Call them what they are: toxic pathological hoarders.
11
"Abolishing billionaire", this type of thinking seems a little bit silly. 1) billionaires, even the most reactionary, selfish, the least philanthropic are all in all rather benevolent (not to mention those, like Gates, who keep bringing so much to their fellow humans, not only with their money) compared to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and all the dictators incredibly successful at gaining power and bringing hell, so learn to recognise real threats ! 2) billionaires are more an effect than a cause. The cause is the value brought to the world by their innovation, creativity, obsessions and energy, so you may not want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs with some cool restyled leninism !
3) plus, billionaires don't put their money in coffers like Uncle Scrooge, they spend it or invest it, maybe lavishly and conspicuously but it still ends up and trickles down in the economy, sometimes in unique foundations like Gates, Broad's, Ford's and others, that earmarked tax money would never have achieved. A few billionaires like Soros, Gates, Bezos, etc. freely and creatively investing in education, health, food, environment innovations, may bring some of the most serendipitous contributions to reduce the present growing inequalities caused by these same billionaire-producing innovations !
11
Bigger is better.
$1 billion!....I vote for 100 million
3
How does one destroy the fantasy of Travie McCoy" "I wanna be a billionaire so freakin' bad" and uncounted others? Efforts to eliminate self interest are largely derived from self interest and generally damaging to all parties.
3
Bravo! Well done Mr. Manjoo.
Don Brown
3
Amen.
3
What a kick in the butt to all the left wing billionaires that support socialist causes.....I always wonder were they find all these unemployed demonstrators, college grads that can't find a job with there human rights diploma?...Too involved to get a "real' job? Or just well to do kids living off there parents allowance.
11
This is such a weird, provocative, pointless article masquerading as thoughtful. This is like when the WSJ denies climate science. Why write this. It’s so disheartening.
12
There seems to be no limit on the lunacy proposed by the left. This is right up there.
Where exactly would the wealth go? To the same government that can't do anything without huge overruns and inefficiencies? Collective planning a la Moscow?
Keep writing nonsense like this and he won't have to worry about ever becoming wealthy.
23
Before they open their mouths again, I implore Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, David Leonhardt, Paul Krugman and countless others who seem impervious to truth to pay attention to the wise observations of recent Nobelist Angus Deaton of Princeton.
Deaton says: "the most popular story in the media is the 'inequality kills' story. Of course, this presumes that if people at the top had made less, those at the bottom would have more, which I don’t believe is true. Even then, the matching of mortality to income growth, as a story, turns out to be surprisingly difficult to tell.
Deaton continues: "…. [I]t’s far from clear that [the mortality epidemic for the less educated] has anything to do at all with expanding income inequality."
And also "… [I]f someone gets rich, good luck to them. Otherwise it is as if those left behind in the prisoner of war camp can legitimately complain that their lives are worse just because some people made a successful escape. Yet there are many, particularly on the left, who think that equality is a desirable goal in and of itself."
"This idea has enormous appeal. But the more you think about it, the more difficult and less appealing it becomes …. [F]ew would support a prohibition on allowing parents to use their talents to favor their children."
"Procedural inequality … important and overly neglected…. Getting rich by making is fine; getting rich by stealing is not fine."
Morally Deaton is right, and they are wrong. Time for them to admit it.
24
There are two ways to fly higher than the other birds:
1). Fly higher
2). Shoot the other birds down.
Lots of guns on this board...
22
A yes, cap one's wealth at 999,999,999 dollars. How come the moment the left is energized has gotten some power, they want to take away from other people's things?
I have a suggestion. Find some one who is poorer than you, then give your wealth so that you two have the same amount of money. Then I'll at least accept that you are earnest.
20
If I comment on a photo for an NYT article it rarely gets posted. They say, 'a picture's worth a thousand words' - so why can't we comment on them? If this picture from Davos, Switzerland represents the vanguard of economic reform in America the working class here are in real trouble.
4
We want to keep our billionaires ! May be I can become one also one day . So don't ever kill the billionaires !
8
Bigger is Better ! Steal the land, kill the whole native population, import and kidnap by force a whole third population to enslave it for 300 years , fight an inner civil war with millions of deaths and still call themselves the "unitted " states, now invade the European economy by installing all its major corporations there and cheating not to pay taxes . What else can we expect from that culture ?
3
This is nice and provocative.... I know that the author is surely both aware of and ardently opposed to clickbait, but I'm afraid that the NYT is less knowledgeable and less scrupulous on this score.
This is borderline crazy in any event.... Of course, there are billionaires galore these days - IPO's and rational investors looking for the occasional 100-to-1 payoff are equally responsible.
SOME of them are good. Both Bill Gates and Warren B. are, I believe, first class human beings, ... and the best answer to all the baloney questions in this article is -
Government and even most well-run foundations waste a huge percent of what they spend ... and lack nimbleness ... and have big conflicts of interest, ... so THANK HEAVENS there IS the occasional wealthy-beyond-what-s/he'll ever need ... or even his/her kids will ever need INDIVIDUAL!
George Soros "wrote the book" on what is possible, ... and not just because he was uncommonly wealthy. "Mere billionaires" - less than $10B in terms of net worth - have long since blazed the trail for him and others.
Yes, the tax code needs a major overhaul - going far beyond reversing the Trumpian pig-out. But if you take that "pledge" seriously - my kids may be millionaires when they leave college... but NOT BILLIONAIRES
seriously, this could be way better than the revolution that Farhad implicitly and others explicitly are calling for.
It's OBVIOUS that people smart enough to accumulate $1B+ are likely smart enough to master "charity!"
3
There is only a single point worthy of consideration here: " Abolishing" billionaires for the purpose of limiting excessive power. Moral considerations and all of that are far to vague and inconsistent to matter.
1
Banning billionaires in America is not going to be a practical idea unless all political campaigns are taxpayer-funded. As long as politicans need private funds to launch and propagate their campaigns, the billionaires will continue to thrive.
To ban billionaires, political campaigns will first have to be funded by taxes
1
Think of $1B this way - if you spent $1000 day, everyday, how long would it take to spend $1B? Answer - 2739 years.
11
How is the existence of billionaire's in this world even possible? Most of us walk through life utterly distressed half the time that we can't help all the homeless people we pass on the way to work or can't do something to save that magnificent species of gorilla going extinct that we saw on the news (as well as the utterly destitute people's cutting down their habitat because they have no other way to survive), and on and on and on. Yet, these "people" can manage to accumulate billions (an amount of money that is really unfathomable) and just hoard it. Yes, I know they give away millions and millions, But take out your calculator, divide what you estimate you give away by your net worth (and don't forget to subtract all you owe from your savings before doing so), write down that decimal, and then divide one hundred million by say 50 billion (Bloomberg or Zuckerberg or Bezos type money) and compare the decimals. They're sociopaths. Still I don't believe in setting a cap on wealth or arbitrarily picking one billion as a cut off for allowable wealth. Let's simply get back to a steeply progressive income tax, eliminate weird tax benefits for being a hedgefund manager, tax capital gains and large estate transfers, etc. If they can still get that rich and it means that much to them, fine.
12
Fast and simple solution to our problems:
Resurrect the Internal revenue tax code from, say - 1957. Adjust all the brackets for inflation. Remove the ancient subsidies to fossil fuels corporations (15% off the top is tax exempt? Seriously?) Adjust all the deductions for inflation.
And then, sit back and watch the fur fly. Billionaires that are kvetching over a measly 70% top marginal rate will plotz when faced with the 91% that their grandaddys paid in 1957.
Faced with the extraordinary amassment of wealth by the very few, we may need to take this one step further - and institute a yearly 'excess success' tax - of say - 5% of everything over one billion. If you are a billionaire and don't like this idea, you could evade that tax the way author J K Rowling did - gave away so much that she is no longer a billionaire.
8
There is one huge, huge problem with this idea, regardless of which side of the political fence you are on. The assumption is that the government would somehow end up with the "excess" money to do with as they please, and both parties have clearly shown that they have about the same fiscal responsibility as a drunken teenager with dad's no-limit credit card.
Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc. all got where they are by improving our lives in some way; they are not evil, undisciplined creatures that need to be brought down to size. But this is exactly what Robert Reich and others like Mr. Scocca, assume as their premise. I'd rather have Mr. Gates giving his billions to help promote health, education, and development the world over, as he does, rather than leave it in the hands of our Congress to waste as they have continually shown a propensity for.
21
Before I could comment, I had to either sign in via Facebook, which is run by a billionaire or Google, whose owners are billionaires. I am against abolishing billionaires because then I couldn't comment on future articles!
5
Our current economic structure rewards destructive behavior.
The reason that so many of these businesses make so much money is that they don’t have to be responsible for the damage that they do.
What if the fossil fuel or plastics industries had to be responsible for the mess that they make?
7
Perhaps if we spent more time challenging ourselves than competing with others the sense of irrational entitlement and dare I say--envy--would give way to the truth that we live in the greatest country in the world in which to seek opportunity, create wealth, live successfully. It may not be a perfect system but it's better than anything else out there.
