I am not at all proposing that "people with billions of dollars" somehow directly pay for "the needs of the population as a whole".

I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".

Generalize "people with billions of dollars" to all Americans - and then this logic will start to work fully.

"Until people with salaries of many dollars per hour behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others 90% of the world that live on less than 2 dollars per day... The distinction has no practical use."

Moreover, these people do not simply lobby the government, but directly elect it, and actually have many times more money at their disposal than the rest of the world.

If I understand what you're saying it's that as rich as they are, the amount of money the ultra-wealthy own just doesn't add up to nearly enough to give everyone a quality of life that they deserve / once had?

Perhaps what's happening is that in their attempts to reach a personal all-time high in their bank accounts the ultra-wealthy are destroying value and economic systems en mass with little regard to the efficiency of their money siphoning process?

It's kind of like a drug dealer selling brain burning addictive substances to a few people on a street. Sure they're going to extract a person's life savings to date and whatever money that person can steal once they're addicted but that value pales in comparison to what that person could have made over their career, what it could have made if properly invested, the cost of law enforcement to deal with these addicts, the cost of the stuff that they destroy in their quest to get money to buy drugs, the opportunity cost of them not raising their kids to be productive members of society... like it all just snow balls all so some asshole can make a few bucks...

The ultra-wealthy are doing that shit where people burn acres of pristine forests to get some biochar -- but to the entire world.

  Isn’t it strange
  That princes and kings,
  And clowns that caper
  In sawdust rings,
  And common people
  Like you and me
  Are builders for eternity?

  Each is given a bag of tools,
  A shapeless mass,
  A book of rules;
  And each must make-
  Ere life is flown-
  A stumbling block
  Or a stepping stone.

The question is not how much they have, but how much they will have once all the replaceable jobs are replaced.

Bloomberg Billionaires Index publishes daily net worth for the top 500 globally. As of end of 2025, the top 500 totaled $11.9 trillion, with $2.2 trillion added in 2025.

Forbes Real-Time Billionaires covers the full ~3,000-person list. The 2025 annual snapshot: 3,028 billionaires with combined net worth of $16.1 trillion

Forbes 400 (US only): 2025 cutoff was $3.8 billion to make the list. Forbes publishes the aggregate annually and recent years the total net worth was over $5.4T for the 400.

Really? Because GDP vs household income graphed over the last 40 years paints a rather clear picture.

Well, the top 10% richest people control 67% of the wealth, and top 1% richest have 30% of the wealth in the US. The top half has > 97% of the wealth.

It appears you are the one very confused about wealth distribution in the US. Maybe you are confusing "income" with "wealth hoarding". The hoarding is happening to a gross amount, and this is why there should be a 1% tax on fortune portions over 100 million and 2% on portions over 1 billion. That and going back to the 70% tax over incomes in the top bracket (eg > 10million / yr)

Those taxes are coming. Trumpty Dumpty and the oligarchs brought it on themselves. Maga grifters are getting f'd in the midterms. Maybe maga should have picked a few dear leaders with some integrity instead of greedy frauds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

Edit: downpout all you want, doesn't change the facts.

[flagged]

The wealthiest group in the US is the 70-95%, they have over double the wealth of "the billionaires".

But we can't talk about this because it includes a large tract of the white collar everyday man workforce.

This is why the focus is so heavy on billionaires, so heavy on increasing minimum wage, so heavy on protecting immigrants. Those are all virtuous values that also bolster the value of the 70-95%, while piling all the blame (and responsibility) on the 1%.

The wealthiest group in America is doing an excellent job at protecting (and growing) their wealth.

(for those wondering, the "back breaker" of this class is zoning laws and new housing, everyone is aware how intense NIMBYism is in the middle/upper middle class hives).

America routinely ranks fairly low on the "happiest countries" rankings. Currently #24 behind most of Europe, with the Scandinavian countries typically at the top.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...

Clearly other countries are doing something to keep their citizens happy that the US is not copying.

Given that US politics and policy is driven by lobbyists and tribal infighting, would you really expect anything different?

Lobbying is "directly advocating for or against particular legislation or regulations." Writing your representative is lobbying. Fighting bad legislation is lobbying. Any good faith attempt to argue a position on a government policy is lobbying.

Giving money to politicians or their campaigns is not lobbying, and it is already illegal for lobbyists to do so.

What could and should be made illegal is allowing unlimited political campaign donations via Super PACs. Political donations aren't lobbying.

It's worth being clear about what you actually want to make illegal because you probably don't want to ban anyone from arguing a political position.

isn't it an attempt to give structure to something that surely would have existed illegally otherwise? banning something doesn't automatically stop it.

Who is going to lobby to make it illegal? Our system is broken and won’t fix itself.

Inequality is going to continue to increase until society collapses. If we want a better world we need to prepare for this eventuality by building avenues of popular action to return power to the people. Once the oligarchs have fucked up enough people’s lives, popular action becomes a realistic way out of this mess.

The US was founded upon corruption and continued that tradition throughout history. It's so normalized that almost nobody recognizes it.

UBI, at best, will only fix one aspect of disruption. Income is not the only reason why people want to be employed.

We can’t even deliver on universal healthcare. UBI is an even bigger pipe dream for american politics.

