I need these statistics for other countries. Especially Germany. We seem to struggle to understand it as well.
this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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Wealth is not money.
We don't need to redistribute any wealth. We only need to disappear the wealth of the billionaires, and the billionaires themselves just to be sure they do not rise again.
Even so, this is a good way to illustrate that the typical person is well below the average amount of wealth.
You gotta grease the wheels. Americans are very self-centered, they won't put in effort for somebody else's profit (knowingly), but if they're told they themselves can get almost $500k they'll be more inclined to do it.
Hmmm . . . as a lump sum the market would then react and everything would cost 1 million dollars. Money isn't real. Food, Land, and property are.
I think money's value is directly tied to its velocity of trade vs the scarcity of the item it's being traded for.
However
IMO: What you are owed is 500,000$ worth of government services per person. The costs of things like public education, infrastructure, healthcare , social security and other social services should be covered by this.
This is what they want to take from you.
No one said it would be 500k in money/cash. It could very well be real estate, gold, shares, bonds, or a mix thereof.
I assumed it was cash by "each couple would have a million dollars".
... Of networth. Given that we're taking about the wealth of the US, most of which is NOT cash, assuming the post-redistribution would be all in cash is ridiculous.
Upvote to the moon. Lots of leftists seem to intellectually understand that money is a fiction that's sometimes useful, but are bad at putting that into practice.
I'll stick my neck out on something here: this includes donating to individual people in Gaza, even if they're coming to you from a verified source on Blue Sky. Yes, a kilo of flour might cost $600. Giving someone $600 to buy flour might feed that family, but there's some other family who isn't getting that flour. You're just choosing who starves today. The fundamental issue is that there isn't enough flour or any other food. There is no way to solve that by donating to individuals. It can only be solved by telling the government of Israel to go fuck itself.
It can only be solved by telling the government of Israel to go fuck itself.
I wrote them a strongly worded email. Is it solved now?
I get the general point you're making. But you're not even recommending the money be spent on something else that will help. We can do both things. If you are going to donate money because you have spare and want to help, and then don't on the basis you're choosing who starves, you're still just making an additional family starve.
I dunno. I haven't thought too much about this. Convince me why it's not better to try to enact change and donate money at the same time.
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I just want billionaires and churches to pay their fair share and end citizens united. That's a great start
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If 20 strangers get 1/20 of a 10 million dollar mansion what do they do? The most anyone could pay for it is $500,000.
Everyone is on here talking about how this would cause inflation, but I don’t think it would. A vast majority of this value is not in cash but in stocks bonds and property. I am more sure how you would divide up who gets apples shares and who gets 5% of their neighbors $600,000 home. But even if you were able, what is sure is that most people would want to convert their stock/bonds/property to cash so they can eat. Only problem is that no one in America would have any cash to buy up the assets. So in a market full of sellers and no buyers the value of everything will plummet.
I think there's a lot of distraction discussing the particulars of this hypothetical, when it's clear that it couldn't work that way in practice.
It's really only helpful to illustrate the equity imbalance and just how much equity is in the system that most people don't see.
I don’t disagree that the commenter was not calling for all wealth to be seized and redistributed. But I didn’t want to post my disagreement with all the other people who said this would cause inflation.
To be honest we could use a little deflation right about now.
Except the wealth you're talking about is ownership, not actual money. Redistributing it won't give everybody a pile of Scrooge McDuck coins, it will give them stocks and other asset ownership worth half a million. To spend any of that, they would have to sell shares to somebody for cash and spend the cash, which they can only do once. After a flurry of liquidating and spending, you'd end up with a lot of people who have more stuff but are otherwise back where they were, and other people who spend less and gradually accumulate a ton of shares to become rich.
Well, if everyone has equal shares, and trading them becomes as common as exchanging money, you could just use your shares (or fractions of it) to buy something at the grocery.
I am sure that people will find solutions for what you describe, if they want to.
But sure if you don't effectively prevent developing wealth-inequality after you redistributed it, it will slowly move back to a similar situation, but not sure what your point here is, you cannot simply fix capitalism by redistributing wealth one time and not changing the underlying incentive structure. But that is not what is expressed here.
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"people would just have a little bit of more stuff, don't give the poors anything, they're not responsible with their money"
you're labouring under the just world fallacy
science disagrees, buddy
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Mathematically, I think it's hard for people to truly understand the obscene wealth that some people have accumulated. 100 billion doesn't sound that different than 100 million.
100 million is magnitudes closer to ZERO than it is to 100 billion.
The net worths are outdated but it's still a shocking way to show how much billions are...
Wealth shown to scale
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Doing it over world wealth/population (454385÷8.2) gives 55,412 USD per capita, which tell how skewed is wealth in the US.
If we could figure out how to distribute food efficiently and how to build housing units efficiently -- in the sense of actually getting that done -- $55k ought to be a perfectly acceptable amount of money for everyone.
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