I would like to propose a cap on net worth.

Realistically, if you have 300M, you and your direct family are settled for life. So, I want to propose 1B cap on net worth, if its more than that for 12 months straight, surplus goes to government, if your net worth is down after that, government obliges to return it partially to make it to 1B.

People, who are eager building things and innovating, will keep building regardless, power hungry will try to find other ways to enrich themselves, but eventually they will give up (e.g. having 10 kids, each with 1B net worth)

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GoatInGrey 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Instead of an arbitrary net number, why not a multiplier of the median? For example, capping at 300x the median citizen/household.

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andrew_lettuce 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is so arbitrary and incredibly naive. How did you come to with 300M, why not 300k or 300 billion? How would you determine the worth of rare, illiquid or intangibles? What about wealth held in trusts or companies? How does the accounting work if I borrow against my wealth? What happens when things change value dramatically in a short period of time? And the government is going to "make billionaires whole again" if they crater their wealth?

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throwaw12 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

You are asking me about implementation difficulty, difficult implementation doesn't mean idea is not worth it.

One example:

* 300k vs 300M - doesn't matter if I said 100M, 200M, 550M, if you think 300M is not enough for you and your family to afford anything, not sure how other people are surviving for even less.

Here is why I think this is good:

1. Ambitious people will still be ambitious, its rare some genius kid says: I know this is 100B idea, but I won't build it, because I will only own 1B of it.

2. Limits the power, when power is really limited, people will be forced to focus on different things. For example, if you had plans to take over the world by making $10T and creating an army to kidnap president of another state you don't like, then you would know, it is not possible to make 10T, its not only about how much, its about suppressing hungry animal in you by capping your limits.

3. There is a chance "bad" ambitious people, will be converted to real philanthropist, because they know it doesn't matter to own more than 1B anyway and they can't own it.

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jjice 2 days ago | parent [-]

> You are asking me about implementation difficulty, difficult implementation doesn't mean idea is not worth it.

I can agree with that idea, to an extent. If something is near impossible (not saying this is), then it does become not worth it.

The other questions the parent posed are more interesting to me:

> How would you determine the worth of rare, illiquid or intangibles? What about wealth held in trusts or companies? How does the accounting work if I borrow against my wealth? What happens when things change value dramatically in a short period of time?

Another I wonder is that (ignore all specifics of the values, just the concepts matter here), let's say you own a private business that then becomes valued at 1.5 billion dollars and this individual has 20 million dollars liquid. How do you tax that? The government can't take one third of the business, at least not without a lot of issues (in business dealings and individual rights), and the 20 million liquid wouldn't come close to what this plan would value. What do we do then? Plenty of billionaires don't really have liquid cash and forcing liquidation of assents in such a way seems like it would be very difficult.

I'm all for more taxes on higher net worth individuals, but I think there's a lot of talk to be had on how one can implement this. It's going to be really difficult to find a way that makes sense.

	▲	LunaSea 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I can agree with that idea, to an extent. If something is near impossible (not saying this is), then it does become not worth it. FATCA law makes this very possible in the US. > How do you tax that? The government can't take one third of the business, at least not without a lot of issues (in business dealings and individual rights) I would say that the government can and should and simply be a passive share holder with no voting rights.
	▲	throwaw12 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Obviously, I do not know nitty gritty details of economy and finance, but if I would implement this tomorrow I would start taking the equivalent of surplus and start from there to understand more. For example, say individual has 20M liquid cash, 2 houses each valued at 5M and 1.5B in company shares (based on averaged company value for the last 6 or 12 months): * whatever you can immediately spend is prioritised first, so you keep your 20M + 2 houses, then surplus is $530M of your company shares * this equivalent number of shares will be moved to government trust, individual doesn't have any control over it, if person dies next day, government keeps the money (lets simplify for now and keep voting rights as separate question) * let's say after shares moved to gov. trust, during next 6 months company value halved, gov. returns all your shares, if stock dropped only 10%, you get equivalent back to make your net worth 1B * regarding taxation, I would keep it as it is today and tax on "realization event" There are around 3.000 billionaires in the world, even hiring 10 dedicated people for each billionaire to calculate all this stuff on a quarterly basis is not expensive

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Fin_Code 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They would break ownership into trusts. The caps idea has forever been dumb.

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globular-toast 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So let's say we implemented this and the government suddenly receives billions of credits from wealthy individuals. Would anything actually change? Is this what's holding us back from repairing all the roads to a fine standard? From implementing universal basic income?

It seems to me that if one tried to actually spend those credits we'd simply get inflation. Prices for roads, food etc. would just go up.

We definitely want to work on inequality, but I think numbers above 1B net worth are just weird quirks of the system. Musk is powerful because he's powerful, the number is just a reflection of that. Keeping his number below some arbitrary threshold isn't going to combat his power.

We need to tackle the problem head on: we need to stop individuals from amassing so much power. We get lost in this stupid abstraction called money. It's not what matters.

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oceanplexian 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Doesn’t the US have an almost $2T deficit?

What do you think all that money you taxed from billionaires will do in the hands of the “government”, pay the bills for 12-24 months? Then what’s your plan after the government has spent it all? No amount of taxation can solve a spending problem.

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sejje 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Would SpaceX exist if your ideas were in charge?

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throwaw12 2 days ago | parent [-]

it would.

Some options why it should happen:

1. Assuming Elon is curious person, he will still build it out of curiosity.

2. Assuming Elon is not curios person, just power hungry, he will probably think its not worth building it, but someone else who is curious will build it eventually. This is even better, because when power hungry person owns such thing, they might use it for bad things as well (e.g. to gain more power, eventually interfering with elections, oh wait, it did already happen)

3. Government will build, because government will have more money now, but then we should be even more careful who gets to the top. Assuming people won't have more than 1B, maybe there will be less lobbying? because its not worth as much as it was before?

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oceanplexian 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Is the reason NASA couldn’t build reusable rockets because they didn’t have enough money? Honest question?.

	▲	throwaw12 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		honestly, I don't think it was money related, because look at James Webb telescope, I think NASA achieved lots of good things, IMO they could have built SpaceX as well, it was probably more motivation and organisational impotence and bureaucracy from management (including higher ups than NASA).

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nlitened 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> because government will have more money now

Ah, so your idea is the good old “only the emperor who controls the violence apparatus should have a lot of money and power”?

It’s not a very original idea, and it has been tried many times, and it failed many times.

> but then we should be even more careful who gets to the top

Right, so “for some reason only the greedy power hungry psychopaths get to the top in the current system — let’s fix it so that there can’t be many of them, only one government who has power to take away other people’s wealth and concentrate it immensely, surely we will figure out how to make sure it’s not filled with greedy power hungry psychopaths as we go”