael Cole]

Questions for Bernie.

If wealth is capped at one billion dollars, and an individual owns one billion dollars worth of stock, any appreciation in value will go directly to the government. What effect will this have on equity markets? Is there a study I can read?

If wealth is capped at one billion dollars, how does this translate to corporations? Corporations are multi-billion-dollar entities. Will shares owned by individuals exceeding one billion dollars be seized by the government?

If a business is owned by an individual, and that business needs to grow, but its current value is $1b, how would the owner grow the property?

Where are your numbers?

 

[Michael Cole]

Why do you believe that it's acceptable for any person to accumulate that much wealth from our societies and planet?

Why do you begin a post by putting words into my mouth?

I accept rational proposals with realistic outcomes. I don't accept hyper-partisan mindless emotion in politics. I was clear.

It's a pretty safe guess that there is no person on this planet who is more than three or four times more talented than the average for their field (human brains and bodies are subject to biological limits) and no person who is more than three or four times more hard-working than the average (a week has only so many hours). But even we go way out on a limb and imagine a superman who is both ten times more talented and ten times more hard-working than others, what this mythical creature could have actually earned by their own efforts would still cap out at about a hundred times the average, somewhere in the order of $20 million in the USA. Without this superman, we might more reasonably suppose that there just possibly might be one or two truly exceptional folk who've actually earned $2 or $3 million by their own efforts.

All the rest is wealth accumulated from their societies and their environment; thousands of years of prior technological innovation which make Facebook a possibility, tens of millions of viewers which make professional basketball a lucrative career possibility, coincidences of geology and millions of dollars of government infrastructure that make it valuable to 'own' land that you never produced... the protection of a military and international treaties, the stability of economic regulation and central banking, the availability of an educated workforce, communications networks for advertising, infrastructure for distribution, consumers with disposable income, the list of societal and environmental contributions to rich peoples' wealth goes on and on.

I'm not saying that's always or entirely a bad thing, but it is a fact that far too few people even understand, let alone acknowledge, instead subscribing to the utterly ridiculous myth of the 'self-made man.'

So I'm curious... is there any kind of upper limit you would consider for how much wealth individuals 'should be' allowed to extract from their societies, or just as much as they can possibly grab going into the hundreds of billions and soon trillions of dollars?



The most common justification and as far as I know the only one which has any kind of merit is based on incentivization... but that pretty much caps out somewhere around $10 or $20 million at current monetary values, beyond which further wealth has little or no appreciable effect on quality of life (weighed against rapidly-increasing adverse ecological and societal consequences). This isn't benign - billionaires' wealth was distributed towards them and away from the rest of us by a system designed to do so, and not only deprives society of a lot of potential good from increasing investment in science, education, healthcare and so on but very often actively contributes to harm.

 

[Cope]

We will never run out of their money. These people are criminals and they deserve to have every penny of their wealth confiscated.

Bahaha!

Good luck, after the initial taking of it to fund the US for about less than a year, have them leave, and then wallow in the self induced stupidity

 

[VanceMack]

The top 1% didnt steal your pennies. The top 1% wealth doesnt prevent you from becoming successful and wealthy. The fiscal penis envy this topic exposes is ****ing embarrassing to watch. If you want to be critical of the person responsible for your failures...go talk to the person staring back at you from mirrors.

 

[Michael Cole]

The top 1% didnt steal your pennies. The top 1% wealth doesnt prevent you from becoming successful and wealthy. The fiscal penis envy this topic exposes is ****ing embarrassing to watch. If you want to be critical of the person responsible for your failures...go talk to the person staring back at you from mirrors.

That's right. Joe Biden and the RADICAL LEFTISTS are responsible for MAGA failure. Tariffs are gonna make MAGA rich.

 

[VanceMack]

Mind you this the same Bernie Sanders who is a multi-millionaire, who has accumulated all his wealth through government service, who pees himself over the rich owning too many homes, and who glibly defends his owning of multiple homes. Hey....I'm a US senator.........so...I'm different...

What is tragic is that MOST of the democrat party politicians are uber rich...supported by other uber rich 'oligarchs'...and yet they KNOW...all they have to do to get their minions dancing is a pull a few strings.

 

[JMB1911A1]

Mind you this the same Bernie Sanders who is a multi-millionaire, who has accumulated all his wealth through government service, who pees himself over the rich owning too many homes, and who glibly defends his owning of multiple homes. Hey....I'm a US senator.........so...I'm different...

Bernie acts just like the old Soviet nomenklatura that I am sure he worshipped. He deserves the “benefits” of a private plane and multiple houses while the commoners stand in bread lines.

What is tragic is that MOST of the democrat party politicians are uber rich...supported by other uber rich 'oligarchs'...and yet they KNOW...all they have to do to get their minions dancing is a pull a few strings.

 

[VanceMack]

Bernie acts just like the old Soviet nomenklatura that I am sure he worshipped. He deserves the “benefits” of a private plane and multiple houses while the commoners stand in bread lines.

He all but said the same. I'm flying around in private planes paid for by rich people and I'm giving speeches pandering to leftists........what...you think I'm going to fly commercial?

 

[PeteEU]

It is simple to solve.. just ban the ability to borrow money for personal use that is secured in stocks, bonds or physical assets.

Any personal use of company funds.. so company car, house.. food delivery needs to be documented and taxed as personal income...plus 10%.

Also scam charities and giving to charities is not tax deductable..

That would make people like Elon Musk "poor" very fast and have to live like the rest of us.

 

[LostInSeattle]

Most of these billionaire's wealth is unrealized gains in stock growth. How do you propose capping that?

no need to cap it. Just tax wealth.

 

[Allan]

no need to cap it. Just tax wealth.

Wealth? I'm assuming you mean income.

 

[LostInSeattle]

It's straightforward to make the case that there exists an economically suboptimal distribution of wealth. As a thought experiment, how well would the economy function if all wealth were concentrated in one person's hands? Work backwards from there. The more difficult question - in part because it is more subjective - is what is the socially optimal distribution of wealth.

I have always thought that most people don't aspire to be "rich" per se, but no one wants to be poor. Most of the things in life that matter - friendships, family, work that we care about, health, safe community, good education, food, shelter, time to pursue hobbies and interests, freedom to worship - general happiness - are not zero sum. Wealth is zero sum. And if wealth is required to realize some of these things, then when the distribution of wealth becomes an impediment to many people being able to realize those components of happiness no matter how hard they work, it's a societal problem.

I don't care about people becoming wealthy. I'm happy for Bezos, for example. But at the margins, great additional wealth for him means next to nothing, whIereas relatively little additional wealth means a LOT for most people. My life would be easier if I made $20k more a year. Bezo's life would be unchanged if he made $20 million more a year. Or even $200 million.

What concerns me more than people temporarily concentrating wealth through their success is the tendency for that wealth to remain concentrated. Sam Walton was an entrepreneur who changed retailing and became fabulously wealthy as a result. But his children who inherited that wealth, dont' do shit. Not really. Inherited wealth is a huge problem today as it was in the Gilded Age, because it grows, like a black hole, sucking more and more in. After a certain point, it becomes more or less impossible not to become more wealthy.

Today's tax laws are crafted to protect inherited wealth. There's a whole wealth management industry aimed at a narrow slice of society. It's a problem.

 

[eohrnberger]

The OP appears to have a bad case of class envy and / or class jealousy and wants to see a Marxist style class war.
He apparently hasn't learned from history what such a Marxist style class war leaves behind.