Just reverting the tax cuts for the wealthy would already do a lot of good. I also think a steep inheritance tax for inheritances over a certain amount (1 million? 10 million?, 100 million?) to preventing these concentrations of wealth from creating a new aristocracy.
But 3 billionaires owning more than the bottom half of the country doesn't have to mean if the bottom half owns nothing:
>> "Their $264.1 billion in holdings outstrips the combined net worth of an estimated 160 million people"
Simply redistributing that would mean that everybody in the bottom half gets $1600. That's not going to fix poverty. It only underscores just how little that bottom half really has.
The problem with high inheritance tax is that it only hurts the rich when it catches them off guard. In otherwise free economy there are so many legal ways to circumvent inheritance tax for the lowest rate tax that is available.
That's true. My point is just that inheriting massive fortunes is a problem because it keeps wealth concentrated across generations. But there are so many loopholes around inheritance that it's not trivial to address this.
Hypothetically, if assassinating Gates, Buffett, and Bezos were a viable method of wealth redistribution, I don't think the idea would be to give everyone $1600. It would probably be more like "we're going to look at the median and top everybody up to that level."
I'm just looking at what the bottom half of the population gets. There's on average $1600 per person available. And that's apparently also what the average person in the bottom half already has, since together they apparently own as much as these three billionaires.
So that means if you completely equalize the wealth of the bottom 50% of the population after redistributing the wealth of these billionaires, the average person in that bottom half will still only have $3200.
So maybe they can get their car fixed, but they still can't send their kids to college.
But 3 billionaires owning more than the bottom half of the country doesn't have to mean if the bottom half owns nothing:
>> "Their $264.1 billion in holdings outstrips the combined net worth of an estimated 160 million people"
Simply redistributing that would mean that everybody in the bottom half gets $1600. That's not going to fix poverty. It only underscores just how little that bottom half really has.