6
In looking over the comments I see that there are millionaires who want to protect the rights of billionaires. Comparing billionaires and millionaires is comparing apples or oranges. Billionaires are 1,000 times richer than millionaires. For instance, imagine I am making a yearly income of $66,800 per year. Imagine that the money fairy waves her wand and my income is increased by 1,000 times. The next year I would make $65,800,000, making me a multi-millionaire. Ths puts me in a different income bracket, to say the least. Even with a marginal tax rate of 70% after the first $10 million, I still have $28,600,000 to play around with.
Increase my hypothetical $66,800,000 by 1,000 times more and you would have $66.8 billion, or how much Jeff Bezos’ fortune has grown since Trump took office, according to Bloomberg. Tell me how hard he works, how many hours per week. I don’t know. If he were working a 40 work week then for the last two years he would have been making $16,372,549 per hour. In a much publicized move, he increased the wages of his lowest paid workers to $15 per hour last November. That means he is making 1,091,503 times what his lowest paid employees are earning, the very people he is using to create his wealth. That strikes me as an obscene disparity.
It is a failure of imagination to equate millions and billions. Do the math.
13
For some time I have had the same idea! Some number is more than enough. A billion? I had thought more like a hundred million.
Consider that the very rich are skilled and driven to succeed. If more money can no longer be a goal,I believe many of them might change their focus to things that would be far more beneficial to others!
Let’s force the issue and channel thattalent and drive!
2
It's a provocative title. Good! It's about time we get this conversation started. Here’s two more pieces that need to be in it.
1) Billionaires are not a natural phenomenon. We have them because we agree to have them, or not. The thing is, none of these people have anything, their claim of property, unless the rest of us agree to protect it. None of us can make any kind of property claim unless the rest of the tribe gives protection.
So the very existence of property comes from a collective decision to protect.
How big a claim we protect is also a collective decision. Right now it seems there’s no upper limit. I venture that’s not really the case. I bet we would not honor a claim to all the world's wealth by a Putin or some Chinese media tycoon, or a claim by Jeff Bezos to all the wealth of the United States. There is an upper limit. Let’s talk about it and decide what it should be.
2) Indentured servitude. This a feared reality for way too many people. School debt, accident, employer failure to pay promised deferred income and other unforeseen bad luck circumstances can push almost anyone into an economic hole they can't escape. Letting one person, or a very small number of people own everything makes the servitude problem worse.
6
Read Branco Milanovic " Global Inequality. A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Harvard University Press)".
How inequality and accumulation of capital has destroyed nations economies and how today after the last 40 years of exponential acceleration of inequality ,the creation of a billionaire plutocratie and its reverse medal,the installment of populism can seriously put democracy in danger.
2
Many people who have read this column, certainly those who have commented, seem to have picked up on a general theme: Wealth, in and of itself is not a bad thing--unless you feel that you are poor and wish you weren't.
Most of us, if we are wealthy(an inexact reference) tend to feel that we have worked for and earned what we have. That is where I stand.
We are all aware of the dire circumstances of many of the people in the world. The Socialist tendency is to say that individual wealth should be redistributed according to need. Somewhere in my memory, I seem to recall that was a Soviet mantra some time ago. Let me ask this: how well did that work our for them?
OK. We can, and should, give what we can of our available funds toward helping those less fortunate. But mind, in our own country first. We are not, and never will be, a global community, the EU experiment aside. Even there, as we see, there are populist feelings taking root. Brexit, anyone?
The above puts me in the crosshairs of the Obama led millennials who have never experienced disruption, but, given time, they will find out.
1
The wealthiest 1% are responsible for 86% of charitable donations. What is being said here is that the federal government should force the 1% to fork over that money rather than giving the 1% the choice of where to donate their wealth. I can't be the only one to see the flaw here, and I have to say I'm really deeply shocked at how the current state of politics has pushed the left into advocating both radical socialism and continued foreign war.
3
love this, also means no tech inequality, access to heart lung machines,or proton beams for prostate cancer, pellets work just fine.Like the Soviets where billions lived and died in bad shoes.Ringworm needs web access and vinegar,or a minute clinic at any pharmacy.
If you’re going to argue for a radical rethinking how our capitalist society allows people to accumulate capital, PLEASE don’t use male pronouns when referring to billionaires. It’s misogynistic and undermines your underlying point about injustice. I’ve grown up in a world that normalizes the use of male pronouns for elite positions/jobs and it has led me to internalize the belief that people with those identities are the ones who deserve those positions the most. Now, it just makes me feel erased.
4
The concentration of wealth and ownership of property under the control of a few is very dangerous as we see today in politics. The wealthy aren’t often the brightest and best of but simply the lucky winners at the right time and place who believe they deserve what they acquired no matter the means of acquisition.
Even so this is a direct attack and doesn’t solve the real issue which is global labor arbitrage. If you want actually erode this massive wealth gap you have to find a way to flatten the global inequality. Or find a way to tax market arbitrage and provide social programs to offset job losses.
The ability for labor to organize or defend itself is drastically reduced because of globalization. They just punish labor by moving somewhere else.
Either way the wealthy I see in our day and age seem exceedingly arrogant and dangerous. Maybe I’m just jaded by our current president though but I’ve rarely worked with CEO’s and executives that I’ve respected. Most are incompetent, selfish and spend more time fooling around in the office than actually providing value and leadership.
2
The writer refers to Peter Singer the philosopher who actually advocates that everyone with more wealth than necessary should give away whatever exceeds the basics. Singer himself does. This would mean that most middle class and even working class families have too much. Compared to much of the world, most Americans consume beyond their share. Too much food, entertainment, gas guzzlers, pollution. So before directing your class envy, righteous schemes, and moral superiority at others, see how others might look at you.
2
I would also suggest a great book by Anand Giridharadas
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.
"An insider's groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to "change the world" preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve.
Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? He also points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world. A call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike."
Great read!
3
Say, Google is worth $1B and Serge owned 51%. Market the next day says co. worth $3B, so Serge must give up control and sell part of company to pay tax. Market the next day says co. only worth $500mm. Do we give Serge back the shares he had to sell and the tax he had to pay?
6
Abolish Billionaires: yes, just give us their money.
1
The idea of a billionaire needing to be a good billionaire is a fallacy. It is based on the notion that benevolence is more beneficial to the masses than the enlightened self interest that earned the money. Let’s take Bill Gates for instance. The products , services, and money made as a result of founding Microsoft have a far greater value to the masses than any benevolent acts or charitable donations that come from him.
2
Three millennia of humanity's best moral thinking arrive at same conclusion: that greed will never give us a better world and is highly destructive to the individual afflicted with it. There are people in history who, realizing that their excess wealth constituted a morally corrosive condition, gave it away with both hands. They are the anomaly, however. Why would we trust an anomaly to keep the money/power flowing as equitably as possible? What about the billionaires who feel no moral imperative to undam their accumulation? Should we risk the economic enslavement of humanity to give the few unprecedented power and freedom and just hope they will see the light? Why did we ever think that a winner-take-all system was a good idea except we hoped we might become a winner in that system? Were we blinded by . . . greed?
2
Banish the Billionaires! Well, why not, I guess? It will only impact maybe 500 Americans. While we are at it, let's ban actors from winning more than one Academy Award, well, maybe two. Come to think of it why should Tom Brady be allowed to have more than two Super Bowl rings? I imagine politicians could also devise a means to prevent a musician from creating more than one or two Platinum records. Speaking of politicians, if we ban billionaires we should be able to ban elected officials from serving more than one or two terms. Getting back to billionaires, why stop there - all a family really needs to live comfortably is maybe $100,000 a year. We could even index the limit to inflation. I am 100% certain our government can appoint a committee that would invest the money taken from billionaires so much better than the people who generated the billion dollars in the first place. To make it fairer and, of course, to protect them from themselves, we should include in the banishment the teeny-weeny top of the millionaire bracket as well. We certainly don’t want anyone to become billionaires.
6
The government should not be in the business of deciding how much is too much. As long as the money is made legally then it’s not anyone’s business. Sure, no one needs a billion to live off of but that’s not what billionaires do. The vast majority of of a billionaires money is typically tied up in investments that are valuable to the economy.
3
Again Mr. Manjoo floats an idea that needs world wide cooperation to work. Billionaires can just "move" to a tax haven and be done with us. Can we please have someone writing opinion pieces in the Times with exciting ideas that address the problems we face, including how we create a shift to the left in our two party system, how can we create a society where working people do not have to live in economic fear. I think this click bate silliness has no place in the Times opinion columns. A thoughtful examination how the tide is turning away from veneration of excessive wealth might be a much more interesting read.
5
"I cover technology, an industry that belches up a murder of new billionaires annually..."
What, exactly, does this mean?
4
I'm not a billionaire and have no chance of being one. But, it doesn't bather me. We've had pretty good luck with the supper wealthy. They gave us grand Tetons. We had a president who helped us come back from the depression and carried us through WW II. Bill Gate is giving huge amounts as to help where help is needed. But when I hear these ideas, I think of misdirection. It takes our attention away from our needs. Has anyone said, "We'll be able to lower your taxes."? . Of course not. It's not about us. Maybe we should look at Congress. Anyone worth over one million is not allowed to serve. Right now over half of congress are millionaires. Take away their perks. Let them buy, out of their salary, their own health insurance and medicines. Maybe they would do something about drug prices that have skyrocketed in the last ten to fifteen years. When I hear this type of yaking, especially from congress,I know that it is actually, "Don't think about of you needs, we have to get the rich. Also, be sure to vote for me next election."
