Then who pays for it?

Ownership of the economy is split roughly 30/30/30 between the top 10%/1%/.1% with the bottom 90% of people making an entrance as the rounding error. If you picture "the owners" by drawing a representative sample of 10 people:

    1 Normal person
    3 Doctors / Lawyers / Engineers ($1M+ net worth)
    3 Successful Entrepreneurs ($10M+ net worth)
    3 Ultrawealthy ($50M+ net worth)

    1 Normal person 
    3 Professional ($100k+/yr passive)
    3 Successful   ($1M+/yr passive)
    3 Wealthy      ($5M+/yr passive)

Are the in-betweeners part of the problem? Sure, but we have a foot on either side of the problem. We could get hype for many of the plausible solutions to aggregate labor oversupply (e.g. shorter workweeks) even if it meant our stocks went down. Not so for 6/10 people in that sample. The core problem is still that the economy is mostly inhabited by people who work for a living but mostly owned by people who own things for a living and all of the good solutions to the problem require rolling that back a little against a backdrop that, absent intervention, stands to accelerate it a lot.

EDIT: one more thing, but it's a big one: the higher ends of the wealth ladder have the enormous privilege of being able to engage in politics for profit rather than charity/obligation. A 10% chance of lobbying into place a policy that changes asset values by 10% is worth $1k to a "Professional", $50k to a "Wealthy", but $8B to Elon Musk. The fact that at increasing net worths politics becomes net profitable and then so net profitable as to allow hiring organizations of people to pursue means the upper edge of the distribution punches above its already-outsized weight in terms of political influence. It goes without saying that their brand of politics is all about pumping assets.

>>Until people with salaries

Salary (income) is a horrible choice to serve as the marker to determine a person's (family's) fair share contribution to the burden of paying the costs to operate a society. Not everyone is so poor that working for a living is a matter of survival.

I can think of only one universal marker that would assure every citizen shares the burden of paying for society's costs equally: wealth.

Adjusted in a manner that the financial impact of one thousand dollars to a full-time MacDonald's counter worker is transformed into a dollar amount that causes the same relative financial impact to everyone, all the way up to the wealthiest family in America.

Yes, a billionaire and substitute teacher have the same political power in America. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

/s

America only has the shallowest appearance of a democracy where voters get to control who is elected.

The electoral college system, coupled with it's winner-takes-all implementation in most states, means that voting is a sham for 80% of the population. The other 20% live in a swing state and their vote can at least potentially affect the outcome of an election, but even there "your vote" will literally be cast opposite to what you put on the ballet unless you end up being part of the winning majority.

What is a stumbling block? Who are they made for?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stumbling_block

Turns out it's a fictional object created in the translation of the Koine Greek for "obstacle".

I'm more curious who with a NW >$100M is hoarding it? Everyone I have come across is hoarding approximately 0% of it.

Maybe Notch when he sold Minecraft, apparently he had $2B sitting in a bank account, but I'm sure by now he has deployed it.

Their point is “billions” in securities representing the market capitalization of various organizations is not equivalent to purchasing power. The organization is not a silo full of energy, food, construction workers, and healthcare.

The “billions” are a constantly changing representation of what the average buyer in the market might be willing to pay at a certain point in time.

I really don't understand this "simping online for billionaires" hobby. Is there a signup I missed somewhere, where they pay $100 for every post one makes glazing and defending them as a class?

The top 5% of the country have around 60% of its wealth. It is logical to bring that number down.

The top 1% own 31% and the top 10% own 68% of household wealth.

The group you’re talking about, 70-95 percentile, are often people that just own a house near a big city or a farm/small business.

Exactly. This is why I don’t support all the current wave of Democrats’ “wealth tax” policy ideas. There isn’t anywhere near enough money in billionaires pockets to keep the promises they’re making - especially once you account for them simply fleeing overseas, and also for even if you “catch” them, the downward pressure on their assets’ value that forced liquidation would have.

Once the Democrats who are elected on the fantasy of making Musk and Bezos pay for everyone’s past and future college/student loans, Medicare for all, UBI, high speed rail, while simultaneously closing every fossil fuel plant and subsidizing clean energy to replace it at the same cost — once they’ve failed to raise enough to pay for 1/10 of those promises, they’ll be coming for everyone more “wealthy” than $100k net worth.

You can just look how successful the USSR was, or China before they sold out their own Communist ideals. Most people were just subsistence farmers, or factory workers living in crowded minimalist apartments if they were lucky.

Legislators elected for that policy, I suppose.

The problem with billionaires is they have a vastly disproportionate voice in the political system, which leads to ineffective politicians and policies not aligned with a thriving society.

eg: cutting funding to the IRS and advanced science, both of which have long proven positive dividends… or advancing new wars abroad to directly blow up money.

Plus wbillionaires are nothing special. Right time, right place.

Steve Jobs is a perfect example of someone who was in it for the love of the game. He wouldn’t have been any different if his income was taxed at 90%.

> 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.

Am I meant to believe that we wouldn't have iPhone-level innovation if inventors couldn't become billionaires?

This makes no sense. We have so much more innovation than we have billionaires, always have. Ability to become a member of the 0.001% is not a barrier to innovation, not in America, not anywhere, and never has been.

No one serious is claiming there should be zero wealth inequality. Inequality is ineradicable. The claim is that wealth inequality can reach a degree that becomes corrosive to society as a whole and severs the link between innovation and profit, because it becomes more profitable to hoard wealth and collect capital gains and interest than it does to innovate and create things in the real world.

It's entirely possible to preserve (and in fact would actually strengthen) the profit motive if we changed incentives to get rid of the wild capital hoarding we see today.

Literal money transfer is not the point. It's about power and concentration of it to insulate future consolidation of power.

Money is made up system to provide a relatively stable society; if that stops working it's not good; violence becomes what's left.

Maria Sam Antoinette and brethren saying let them eat cake (or everyone will just build new things with (our) AI) without a sense of what is happening / about to happen to the broader populous is on a similar track.

The "billionaires" should use their influence to help with this transition invest figuring out how these new system will work.

No one should care if that means more "millionaires" vs less billionaires these numbers as social constructs; the point is power and self determination. History shows lacking that for too many will breakdown to broad violence and or dystopic robot overloads guarding a diminishing small and isolated elite.

The time to course correct is now.

The power and influence (and damage caused) does not scale linearly with net worth. And you don’t need to have money on hand to be able to use it to harm others, you can e.g. use it as a collateral for loans and funding to build your child crushing machine.

Personally I wager society would be better if the excess wealth of billionaires was simply deleted, or burned. It would be better yet if that wealth was used in our shared funds to build common infrastructure and services. Leaving such wealth in such few hands is really the worst you could possibly do for society.

> 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.

In general, this is total bullshit. But in the particular, Job made his first billions from selling Pixar to Disney, not from Apple.

The french invented the guillotine. Works wonder.

To paraphrase The Donald:

Just wait ... in two weeks ...