UBI requires a wealthy elite class to tax from that also does not capture the government and reduce or eliminate the UBI. The status quo shows us that if a wealthy class exists they will capture the government and eliminate benefits for the masses. Thats why minimum wage does not rise and as another commenter said we do not have universal healthcare.

Yes, our tech leaders would rather send america into fascism that have any impediments put in the way of their business plans. It is disgusting, and sad.

I suggest you keep going with that math. I'll use the numbers from here [0]. 924 billionaires with an overall wealth of 7.5 trillion. Split among 300 million people, that's about $25k for everyone.

Here are some points of consideration:

1. They don't have $7.5T in liquid. The average american won't be able to use that $25k to pay a hospital bill or eat. Also note that one-time wealth transfer won't even pay in full for one major surgery.

2. You've wiped away the incentive for getting-big mentality which drove some of the billionaires to innovate which advances society to this point. Think - discouraging a future Jobs from making another iPhone-like device.

3. After the one-time transfer, it turns out we need more money for the common folks. "Why is the line at $1B? Isn't $900m enough? The line should be $100m." And so on and so forth.

[0]: https://fortune.com/2025/12/08/how-many-billionaires-does-am...

Concrete examples please

Does economics or political theory focus on centralization, practically speaking? Not as a normative claim. What the actual effects are like. It just feels like we're at a centralization of power of unprecedented scale, to the point where no previous theories or models could really apply (in order to make analytical progress - I mean sure feudalism is honestly becoming a scarier and scarier analogy but still, there are significant differences)

I'm pretty much only thinking about these kinds of problems at my job at this point, so this is important to me in that regard

> When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there?

The response is "we don't believe you" because their actions show that they are hellbent on accelerating inequality using AI and they have offered absolutely no concrete plan or halfway convincing explanation of how, if their own predictions of AI's future capabilities are correct, we're supposed to go from here and now to a future that isn't extremely dark for the vast majority of humans on Earth (to the extent that said humans continue to exist).

The work they have done in this direction so far is not serious, so it's not taken seriously. They obviously care much more about enriching themselves than slowing or reversing current trends.

If they want to be taken seriously, maybe they should start acting like they're serious about anything besides their own wealth and power. And I do mean acting---they need to show us through their actions that they are serious.

We can look at their actions, in particular their efforts to influence public policy.

The billionaires could start to earn trust by lobbying for laws and programs that help the poor and displaced. Put money in to retraining programs to help people who lose their jobs. So far they seem to be doing the opposite, CEOs are publicly declaring ‘fuck you, got mine’ and leaving it at that.

>How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation?

Because it IS an us vs them situation.

They're awfully good at turning it into an us vs us situation whether it's blaming our parents' (boomers), blaming immigrants, blaming muslims or (their favorite), blaming the unstoppable forward march of technological progress (e.g. AI).

The media organizations they own are constantly telling these stories because it protects them.

>The Government could legislate that any increase in profits that are attributable to the use of AI are taxed

Nothing a billionaire loves more than misdirection and a good scapegoat. This is why Bill Gates made the exact suggestion you just did.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-wants-tax-robots-2...

When THEY are the problem they love a bit of misdirection, especially when the "problem" is a genie that cant be put back in its bottle.

They're terrified that we might latch on to the solutions that actually work (i.e. tax them to within an inch of their life) and drive a populist politician to power which might actually enact them.

Sounds promising honestly. One of the scariest parts of the big AI labs is all of the exclusive training data they get through their UIs. (It’s unclear whether distillation is a feasible way to close the gap).

If there were another party involved, that would (hopefully) diversify power that (potentially) comes with those streams of data.

It’s a bit ironic that the USA has mostly abandoned interoperability after being one of the pioneers with the American manufacturing method. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturi...

This is interesting to see since on another HN post everyone is bemoaning how expensive it’s getting to use frontier models because Anthropic is massively throttling Pro Max Claude plans. That’s certainly not going to become more accessible to us normal folk through taxation.

This might be a solution if there wasn’t staggering wealth inequality prior to AI.

This is only true if productivity gains tied to general well being, but instead it's being concentrated in the hands of a few.

No.

Because success is individual, inequality is statistical.

It ia true that AI gives ordinary people a lot more chance to be successful.

But do not forget that success depends on lots of factors that are not in one’s control: knowing the right people, time being right for what you are doing, and lots of others. So while the mechanics of success is a lot different to lottery, it does not work much differently: 1 in 1M attempts are successful.

Yes, AI gives everyone more lottery tickets, but it gives rich people a lot more tickets.

And is controlled by a handful of mega corporations? How is that equitable?

> AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity[.]

I would rather claim that this is a proper description of shadow libraries [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library

Yup. This is why if you claim to espouse literally any form of egalitarian political belief while being upset about (open source) generative AI, I know you're a fraud/charlatan/intellectual bankrupt/ontologically evil.

Huggingface, Swartz et al have done more social/political good for this world than billions have.

>It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them.

Unless the rich somehow manage to completely stifle the progress of consumer-level computing advancement (all chip manufacturers would just collude to quit selling to consumers?) and exert an iron-fisted control over the dissemination of software (when has this ever worked?), I'm not sure how they could control the democratization of AI.

> It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them.

There's been ongoing class warfare happening for centuries, but only the rich side is firing the bullets. The rest of us are just standing in the front lines getting shot. AI is just another type of gun for their army.

It was supposed to be "a" gigahertz, Google transcription fail.