1
If this picture for real? With friends like NYT, who needs enemies? Would someone in the waiting room of an Urgent Care Clinic in Keokuk have anything in common with a guy in Davos, Switzerland, sporting a proletariat cap (like a costume for the movie, The Way We Were) and a middle-eastern scarf? I guess it's still safe to assume NYT is not getting product placement revenue from Eastpak....
1
The question about the morality and existence of billionaires could take a very steep curve to the left if China's Enron-style accounting takes a dive in the next year or so. If US govn't loans from China go the way of the humpback whale, and the economy and currency tips into the abyss - watch out, billionaires!
Reference Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a pre-Caesar Roman dictator. After the civil wars, the Roman treasury was empty. Sulla compiled a list of the wealthiest Romans and confiscated all of their wealth to bulk out the treasury again. Quick and efficient.
Just saying. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Not a new idea by any means.
I have two objections to any such idea. The first is philosophical/moral, As long as the money was acquired legally, why should any amount of wealth be automatically suspect? What is the moral difference between a man with $999,999,999 and $1,000,000,000? If none, then where is the morality cutoff?
Second is a practical issue. If a person has this kind of money, they can import their lifestyle to anywhere they want to live. Therefore, unless we figure out a way to make this a world wide scheme, all it will do is to drive the rich out of the country. I, for one, would rather that they spend their cash here than somewhere else, and I would rather get whatever tax revenues they may pay funneled into the U.S coffers as well.
Either of these is, to me, sufficient reason to doubt this proposal.
4
Reminds me of the George Carlin line: "How come anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac and anyone who drives slower than you is a moron?" It's always relative, and of course one tends to think that your perspective is the correct one.
Billionaires exist because they (or sometimes their relatives) did something new or better than anyone else. Whatever they did must have been beneficial because, otherwise, they wouldn't have been compensated for it by society. Society benefits as a result -- that is the important outcome, and one we don't want to squelch through half-baked confiscation schemes. The fact that the creator benefited personally is largely irrelevant.
110
@Steve I don’t know that billionaires did something better necessarily. What they have done is to create something more valuable to consumers than others. That’s the key. No one becomes a billionaire except by inheritance unless their consumers have found enough value in their products/services or products/devices invested in to earn that much money.
10
@Steve
The benefits to society really depend on which society you choose to observe. Consumers reward creators for the products they invent--but they aren't the ones laboring in sweatshops (or factories that come darn close to that definition) in far-away countries making those products. Even with the best and most altruistic of intentions, a person cannot amass billions of dollars through enterprise without causing suffering, because somewhere down the line in that company is the person responsible for saving money by exploiting cheap labor--savings that get passed right back up the food chain. If that were not the case, fancy smartphones would not be affordable to the average consumer, which means fewer of them would be sold, and less money ends up in the creator's pocket.
I don't see any reasonable way to "abolish" billionaires, but I don't think they deserve the reverence with which our particular society seems to view them.
23
@Steve How does society benefit from hedge fund billionaires? Or crypto billionaires?
40
No mention of Andrew Carnegie? Maligned at times though he might be--and often appropriately so--this idea started with him.
One question I have is, to whom do the billionaire's owe their wealth? Should Bill Gates be doing more to advance our poor maternal health outcomes in the US (given this is his wife's pet project abroad?), particularly in black and rural areas in Washington state and elsewhere? It was America's favorable tax laws (and Washington's lack of state taxes) that have fed their fortunes to begin with. Or does it belong to the developing world on whose backs America was built?
My thought is both. But it's a nuanced question, I suppose: If it's not their money, to whom does it rightfully belong?
1
Did they earn it or simply shave value off our currency by leveraging markets. Much of what these wealthy do doesn’t bring us value but actually costs us. In a way the rich tax us indirectly against the value of our market versus others while directly pushing inflation down through labor arbitrage. In no way are they creating new innovation or value. They simply have enough wealthy to leverage global inequality to their advantage. If you had enough wealthy you could do the same. This isn’t rocket science. They aren’t bringing us new innovation or a brighter future.
For lack of a better word it’s a reverse tax against our society. It actually costs us and our communities as they take our skills, knowledge and efforts and then sell as we train our competition to put us out of a job and then sell it back to us at our current highest market price possible instead of the actual cost.
1
One point that Mr. Manjoo fails to cover is that even the good billionaires have trouble giving away their money. It takes a great deal of effort to ensure that charities aren't squandering the funds and are actually providing effective solutions. Any while they vet the best use of resources their wealth continues to accumulate interest. By contrast our chronically underfunded public institutions already have accountability built in and an equitable way to provide access to ensure the funds would go to those who need it most (public ed, low income housing, and healthcare clinics to name a few). Unfortunately our global economy has made it incredibly easy for the wealthy to shield their gains. Whatever the solution is it will probably have to be more complex than just raising the marginal tax rate.
1
Actually, the poor in Alabama also get ringworm (and a whole lot of other preventable diseases)
1
The more accumulation of capital , the more obvious abuse it operates. In singularity but also as a system. Just read Marx to understand.
Who can compete against Amazon today ? Who can compete against Apple ? They all cheat . And get away with it. Ireland offers a zero tax incitive because it needed to get out of extreme poverty and needed the jobs. Now the EU has to exerce pressure on Ireland to ask Apple or the other GAFA to pay even the ridiculous amount of tax that they are supposed to honor. And they don't. The money is being redirected to the US via London and the US fiscal paradise islands of the Caribbean and the EU cannot do anything about that . The power of centralised money corrupts everything. if you sue a mega rich company that can hire 100 lawyers you have to fight against it with the same power. And governments are impoverished by the unballance of budgets and of capital.The fiscal fraud per year of the GAFA ( only US companies ) is equivalent to the annual deficit of the EU budget .
Of course London takes a big chunk of the fraud also. The term " receleur " in French ( is it receiver in english ? ) means the intermediary who profits by selling the fruit of the crime.
1
Practically speaking, we can’t abolish billionaires. But we can export them. It worked for Venezuela.
Winston Churchill said it so well, years ago: "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
Someone should remind Mr. Manjoo, that the poorest, most despotic places on earth, are places with no millionaires or billionaires--except for those in the political ruling class who rob the country of wealth.
There are no millionaires or billionaires in Cuba, or North Korea, or Venezuela. And there are no large, successful corporations either. There is a reason for this.
Look at any thriving tropical reef. It has big fish, little fish, and every size in-between. When the big fish disappear, everything falls apart. The ecosystem gets seriously out of balance.
Those who strive for income equality should go live in Cuba--where the average per-capita income is $23.00 a month. "But wait!!!" say the Liberals, "...you're forgetting they get free health care".
There is a reason why American technology and culture are found in every corner of the world. There is a reason why Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Intel, Amazon, Netflix, and nearly every large pharmaceutical and technology company are located here in the U.S.--and not in France, Korea, China, Russia, or Scandinavia. It's about freedom.
So far, we have resisted ridiculous calls by folks like Mr. Manjoo---to eat our Billionaires. That we have so many is the very sign of a successful nation.
5
@Jesse The Conservative
So why all these US companies are all settled fiscally in Europe and cheat ?
@RBC (who wants us to thank Carlos Slim, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs)
Oh Boy!!!
If you knew what else Carlos Slim did! And at what price. Convertible bonds are not pretty.
And by the way, I much rather not have Apple or Google if the price tag is an L-shaped wealth and income distribution rather what you are thought in school about bell shaped curves that trace intelligence, talent, height etc.
2
We don't need to speculate on how something like this will work out. We can look at recent experiences in France, for instance. If you try to "soak the rich" there is no doubt the rich will just leave and take up residence elsewhere. Then you've actually created a bigger hole in your budget. But at least it will appear like you're closing the inequality gap so it would be hailed as a success even though everyone is worse off.
2
The siren's call to communism never ceases, no matter how many historical catastrophes and failures. I suppose trying to eradicate "give-me-something-for-free" ideas cannot be done before eradicating human foolishness. Tough job!
2
Yes, Capitalism has a number of problems. Yes, some billioniaires do not want to share their wealth.
An argument against capitlaism and the inevitable 'winners and losers' leaves us where exactly? You can only be sort of rich? You can only be a billionaire if you agree to a 'liberal bill of rights'?
I say abolish liberals who want to tell Michael Bloomberg and Howard Schultz how to live their lives and where to donate their money!
1
I don't have a problem with earned wealth if it can be traced to some social benefit. I do have a problem with inherited wealth.
I tend to agree with Mr. Buffett--while it's fine to leave your kids with enough money to be comfortable, no one should inherit political power, including the political power that comes with extreme wealth. Inheritance taxes, and absolute limits, are essentially if we want to maintain any semblance of democracy.
Moreover, I don't think it's unfair to tax the ultra wealthy more. They receive greater (much greater) benefits from society. They could not be wealthy without the property rights, monetary system, infrastructure, resources (including labor) and protection that all of us provide and the pollution that all of us suffer.
$1 billion! I vote for $100 million!
PLEASE MAKE THIS A NY TIMES PICK! YOU NEED MORE WOMEN AS TIMES PICKS!!!
