I agree that that's the major problem; the poverty is inexcusable. But that's not caused by the $300B (or whatever) of equity. It's caused because the homeowners of the Bay Area decided that once they got a house, nobody else should, and that they should get to exclude others from the opportunities they had.

This same thing was observed during the Gold Rush in California in the 1800s; extreme wealth also resulted in extreme poverty. And there's a great way to solve this: tax the land and redistribute it equally to everyone. Land can't be moved, it's something that belongs to all of us, and you can't make more of it.

This is almost completely traceable to Californians' failure to allow sufficiently dense housing to be built on their doorsteps. The only thing Larry did was bring prosperity to the region.

(I'm in agreement with the thesis of the article)

More taxes should solve that.

Read somewhere that SF spends roughly 50k$-80k$ per homeless person per year.

Taxing more doesn't solve a massively inefficient system at it's core. Just like US education, we spend more than any country on earth, why is it still bad?

Answering that question with a "if only we had more money" is a really poor argument. The CA tax fundamentals are bad, pooring more cash onto the fire will not fix that.

This has basically nothing to do with with market cap of Google or Larry Page's percentage ownership of it; and the state government taxing it more will not make this situation any better.

that has ZERO to do with the tax system... You can't be serious? Have you looked at the data at all? have you seen how much money is spent "combatting" homelessness in San Francisco?

just not his problem. not a single motherfucker on this website lives their life as if wealth disparities are a genuine problem anyways. you are motivated by resentment

Why does it matter how much the shares of his company are worth? They just represent ownership of a company. It's not like their existence is somehow holding back wealth from the market or from other people. And if he wants to sell the shares to make some cash, then he's going to have to pay taxes on that, which is good for everyone else. And he wouldn't do that unless he planned to spend or invest the cash receives, which is also good for everyone else. I fail to see the harm.

I think one could argue that taxation should be higher, and harder to dodge, and I would agree with that.

But once you start saying that some people shouldn't have more than others to some degree, that's a very slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? Why is it okay for middle class Americans to buy nicer clothes and move into bigger apartments when people are out there starving? If it's not okay for someone to have the net worth of Qatar, why would it be okay for someone to live in an apartment that's worth more than a poor township in South Africa?

At some point we have to accept that inequality exists, and that although almost everyone could do something to minimize it, there's an ethical and practical line that needs to also respect individuality to a large degree, if we want people to feel incentivized to do things, to feel ownership, to maintain autonomy. And where to draw that line is tough to say exactly, but it probably shouldn't be a line, it should probably be smooth, or at least smooth-ish. So I feel like we're just coming back around to progressive taxation. Which we already have.

Sure, yeah, but which of the two numbers I was multiplying together is, in your mind, too big, and should be made smaller, and by what mechanism?

Why?

What if they provided value of 10x of the GDP of Qatar?

Well, why does something have to be done about this, exactly? Who is getting hurt here? It's not like borrowing is increasing his net worth. Just like anyone else, he has to pay back what he borrows, he immediately owes an equal debt. And that requires actual income, which gets taxed.

Larry has sold tons of Alphabet stock and paid lots of capital gains taxes. This is easily available public information. The whole buy-borrow-die thing is sort of a stupid myth. Actual centibillionaires diversify because the risk of having a huge concentrated position is much greater than the liability of having to pay some capital gains taxes.

Then you'd have two (or three, or four) companies that Larry owns 5% each of that are collectively worth $4T.

Google doesn't have much power. It can't arrest you or pass laws or vote. It just happens to produce a lot of profits for its shareholders (who are, overwhelmingly, average people with 401Ks) and a lot of profits means a big market cap.

If we need revenue to fund useful government programs, great, let's tax Larry. But I don't understand what problem is solved by expropriation qua expropriation.