This is emotional pleading, not a serious argument of any sort, based on the core premise of "this person has more money than me, and I don't like that, therefore I should get some".
Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society.
The ability for a single person to own over $100m in assets is not a human right. It's not a protected class or status. It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.
And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth. This completely insane $100 million figure is so small to those men that you would have to earn $100 million every single year for over 30 lifetimes to get to their level of wealth.
It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's a shallow way to think about it. It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.
Think for a second what would happen to you if Jeff Bezos banned you from using all Amazon products. Would the Internet even work anymore for you? You know, every company has the right to refuse service to anyone. This one man can basically cut you off from television, e-commerce, Internet, employment (if you do engineering work on AWS), even Thursday Night Football.
Because, factually, the statement "Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive." is emotional and meritless. There's literally zero value here. It's an opinion. In fact, you doubled down on this throughout your response.
> It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.
This is also factless, meritless, emotional pleading.
> And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth...
As is all of this.
> It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy.
That's literally what you're doing.
> It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.
It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy.
If you consider pointing out that you're not making logical arguments, and instead engaging in emotional pleading, to be insulting (especially when, upon that being pointed out, you can't make a rational argument and instead continue pleading), then you should take a step back, because there's a good chance you're engaging in advocacy and emotional manipulation as opposed to genuine, rational arguments in good faith.
As someone who thinks wealth inequality is a huge problem in the US - I'm genuinely curious as to what you would propose to address this problem "directly". Because to me, this tax proposal is addressing it directly.
Wealth inequality doesn't have any direct effects - merely having more money than someone else doesn't do anything. It's only after the money gets spent that you see negative effects, and the magnitude and type of spending determine the effects. It's more accurate to call this "spending inequality".
This proposal doesn't address the problem because it doesn't affect spending - only wealth. (a capital gains tax is actually a deceitfully name wealth tax) Wealth doesn't do anything until it's spent. That's the main problem with this proposal - it doesn't even try to address the problem it pretends to address.
As to how to actually address the problem: there's two types of wealth inequality that most people are concerned about - that between the super-rich and everyone else (discussed here), and that between the poor and everyone else (not discussed).
Thank you for engaging honestly, it's a breath of fresh air in this thread.
The ~wealth~ spending inequality problems of the super-rich seem to be mainly manifested in corruption - donating large amounts to political groups, and lobbying. You want to regulate/outlaw those specific things.
However, aside from corruption (which is a huge problem) most of the spending inequality problems seem to come from the middle and lower class. For instance, cost of housing and living - I think that that's being driven by the middle class having more access to capital in a supply-constrained environment (which is partially caused by big hedge funds buying up housing to rent it out - which again is a separate problem that can be addressed separately and isn't fixed by the capital gains tax). People like Zuckerberg aren't personally buying up housing all over the US on their own - this problem isn't at their level and this tax wouldn't help.
> donating large amounts to political groups, and lobbying
Those are indeed ways of exercising power that can be outlawed, but there are other ways of exercising power that are impossible to outlaw. For example, the ultra-rich can spend far more money on lawyers than anyone else. How are you going to outlaw that? And even the charitable contributions of the ultra-rich are controversial and probably wouldn't happen in a true democracy. E.g., the Bill Gates foundation has a lot of influence on global health spending[1]:
> If you look across global health, they’re funding everybody. Nobody is more than one degree removed from the Gates Foundation. So it’s really difficult to avoid the foundation’s money.
Basically they wield so much power that even their charitable contributions to society are inherently political, unlike say if I volunteer at my local rescue mission.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/bill-gates-foundation-c...
EDIT: added the word "extreme" to clarify
> You can't outlaw the exercise of power, so the extreme power imbalance itself is the core problem for humanity; and the only way to fix that is to take some of their power away.
This is not the only fix. It is possible to outlaw specific exercises of power that actually harm people, such as lobbying and bribery, without taking any money away at all, and it's possible to level the playing field in other areas such that money is much less of an advantage.
> For example, the ultra-rich can spend far more money on lawyers than anyone else.
By simplifying the legal system, and removing barriers to entry in the legal profession, such that people can effectively self-represent, both because they're legally allowed to, and because the legal system is simple enough that individuals can comprehend it and argue effectively. (this will also greatly reduce the effectiveness of high-powered lawyers, because the simpler the system is, the less advantage the best lawyers have over the worst ones)
The legal system is inherently flawed in that richer people have a massive advantage over poorer people - that is the problem, not that some people have more money and so can take advantage of it.
Please, seriously, think about that for a bit - our economy is filled with systems that are unfair or exploitative (e.g. legal, healthcare, non-compete agreements, the rent collusion that's currently happening), but the solution is not to start taxing the ultra-rich, because that still leaves those systems in an exploitative state, and they'll continue to take advantage of the middle and lower class even if you eliminate all of the rich people.
> E.g., the Bill Gates foundation has a lot of influence on global health spending
This is also very feasible to fix - make the status of being a tax-deductible charity contingent on not doing the bad things you want to disincentivize. This is similar to how Title IX is a huge lever over public institutions that prohibits them from doing some bad things.