For all of the commenters here who are wringing their hands over the possibility that Oprah, Steven Spielberg and Paul McCartney might be carted off to the town square to be drawn and quartered, STOP IT!
Mr. Manjoo's point is that we - if we are to claim that we are a moral society - have to wake up and demand policies that will move us toward economic justice. And our current taxation system does NOT go far enough. Not NEARLY far enough.
Raising marginal tax rates on the wealthy is both fair and immensely popular with the American public. Remember that during the Eisenhower years, the marginal tax rate on individuals making over $200,000 was 91 percent. In comparison, AOC's proposal of a 70% marginal tax rate on incomes over $10 million hardly seems radical.
So let's start shifting our paradigm here, people - back to where it once was. A truly progressive tax system IS part of our heritage and our values. We need to return to it - now more than ever.
5
This country was built on taxing the rich, confiscating wealth inheritance, and putting everyone in the same place when they are born, in a fair country with opportunities available to all who have the will and the talent to grab them. This country was explicitly built to outlaw inherited wealth and the resultant class structure that hobbled England and drove its people to the new world for a better chance at life.
What happened? The last time the Billionaires rose (the age of the robber barons) we fixed it with the pragmatic solutions of the New Deal which were designed to prevent this from ever happening again. Did those rules fail? No. Subsequent generations forgot what they were there for and starting with the Reagan administration the rich began a campaign of slow targeted repeal. This was completed by the Clinton administration with its repeal of the Glass Steagall Act which was the jewel in the crown of New Deal solutions. We are again living in the pre New Deal legal structure and the market is again whipsawing with a constant series of recessions and depressions as the Billionaires again loot the economy necessary for the proper functioning of the country.
There is no question that this will bring about another Great Depression, the system is biased toward it. The next FDR will have to install all the same legislative fixes again but will we let them all be repealed again? Maybe next time we need to get rid of capitalism itself?
1
I have enjoyed Manjoo's reporting from Silicon Valley. But his opinion pieces so far suggest he is a young man in an indecent hurry to acquire notoriety. Anyway the bandwagon he jumped on is already overcrowded. Let's hear something original.
Manjoo says abolishing billionaires is "the perfect way to blunt tech-driven inequality." So, to blunt inequality driven by tech, Manjoo would blunt tech? Or the US would surrender tech to, say, China?
Really, is inequality so bad that we will pay that price to reduce it? Why? You'll be hard pressed to find any hard argument or data suggesting that inequality has harmful effects. The benefits, on the other hand, have been enormous. Yale economist William Nordhaus studied the returns from technological advances from 1948-2001 and estimated that the share going to the innovators was 2.2 %. Th rest of us got 87.8%. No a bad deal.
The Warrens, Krugmans and Manjoos of the world have their work cut out for them trying to justify their premise that inequality is a problem. We mustn't allow them to get away with manipulating our emotions with dishonest arguments about a supposed connection between the existence of billionaires and the existence of Americans still getting ringworm. The only connection is that in a system where billionaires are possible many such scourges -- take Hepatitis C, for example -- we are effectively rid of it.
The big lie is that some of us are poor BECAUSE other people are rich. Inequality makes us all richer.
3
The point is that unfettered capitalism does exacerbate inequality...and personally speaking...why does anyone need to have a billion dollars?
@Sumana
What does NEED have to do with anything?
Actually, I'll tell you who needs billionaires -- it is US. Our lives are all lives richer, fuller and safer because of what billionaires do to become billionaires. Thanks to them, fewer of us are needy, and many of us have more than we need, which is good for us.
Is it a coincidence that the growth in the number of billionaires has coincided with the greatest decline in world poverty in history?
1
A familiar argument. From our sermon on April 29th, 2018...
"Here’s a belief you can let knock around the old noggin for a while; while any one person starves to death, no one should have a billion dollars...It should never be forgotten where the money is made anyway. There isn’t a billionaire alive who doesn’t profit from impoverished workers, the people digging the metal out of mines, slaving away on production lines. There really are people who made no money building the phone in your pocket, who will die working in that factory with nothing to show for it, that’s how such a marvel of modern technology costs so little. Why it costs so little, why it is imperative to the executive boards of this committee that they must put reducing costs, and so the quality of life for as many as employees as possible, is to sell as many as they can. Real people die so phones, and shoes, and computers, and jeans can cost so little. So these horrendously underpaid human beings make the products, then the vastly better paid, but just as dependent in their daily lives on their ability to create wealth for others, consumes them. The only one making progress is the on already wealthy in the first place, directly at the expense of pretty much everyone else on the planet."
I'm glad to see that this idea is finally reaching mainstream politicians (you can paint them as radicals all you like, the fact is that they represent the masses). The time of worshiping money, and its hoarders, must end.
4
Wow, the defensiveness around money is so rich and vehement. It's hilarious to see people defend billionaires. Nobody here is attacking enterprise or the basic state of wealth. Some folks need a hard lesson in the notion of scale.
Suppose I like coffee, and I decide that because I like coffee, I'm going to acquire a warehouse that's 1,000 square feet and fill it floor to ceiling with coffee grounds. Not as a business venture, mind you, but simply because I am fond of my favorite coffee brand and don't want to run out. I'm also considering putting a down payment on a larger warehouse because I simply can't have enough coffee available to me. Pretty nuts, right?
Anyone with hundreds of millions of dollars who is still motivated by the desire to accumulate wealth needs a therapist. It's called hoarding; it's purely fear-based and neurotic, and it's fundamentally destructive to everyone, including the hoarder. Nobody becomes a billionaire by putting in overtime. The notion of "earning" that much money is physically impossible.
4
This is why we need to strengthen the federal estate tax. A society that permits excessive wealth to be passed down by heredity leads to a self-perpetuating oligarchy where the ultra-rich are selected by birth rather than ingenuity and hard work.
6
We have come to consider hoarding and addiction as very serious problems, and yet hoarding and addiction are celebrated when money is the substance. It is deeply strange and deeply destructive. It was not always this way, and it does not need to remain this way.
4
At first blush, this sounds completely correct! How could there be billionaires?!? However, their worth is more complicated and than having over a billion in cash in the bank. Many of them do have large amounts of cash, but their worth is based on the value of the companies they own and helped create. Stopping innovation and the ability to make money off that innovation is a clear mistake, but we need to put many more checks in place: higher taxes, both corporate and personal, on this growth, much improved baseline requirements for workers, including living wage, benefits, profit sharing, and finally a high bar for environmental responsibility. Revolution is not a new concept—bloody conflict movitated by gross economic disparity has occurred many times. We must act to reduce the social and economic misery that a very large part of the world and the US is experiencing while these individuals get more and more wealthy. It is not just the right thing to do, but makes our society more stable. We are increasingly living out the last stages of a game of monopoly — a few people have all the resources and the others are running out and cannot rebound without a reset.
1
The problem is not so much that people can be wealthy, but how they get wealthy. Some are paid insane amounts of money for singing or acting or throwing a football, others for hitting home runs in the financial markets, even if they may fumble afterwards, others for taking the lead of companies, even if they may end up running them into the ground, some for being brilliant entrepreneurs, etc... Even if the money made is justified, the problem may then be that many find ways to mitigate, avoid or evade taxes. I don't know of an easy way to control the amount of money thrown at entertainers (although stopping to provide tax subsidies for the construction of sports arenas and the like might be a step in the right direction), but clawbacks on traders and executive compensation should be a standard feature, as should a tax code and enforcement that prevents abuse.
2
Thanks so much for this column.
From your lips to God's ears, as they say.
Billionaires are those that can't share.
I totally agree with AOC that Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffet are examples of benign billionaires. And I vehemently disagree with Joe Biden who recently said that all our economic inequality cannot be laid at the feet of 500 or so billionaires. Oh yes it can!
70% of American support taxing the stratosphere brackets. It is what we did from Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. It built the middle class. It did not hobble our economy one iota. Even so, I will bet that most Americans do not understand the logarithmic difference in the political control and influence exerted by the billionaire class. It has become unhealthy. It needs to stop.
3
Bill Gates is a self-made man, right? Deserves his billions, right? But what if a person with the exact same capabilities and work ethic was born in the jungles of the Democratic Repbulic of Congo. Would the same Bill Gates have made his billions?
You see where I'm going with this. He made his billions because he grew up in tn environment where all the prerequisites for his success were established by the work of his fellow citizens, including those making minimum wage. They all contributed to his billions.
4
To really get at the money of the super rich, neither a wealth tax nor higher marginal rates on regular income will do it. The rich will easily get around those by transferring some of the wealth to their kids.
What could be more effective is a graduated capital gains tax increase that taxes rich people's investment gains as regular income, rather than at the lower capital gains rates. We could also tax stock transactions, and also eliminate carried interest. In other words, tax those areas where the real money is being made.
1
The last column I read by Farhad Manjoo was candidly arguing for open borders. So I'm shocked to find how much I agree with this column.
It's undoubtedly true that the world would be better off, if no single person's possessions were worth over one billion dollars. The existence of billionaires in our society is an obscenity. The only question is how best to take the excess wealth of the obscenely wealthy and use it to benefit ordinary people.
