Work Reform

I'd be fully supportive of a "maximum wealth" limit.

Next question, why did you immediately go to 400k? Why not 1 million? If you make a million dollars then you've made half the average lifetime earnings of a worker. Double question, if we capped earnings at 400k, would school lenders not take that into account?

I think a maximum yearly income, including any money you could conceivably spend for personal use, would be a wonderful idea. It would certainly put a damper on being a billionaire if you know you could never actually get more than about a hundred million dollars in your life. Just literally running the score up at that point.

Ok sure, but if you frame the conversation to mean the limit would be set at $400k/year then you're missing the point. We're talking billionaires not single digit millionaires. Despite how those numbers sound to the average person there's several orders of magnitude between them.

Lets put that maximum at $10M/month (or year). Now your counter argument doesn't work any more.

I was thinking about this the other day, one of my favorite analogies is seconds.

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is ............ 31,688 years.

The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It's utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/elon-musk-richest-person-trillionaire/index.html

This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He's still on track, by 2027 no less. There's no telling how directly and flagrantly he'll benefit from a Trump win, either.

I think all the talk about billionaires is using a completely arbitrary number and subject to inflation. Wealth inequality is the big problem, it doesn't matter what number on their bank account is.

people often become defensive saying that the government shouldn’t be able to dictate how much wealth one person can accumulate

Of course it should. If we're expecting to live in a democracy, then people need to have equal voices. If you're a billionaire you have a megaphone, as Elon Musk has shown. Democracy can't work if some people have far more power than others.

Billionaires have very little taxable income. We need a wealth tax.

That wouldn't catch the people who are the real problem, billionaires, who report something like $1 per year in income.

When you have billions in shares, you can use that as collateral to borrow money from the bank, and then you just spend that money. That's not "income" so it isn't taxed.

What's needed is a 90% tax on people reporting high incomes as a start. But, then you need to close loopholes. The carried interest loophole for a start, which would nail most of the hedge fund crowd. Then, tax unrealized gains when they're in the tens of millions range. Then prevent billionaires from handing billions to their children tax free by preventing the "stepping up" of capital gains for their heirs.

Even if it’s not at the expense of someone else, too much wealth in the hands of one person is still harmful. It gives one person too much power over others, allows for people to buy their way out of legal trouble, buy politicians, etc.

A handful of people’s excess is exactly the problem.

C-suite compensation is already largely handled by share offers - which get further pumped/paid for by share buyback schemes.

This would just further exacerbate it, unless we first re-ban buybacks.

Honestly, we should just ban them regardless.