2
Where would we be if we banned millionaires a century ago? Should we chop down the redwoods because not all trees in the country are as tall?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has some unworkable ideas, but her success in becoming a Congresswoman has shown that you don't need to be rich to become a politician. It did require guts and ambition, qualities lacking in the "ban the billionaires camp".
1
Begin with the vulgar winner-take-all lotteries. Instead of $1 billion for one, why not $1 million each for one thousand?
1
Mr. Manjoo proposes a solution that is 180 degrees from a more perfect solution. We should ban poor people....plain and simple. The cost and burden of all these poor people to American society is just too great. Consider the amount of the federal budget going to Medicaid, housing, food aid, policing and direct monetary aid....and the ability to put those funds into infrastructure.
We could rebuild our cities, roads (stop using steel plates to cover pot holes), and schools with the money we stop spending on this small part of the US population.
What to do with these poor people? To begin we shame them....though not the infirm, elderly or disabled...and let them know that they, the poor, are not welcome and they are and need to change immediately.
For those not willing to change, we establish a new homeland for them in what is now the San Francisco area and call it "Poorlandia".
To quote Mr Manjoo..."that if we aimed, through public and social policy, simply to discourage people from being poor, just about everyone would be better off".
I know this may all sound un-American, but the fault is all their own.
2
@Scottsville
I can see your Swiftian bumper sticker now: EAT THE POOR.
Absolutely agree with this article. There is no need for anyone to accumulate the wealth that small countries don't have. We should limit wealth. The wealthy need to feel they are in it, like the rest of us, instead of buying their way out of insecurity about health costs, etc.
And before they leave the country, the get to leave all but a billion to take with them, anyway, so why would they leave.
Extremely rich people shouldn't get to decide what problems need their money, the people should.
1
“Getting rid of billionaires” is a monumental task at this stage of capitalist evolution. Thomas Piketty addressed this issue in his seminal work “Wealth in the Twenty First Century” where he advocated taxing wealth. For example, it would require foreign banks and governments to report the wealth held by these billionaires, something they are currently unwilling to do. And, as has been repeatedly noted, this wealth is well hidden. It is possible to modestly reduce inequality by increasing the marginal tax rates; remember historically this was always accompanied with generous tax deductions. I know, as the UN has recently determined that some 8 billionaires have more wealth than 3 billion people on the planet. Many would consider this to be obscene ethically, or religiously. We can, I believe, as a body politic, establish a socioeconomic community built around the “quaint” ideas embodied in Harry Truman’s Fair Deal: civil rights protections; universal health insurance; welfare and labor reform; aid for education and housing; aid for veterans and farmers; infrastructure improvements; and aid for scientific research and development. (Some would complain vigorously because it would require shifting expenditures from military expenses.)
1
Abolish billionaires from human society? A limit to how much money a person can accumulate in society?
I don't think it's possible to do so without a vastly increased faith in human society across all of society, and by increased faith I mean actual faith in the capacity of the human race to develop itself, to realistically succeed, to not be defeated by all its often self-caused problems, and I certainly do not mean by faith the false spreading of good news across society such as economic growth, decline of unemployment, and slogans such as "our country is doing great", and without question by faith I do not mean religion.
I mean we will not be able to prevent people from "trying to escape" in society, whether this means drug addiction, over eating, or the accumulation of billions and fleeing to Hawaii or Switzerland or New Zealand (pick a "better place" for yourself) until people have an actual and realistic faith in society, are willing to stay put and work hard and put forth all the imagination they have because they know there will be a clear return on their investment.
The billionaires across the world and the obvious admiration of them across all walks of life testifies to the fact that for all human progress we have as much faith in society as we have ever had, which is to say very little, and people still dream like in fairytales of old, want to be as the kings and queens, the nobility, because regular life is just not the happiness its supposed to be.
1
What do billionaires fear? Is it control? If they are so brilliant won't they still be in positions of power even if they have vastly less money to spend on yachts? What's the difference between a CEO with a billion dollars and a CEO with $10 million in the bank? The billionaire can substitute influence and leverage for good ideas. They spend their time buying up other companies and schemes instead of trying to hone their product and make more efficient processes for the organizations they lead. In other words, wealthy people use their money to buy up economic real estate so that they can extract more rent. It's like a cancer on our economic system. Not welfare queens, but rent queens.
2
No. Income and wealth inequality are inevitable consequences of a free society. However a democracy should also include laws to guarantee its lowest earning "a living wage" and a progressive tax system that funds social benefits for all citizens to correct the propensity of "the market" to under-value and under-pay workers - especially essential workers like nurses and teachers.
You see, "the market" is an abstraction - in reality their are only finite and fallible individuals earning, spending and investing - and employers are generally very smart people, but tend not to appreciate that, though it may be in their interests to pay their employees as little as they can - at least if their business is a supplier of goods or services for mass consumption - it's actually in their interests if all other employers pay their employees as much as they can!
Democratic governments should have the good sense to appreciate this and therefore subsidise or provide with no charge goods and services to all, it is in the benefit of all that all benefit from, such as roads and basic education and health care, even if some cannot afford to pay for them from their own earnings. Of course this means tax must be paid - and the most by the highest earners.
Tax paid in the past provides much of the amenity of a commonwealth which allows some of its citizens to thrive exceptionally as individuals. They should accept the requirement to pay much tax to secure its future as a consequence.
1
An interesting concept. But targeting a certain level of assets or income is destined to fail and will only further employ an army of lawyers, accountants and other professionals to ensure that the mega rich will keep their wealth and power. What must be done is to design a system which fundementially helps ensure a more equal distribution of income and assets.
The simple fact is that no one becomes a billionaire by working for wages. For example, if a person is paid $1,000.00 per hour and works 2,000 hours per year that would be 2 million dollars a year. Enough for a comfortable life but which will never create any billionaires. The only way someone becomes a billionaire, is though finance and owning their own business. And yes, these businesses often make great contributions to society and this kind of risk taking and innovation deserves to be rewarded. But, on the other hand, nothing exists in a vacuum and the mega wealthy need to understand that without a functioning society, they would never have had environment where it would have ever been possible to become wealthy or preserve that wealth.
The only real solution, is to create a system that does not reward money earned through investments, over income received from wages. And some redistribution, for example an estate tax over estates worth over ten million dollars, should be imposed. However, the big picture solution lies in a more equitable distribution and taxation of wealth as it is created.
4
I agree 100% with Mr. Scocca when he says, "We should presumptively get rid of billionaires. All of them.”
The people who are billionaires are not all "bad". The insatiable greed, lack of regulation and low taxation that have allowed them to amass such wealth are bad. Of course, those people who got their wealth through theft, inheritance, corruption and tax evasion have behaved badly and should be prosecuted.
The answer is to fix the things that allowed unfettered wealth to accumulate as it has in the past few years.
Break up ALL BIG corporations and organizations.
Regulate the internet so that companies under one umbrella company and/or organization cannot share personal data with each other.
Fully protect the privacy of individuals without their express permission to access it every single time.
Demand that one-half the gross profits from every one of OUR government contracts - before any personnel and corporate improvements and/or benefits - be given back to WE THE PEOPLE to help fund OUR social safety nets and infrastructure.
TAX people and companies/organizations progressively higher after a tax-free base - say $35,000 - for all taxpayers.
That would start to level the playing field.
2
I think chasing down billionaires with progressive and/or additional taxes is putting cart before horse. What we need is a top-down approach. The society should decide what it realistically (!) wants in 2020 and beyond: healthcare for all, free preschool/college education and worker retraining programs, etc. Then we have a budget; then economists can come up with some tax system that covers it.
There is also another, related but not identical problem: taking money out of politics this country should solve.
1
I am employed by an institution funded by a billionaire. I am grateful for the generosity this person exhibited. But I would have been happier if our government had funded the NIH better so that we could afford to pay more scientists to do taxpayer funded work that would in turn benefit the taxpayers.
The existence of billionaires means they will have an outsized influence over our nation's priorities. And hundreds of millions of us exist without the clout to push things in any direction, regardless of how many of us there are.
2
That's a fine article on an idea whose time has come. Yes, there will always be the poor and the rich but the enormous disparity between them, growing by the second, is vulgar, brutal, inhibiting for all living things. Let's hope that natural selection--along with a massive decrease in human populations--will level things out in a few centuries.
I am as anti-Republican as they come, but when the Left starts employing the same cheap slogans (medicare for all, abolish billionaires) as the Right (MAGA), it's the Left that will be in trouble. The American dream (true or not) provides for the highest aspirations and in America, that translates into wealth. Billionaires (mostly like Gates, Oprah, Brin, Zuckerberg, Buffet) became billionaires in stock holdings (not income) because they provided what the people wanted. I am all for a progressive income taxes, capital gains taxes, estate taxes, eliminating tax loop holes, but lets define it as such rather than an empty slogan that will turn off more people than it will attract. In the end (or 2020) it will be the 'Socialist want your wealth' rather than ' Abolish Billionaires' that will win the day because that is America is hard-wired.
3
Not an unreasonable idea. Let's start with progressive taxation and traffic fines - as well as lowering fines and bail for those unable to pay them. Probably impossible to enforce given shell companies, trusts, etc.
Yes ! Thank you for elucidating this concept. I've come to believe that government in many ways functions as an insurer. Government insures individual and corporate property rights. It also, obviously provided security and protection. Most if not all private entities that provide insurance and protection, do so as a percentage of the value being insured or protected. Therefore, there should be a wealth tax. Also, as you stated, money is power, and power tends to corrupt. What more reasons do we need.
1
In 100 years, if our nation survives that long, there will be no billionaires, farming will be weedless, protein will be synthetic, energy will be renewable, and rural America will be depopulated. What can we do now to further these inevitable outcomes?
(BTW @nyt, that photo is awful).
Billionaires, these wreckers and exploiters, must be liquidated as a class.
2
Amen. Any notion of equality among mankind must preclude a billionaire class.
Wanna MAGA? Buy French guillotines (and maybe Roman lions, as well, if the Christians can't get on board.)
2
if you look (as i do) at human systems as biological systems, not as a chessboard for the tactics politics or morality or identity. but the fact that the "filthy rich" exist in capitalist America, socialist Europe, oligarchical Russia, corporatist Japan, tyrannical DPRK -- and all the way back to the roman senate and the gold tomb masks of mycenaean kings -- means that all social structures bend themselves (or can be bent) to wealth accumulation.
this makes the filthy rich a naturally occurring social resource (in the same way that females are a natural resource for population growth) that will develop in almost any economy -- relative to the size of the population and the resources available.
there are two separate issues: reducing filthy political and cultural influence within the electorate, and harvesting filthy wealth for the common good.
the historical answer, from catiline to danton, has always been blatant expropriation (exploitation) of filthy wealth, backed up by the threat of mass violence against their political defenses.
sure, it's fun to have polite talk about philanthropy, justice, morality, free will and the guiding hand, but billionnaires will disgorge their blubber only when the mass of the people take their mincing knifes and blubber hooks to their political hide and fat offshore portfolios.
it doesn't have to be pretty or polite; history never is. the wealth is there to be harvested. it's up to the people to exploit it.
2
Instead of banishing billionaires, lets go back to the tax structure we had in the 50's and 60's that didn't lead to the type of inequality we see today, and lets get money out of politics. Every campaign should be publicly funded. This proposal would pay for itself because there would be no incentive for corporate welfare or tax breaks for the rich. Mitch McConnell would call this a power grab and he would be right. Regular Americans could grab their country back from the 1%.
4
This would be a good time to remind Mr. Manjoo that it was a billionaire, Carlos Slim, that helped the NY Times keep the lights on when the paper was struggling financially after the financial crisis. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/business/media/20times.html
Also, don't blame billionaires for introducing products to the marketplace that the world consumes. Bill Gates gave us Microsoft. Michael Bloomberg gave us the Bloomberg Terminal. Steve Jobs gave us Apple. Sergey Brin & Larry Page gave us Google. When these products were invented, these men didn't think they were going to be billionaires. They just wanted to make good products. It was us, the consumers, that made these men billionaires. So before we start abolishing them, just remind yourself that billionaires have helped the rest of us make our lives a little bit better.
132
@RBC "Contributed to making our lives a little bit better" - sure. Most of us would probably admit that. And this article, and the ideas pitched by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, are not proposing to get rid of the people themselves who made these consumer products; just their wealth above one billion dollars. They can still do what they did, create computers, smart phones, etc. that consumers buy and use. And then once they start making the threshold amount, their additional wealth is taxed at 100%. They don't need more than that no matter how you look at it. And in fact, no person should get to control that much wealth, which inevitably brings with it tremendous unchecked power.
43
@RF
If those fellows had not done it, someone else would have. And even if these fellows are truly unique (as you imply), let's give them national awards but let's also ask them to contribute back to the country that gave them the opportunities and the riches.
22
@RBCThat is mighty naive thinking. One does not have to become a billionaire to be able to all the things you mentioned especially if the profits and renumerations are shared more equally among the workers and consumers who actually make these wonderful things happen.
20
I don't know anyone in this supposed majority of people who adulate billionaires. I wonder if they tend to be journalists or others who rub up against gilded shoulders on occasion. That's not a mass of people, that's a handful. Change is coming when even those who personally know billionaires start speaking up ...even if they tread as carefully as this "maximalist" column.
1
Rather than banning billionaires, how about enforcing the rule of law on white-collar crime less selectively than it now?
1
Using Billionaire as the threshold of immorality seems relatively arbitrary. Why not the 1%.
And obviously we should use global living standards.
Abolish the global 1%.
That only includes * everyone living in North America *
Say you don't need no diamond ring and I'll be satisfied
Tell me that you want the kind of things that money just can't buy
I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love
-Paul McCartney, billionaire.
2
I was walking in a forest yesterday.
I noticed some trees were much, much higher than other trees. It obviously isn't fair. The big trees need to be cut down. Because it's right, moral and just.
Liberal logic on display.
6
@George Orwell false analogy on display.
The billionaires who donate and own the GOP and anyone else must be stopped. Bring out the pitchforks.
2
Trump's techniques rule. All you have to do is change the words in this key quote and you have the president: "[Name of least favorite group] are bad. We should preemptively get rid of [fill in the blank]. All of them.”
When all else fails, demonize, generalize and deny nuance.
2
Not a good idea - We will always have rich and poor. Some of the rich deserve it through their ingenuity and hard work - others are there for other reasons. The money comes back to us in many ways after these people are gone, either bequeathed by their heirs or dissipated by their heirs. I even find it humorous that so many want to delve into politics especially since President Trump won - many think "Hey I can do that too". Plus it might give us a break from the professional politicians who have been boring us to death of late.
Interesting article -- even more interesting are the comments, many of which assume that the advocated remedy is to tax billionaires out of existence. Much can be done at the federal level and world level -- a standard minimum wage that truly provides a good standard of living would be a start. Bill Gates may have create a company that made a great product, but if at all levels of production workers had been paid more, if more benefits had been offered to all workers through out the world, if the product had been sold for less, his wealth would not have been as great and the world would be a better place.
The point is to create a society were all benefit, not just a few. That does not mean that the federal government takes a billionaire's money; it means creating a society where the excessive money is not accumulated in the first place. There are many ways of doing that and I am eager to hear people present ideas about how it can be done.
6
Mr. Manjoo posits, as progressives so love to, a zero-sum situation where any gain one person makes is perceived as depriving someone else somewhere of something that should have rightfully gone to them. Rather than perceiving the economy as expanding and dynamic, Mr. Manjoo perceives it as a pie to be precisely divided. However, that’s not the way it works, notwithstanding his curious appeal to the authority of Mr. Scocca and his personal opinion about how much money he believes an individual should be allowed to keep. Perhaps you should talk to a couple of economists as opposed to one person with a personal grudge against the billionaire who brought Gawker down. Might have mentioned that connection.
1
Couldn't we take a cue from the laws of physics here, the concept of terminal velocity?
Try to push anything through the Earth's atmosphere as fast as possible, and it will reach a speed at which it simply cannot be made go faster. Even if thrust is increased exponentially to overcome wind resistance, at some point, the friction of the moving air will degrade and melt any practical material of which the craft might be made.
Falling objects will reach an equilibrium with wind resistance and fall no faster. Skydivers know this. It's called terminal velocity.
Couldn't the same idea be applied to the ability to accumulate ever more money? That everyone begins with very little resistance to earning and accumulating more, with the burdens of further enrichment becoming progressively more onerous until, at some point up near a billion (or whatever other round number seems appropriate), the resistance becomes so great that further efforts are essentially confiscated? In other words, taxes become so high that nearly everything amassed beyond that point goes as taxes, the economic equivalent of air friction burning up your hypersonic aircraft.
The clever, successful, and lucky could still become rich, very rich, but at some point, becoming richer will not be worth the effort; a soft wall of infinitely diminishing returns.
Who is going to try to buy and control our democratic governments then?
2
A billionaire is a product of a failed economic system, a failed state, and a failed tax structure. A billionaire has failed his employees, and directly or indirectly, lawfully or unlawfully, has exploited resources and/or labor. Computer industry, oil, coal, gas, timber industry billionaires have all massively exploited resources, and to a slightly lesser extent, labor. Consumer goods billionaires have unconscionably exploited labor and indirectly exploited resources (think "cheap" plastic, wood, metals. None of them are truly cheap.) Externalizing costs and passing them to the taxpayer is rampant. (Superfund sites, CHIP, and other safety nets needed because workers are not paid enough to afford basics, are examples of externalized costs.) A billionaire does nothing but drain society, and amass moral and ethical bankruptcy. A billionaire is a failure.
7
Tax and market reform are obtuse concepts that put ninety percent of the population to sleep, the average person can’t even begin to wrap their minds around the complexities involved. The truth is that these are the only real long term solutions to out-of-control wealth accumulation. In reality, “banning” billionaires without inflicting severe damage to our economic system is technically impossible.
1
The problem starts with an ethos that idolizes wealth.
It's in-your-face, 24/7 glorification of the wealthy.
We are continually assaulted by ads featuring wealth icons.
Parents are pushing their children to become billionaires.
Colleges lure students with curriculums toward achieving wealth & getting into the "old boys' club."
It's a national obsession (which no doubt has infected other rising economies on the planet--China, Russia, etc).
It is the land of get-rich-quick & the "hustle."
Buy that million dollar shack, then flip it for 2 millions.
Half billion dollar lottery jackpots.
Money, money, money
1
So do you want salary/wealth caps for basketball players, soccer players, football players, formula one drivers, actors, rock stars, rappers and the like? Plenty of billionaires get there without technology or business exploitation. Moreover, generating ample reward for creation is the American way. Exploitation of public companies, though, does seem to be taking it too far. Ultimately, though, taxes on wealth over a billion dollars won't have any effect on the lifestyle of these high rollers. It is just their unmitigated greed that motivates them to fight taxes.
Prosperity, actually, is a good thing.
2
No single human being has "earned" or "deserves" to control $1 billion of a sovereign country's wealth. That is inexcusable narcissism and really indefensible in the real world.
And why should citizens allow self-styled, home-grown prince$ to use wealth to outsize their say in the allegedly representative government? Decades of aristocratic influence has eroded any and all checks on that.
The USA has been baron/monopoly/plutocrats route before. The plutocrats today hype a new color lipstick for that pig. People, that is not 'capitalism', it is abject thievery.
1
@Batuk Sanghvi (who says billionaires will move somewhere else and misses AM Rosenthal)
On those writers: They are dead. A while ago.
Let American billionaires move to India, Europe and Russia (actually part of Europe). Good riddance.
Shut the loopholes and make offshore accounts illegal. Taxation of income of wealth is a privilege we give Soverigns by choice in democracies. That does not include the right of Sovereigns to allow some to avoid taxes. An international treaty is required to get that done. Piketty, Saez and Zucman have written extensively on it.
To save capitalism from vandalism that is around the corner (the income and wealth distributions are literally L shaped) we have to do all this.
Watch out for the next Great Leveler.
Actually this was tried before. They tried it in Russia, but to be fair, Russia was ruled by a royal family and most people were starving to death, while the Tzar dined on Caviar, it was a very bad optic. In Russia where this was tried the result was as bad as it could have been. about a hundred million were murdered, and the country had to build walls TO KEEP THE PEOPLE IN. Russia collapsed into police state territory, with everybody ratting out each other, and the party leaders became the new Tzars eating caviar while people lined up in lines a mile long just to buy toilet paper. With the murder, the loss of rights and food shortages it didn't work out too well, and be very afraid, very afraid of anybody who brings up the idea, they mean you no good.
5
Be wary of anyone who demonizes the famous "they" or "them," whether they be billionaires or immigrants or people who like Post Malone.
1
Yep abolish anybody that has accumulated more wealth than you.
4
This is the most un-American idea I have ever heard. The concept that someone can dictate to me that I can have $500 million but not $5 billion is deeply offensive and should be denounced as the socialist hogwash (the polite version of the term I'm really thinking about...) it is.
And as the author pointed out, there are over 2200 billionaires in the world with only about 500 Americans. How does he propose to confiscate their wealth?? Good luck with that.
This article was nothing more than clickbait and I fell for it.
8
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
-Martin Niemöller
1
Poor billionaires, with no one to speak for them but all the media airtime, information dissemination outlets, and ad space in the world. Who will hear their pleas for help?
1
What's next? Penalizing blue-eyed people, or left-handed people?
Let freedom live.
3
As a conservative who finds this a ludicrous goal and questionable benefit to society, at least the left's embracing of it will drive more folks our way (and more money - obviously.)
2
I see nothing inherently wrong with being a Billionaire. I do, however, see huge problems and ethical issues with how they make their money, how they spend it and the fake power that ignorant people attribute to it.
Let’s look at Michael Bloomberg for example as someone whom we can respect at any level. He made his fortune through hard word and professional competence. He is one of the most prolific philanthropists on earth and has spent a good part of his life in real, active public service. A good man.
Take Donald Trump - a spoiled narcissistic sociopath who is a grifter and professional con artist. He sells his brand, rips off everyone, is uber cheap and does nothing without a quid pro quo for himself. He has left people holding billions in debt from his bankruptcies, defrauded would-be students at fake Trump U. and, at the very least, has skirted the law for many decades. He may be a full-blown traitor. His “charitable contributions” funnel back into his own pockets and his Chinese-made products, Chinese steel and leather steaks are as fake as he is. He produces nothing of value to society.
Before we condemn a class of wealth we must consider each individual. Most that I am aware of have been massively destructive (Koch et al) and polarizing negatively; others give their money to help society. Choose each by his/her value to humanity. None deserve respect because they are “rich” - that should be earned by deed and higher calling.
1
"When American capitalism sends us its billionaires, it’s not sending its best. It’s sending us people who have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing inequality. They’re bringing injustice. They’re buying politicians.
And some, I assume, are good people."
Can we get more articles from Farhad, NYT?
I mean, satire--satire! In 2019! In America!
And here i thought irony was long dead. What a joyous article.
1
This is the most intellectually lazy and dishonest piece I have read in the NYT for a long time. "We should abolish billionaires?" Really? How? More importantly, WHY? The vast majority of billionaires in the world today built their own wealth (Howard Shultz, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc.). Why should they have to forfeit most of their assets, and to whom? Billionaires can either be good people or bad people. One thing all billionaires undoubtedly have in common is that THEY CREATE JOBS. LOTS OF THEM. Have another cup of coffee and think twice before publishing this nonsense next time.
6
Another exercise in mental masturbation. Billionaires are not going to go away any time soon. Don't get me wrong; I think the majority of them are hurting society with their greed, tax avoidance, hyper-consumption, and contribution to the growing divide between rich and poor. But then you have the Soros, Gates, and Musks who are contributing hundreds of millions to better society through socially and environmentally responsible endeavors (for-profit and non-profit). It's the callous, tone-deaf Bezoses and Zuckerbergs, the billionaire owners of sports teams who spout racism and xenophobia, and the likes of Trump that we need to tax the hell out of.
Workers create all wealth. If someone like Mr. Steyer wants to give his wealth away, good for him, but that fact that he can unilaterally decide how the profits from thousands of peoples' labor can be spent is not just unfair, it is undemocratic.
1
Now that we have changed society and economics through technology, we social structures that compensate and lead to stability. Networks and communications, high transportation and shipping, the leverage of finance, innovation and monopolies require balance.
The old terms of capitalism and socialism are inadequate and are leading us into a new kind of robber baron feudalism, with the rich living it up in castles while draining the rest of us peasants below. It is so ridiculous for the richest country to have no health care system.
Profiteering off social needs, private hoarding and sequestering of public resources, whether land or capital funds is plainly crippling us.
Values need new emphasis on personal and resource development, or health, education and welfare. These are the marks of a prosperous and healthy economy.
1
I was thinking that I should run for president because my tax idea makes AOC's tax plan on billionaires look pretty tame.
I would tax income over a million dollars at 50% with an additonal 5% for every million more and I would tax wealth over a billion dollars at 99%.
Does anyone remember the Richard Pryor movie "Brewster's Millions"? He has to spend 20 million dollars in 30 days with nothing to show for it in order to inherit 200 million dollars. Without telling anyone what he is doing.
He tries to give money away, he tries to buy things for other people, he tries all kinds of very funny stuff.
He has a real hard time getting rid of that money which shows that it is hard to spend a few million dollars, let alone a billion!
Billionaires and democracy do not mix.
1
So money made above a billion is now "booty"? And because Tom Steyer is spending his billions on liberal causes, he gets a pass? What a scary world we are starting to live in! This op-ed is an embarrassment.
6
You might need to read the article again. I don’t think you were comprehending very well.
1
I don't think it's right to take my billions away. after all, I stole them fair and square. and of course, if I didn't have the incentive of making billions to motivate me, why should I even get out of bed in the morning? would you? without my billions, who would know that I am better than everyone else? most importantly, let me say this (and since I am a billionaire, you must listen because my money proves that what I say is important): taking away my billions is exactly the same thing as taking away my position as only child when my little sister was born. now, that was unfair and injuriousness to my motivation and, to add insult to injury, not even tax deductible.
3
Billionaires are a symptom, not the cause.
Corporations grow pension funds, including those of educators whose principal mission in life is to criticize corporate culture even as they vacation in Europe for two months in the summer.
3
1. This article proves that money is a mind-numbing corrupting influence - on the people who don't have it.
2. btw, God's Gift to the Environment Tom Steyer, as noted in this very paper in 2014, got rich by funding coal mines which are still producing coal today.
5
Accumulating this level of wealth usually comes down to not paying for what you get, by either inheriting or by externalizing costs onto others:
1. Inherited wealth and opportunity is obviously immoral, but worse, it is inefficient: it separates work from reward completely.
2. Most of the businesses which result in billionaires are extractive businesses. For example, fossil fuel/chemical businesses (eg Koch industries) profit mostly because the costs of their business are not born by the owners, but rather by the public. A carbon tax would go a LONG way towards insuring that those that use a product pay for the costs they burden others with.
3. Almost all corporate business owners get a massive handout from the public to the owners: FREE limited liability insurance. In no rational world would you provide insurance for FREE to business owners. Why don't they pay for their own insurance against liability? This isn't a very complicated concept, and yet I rarely if ever see it mentioned in articles. Free limited liability distorts the market by not making the price of risky businesses higher for owners of those businesses.
Pay for what you get. It's a pretty simple idea, and if we all did it, there would likely be very few billionaires. But the ones that did exist would truly be the best of us, and deserve the reward that comes from *their own* hard work, and *their own* great ideas.
1
I generally agree with this notion. That stated, it is based on the premise of a benevolent government. Government has been an always will be the largest economic driver in the US and has had a century to irradiate poverty, educate the masses and stem racism. It's moved in the right direction, but has proven incapable in the long run. Whats going to be the big change in government that cures the hookworm ills AOC is talking about? I want to hear that plan too...
1
I feel the same way about charities as I do billionaires, meaning why do we need them, why do they have so much power. Just like I do not want to have to rely on a billionaire to do the right thing with their money and power, I also do not want to have to go on bended knee to the Savalation Army, Catholic Charities, etc., in order to get my bowl of soup. I would much rather the power and resources be acquired and redistributed by the secular community - meaning government.
Yes, big government is where "we the people" should be receiving our justice and our daily bread, and not the billionaires, or the charities. In a country as rich as ours, why do we even have charities? Why do we give so much power to the rich and the charities and political causes they support? Shouldn't the largesse of the people belong to the people without having to be distributed by billionaires and charities.
5
There's this underlying concept to opinions like this one that imply that there is a limited amount of currency out there and that the ultra-rich are hoarding a large share. I think that someone needs to tackle this question before we go around advocating for extreme redistribution.
Does Jeff Bezos' vast fortune mean that he took money from me? I'm not so sure.
4
@Claude People have to understand that most of the billionaires' wealth lay in stock, not in cash. As long as investors keep investing in billionaires' companies, the billionaires will continue to increase their wealth.
The main reason for the wealth inequality is taxation policy. If you invest in a manufacturing company, you pay 35% tax rate on any returns. If you invest in the stock market, you pay 15% tax rate on the returns. THIS is the problem.
1
Thank you for this article. It's strange that this argument even needs to be made. And compounding the ethical dubiousness of possessing a billion dollars is the fact that most of today's billionaires aren't trying to solve important problems; they're just building apps or software to give already comfortable people a little more convenience or help fill their time. At their worst, in the case of Facebook, they're cashing in on peoples compulsions while making people depressed and undermining democracy.
Which brings me to my one gripe about your article: Your only personal jab seems directed at Elon Musk, but he's one of the only prominent billionaires who's actually concerned with real problems (i.e., energy crisis, global warming).
3
@Mike, there are a couple more billionaires with rocket companies, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Richard Branson of Virgin, so I think the jab was aimed at a broader swath.
1
It is deeply disturbing to see how many commenters here apparently think that the current huge disparities in wealth are a good thing. The work of a CEO who makes 300 times or more the wages of his employees is unconscionable; the wealth of a billionaire is obscene. Both are morally indefensible. Democracy cannot survive with an aristocracy of wealth, and ever since 1776 and 1789, aristocracies have ultimately led to revolutions.
6
Brilliant. I presume if we taxed people at the 91% rate of the Eisenhower era, the rich would pay less for sports franchises, pay less to ball players, charge less for admission and concessions and... I could afford to take the kids to a game.
Inasmuch as we have a bald, well-funded movement on the right to dismantle unions and dishonor labor, it wouldn't be far wrong to double or triple the pay of people who work for rich companies. And public servants.
The economy would appreciate the stimulus.
4
Most of the arguments against billionaires are based on their corrupting use of their money (undue influence). However, those negatives are not inherent to the amount, but depend on the person.
There are two compelling moral against allowing anyone to accumulate more than a certain amount of wealth:
1) Regardless of how they acquired it, they do not deserve it. No one, no matter how many hours they work in a 168-hour week, has ever done enough to deserve such money. Instead, they "took" the money that should have gone to someone else. Far more of the millions that the factory owner or investor made should not have gone to them, but to the people who did the real work.
This includes people who are highly paid for the risks they take (e.g. sports stars risking injury) and those whose ideas are turned into goods or services that produce large incomes.
2) Distributive justice. It is immoral to have some have far more than they need when others don't have enough for the basics.
Before money (or other assets) become accumulated wealth, they were income. To prevent people from becoming billionaires, then we need to prevent them from accumulating so much. It's much easier to take away part of what someone just earned than to take away part of what someone has accumulated over time. So yes, high tax marginal tax rates play a big role here.
Exactly how much is too much, and about what constitutes basic necessities for all are both debatable. The moral arguments hold.
2
"belches up a murder of new billionaires annually"? Did you mean number? What am I missing here?
@CHM
murder: (definition 3 by Merriam-Webster) a flock of crows.
@CHM, a "murder" is the word for a group of crows; e.g., a murder of crows, a herd of cows, a school of fish. So Manjoo was just having fun with writing because "murder of new billionaires" sounds ominous and because they're "killing" democracy.
1
murder is a group, like a bunch of crows.
Criminals Row: Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Trump, Bloomberg...
1
Trump sounds nuts, until you hear ideas like this.
8
Abolish journalists who think they know best.
Abolish those that hate others of any race, ethnicity, or economic status.
8
Sounds like abject jealousy to me.
11
Tech driven inequality ?!
Really ?!
Farhad is too young to know, but tech driven markets were supposed to empower the rest of us to take on the billionaires ?! And Facebook founder and Amazon founder may even claim that it worked !
2
Let them eat cake.
I agree with the idea, but we have to find a better catchphrase. “Abolish Billionaires” conjures images of the guillotine and the Czar’s dead children.
1
I always thought that the American dream was becoming rich and having a hefty bankbook. Ever since 1492 immigrants came from everywhere because they believed the myth that American streets were paved with gold!! Farhad Manjoo should get with the program--success in America is equated with money.
1
Just think how many cruise missiles and colonial misadventures we could fund with all that wealth flowing into government coffers instead
To the best of my knowledge...
Bezos has never bombed anyone
2
Brings to mind what Jesus is said to have said about the Ultra-wealthy, the Camel and the Eye of the Needle. Mmm mmm...
1
socialism - always plotting to get other people money, never to succeed on your own merits
7
@Jon
capitalism - success on your own merits through plots to take other people's money.
This is fun!
1
Here is a perfect example how big money, power and politics destroy and corrupt the foundation "The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had opened an investigation into a 2007 plea deal negotiated by a prosecutor who is now a member of President Trump’s cabinet that kept the financier Jeffrey E. Epstein from facing federal charges related to accusations that he molested dozens of underage girls".
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/us/fbi-jeffrey-epstein.html
I was shock that after initial big expose in Miami Herald we got complete Radio Silence, since it was an obvious cover-up for too many years.
He was a multimillionaire who used his power to abuse underage girls along, with many other prominent characters in his entourage.
So we've got Trump, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew named as possible cohorts to Epstein. His brownstone in NYC was famous for parties where the very rich enjoyed the 'hospitality' of Epstein and just 3 names does not begin to complete the list of the very wealthy men who went there.
"Why Does Alex Acosta Still Have a Job?"
By Michelle Goldberg
The cabinet official’s connection to a shady deal for an alleged child molester.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/opinion/alex-acosta-jeffrey-epstein-trump.html
That Acosta made this deal with Epstein should be investigated to the fullest extent and most definitely it should preclude him from ever holding public office.
I just hope the real justice will be served to this particular monster.
1
Economic justice for all!
The Koch brothers destroyed Brazil. They are slowly buying up the country.
It must really gall the Liberals that Gates, Buffet, etc. have vowed to give much of their wealth away to Charity...The Libs would much rather have the money to spend on their pet, Socialistic projects.
3
There goes your Davos invite.
1
Abolish Billionaires
A stupid idea designed to further alienate folks of reason. Hyperbolic statements are just as unhelpful as failing to vote.
A truly progressive tax system, correcting for all of the corrupt deductions and quasi-legal avoidances of our current system is a real, possible and needed approach.
We have a highly regressive tax system. This needs to be pointed out in the simplest terms. Devote a column to that and make a contribution to the discussion.
2
And finally "The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had opened an investigation into a 2007 plea deal negotiated by a prosecutor who is now a member of President Trump’s cabinet that kept the financier Jeffrey E. Epstein from facing federal charges related to accusations that he molested dozens of underage girls".
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/us/fbi-jeffrey-epstein.html
I was shock that after initial revelation we got complete Radio Silence, even contacted some networks with this issue, since it was an obvious cover-up for many years.
He was a multimillionaire who used his power to abuse underage girls along, with many other prominent characters in his entourage.
"Why Does Alex Acosta Still Have a Job?"
till Have a Job?
By Michelle Goldberg
The cabinet official’s connection to a shady deal for an alleged child molester.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/opinion/alex-acosta-jeffrey-epstein-trump.html
I just hope the real justice will be served to this particular monster.
1
Extremist, beyond-far left, Posts like this only exacerbate the severe political polarization that is plaguing our country. I will be unsubscribing from the times, and seeking a publication that is dedicated to reasonable discussion instead of ridiculous soundbites.
7
“All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of. But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.”
Benjamin Franklin, Christmas Day, 1783
Maybe not so un-American after all!
3
Tom Steyer lives frugally because he drives a Chevy Volt?
He also paid to have Elton John play at his birthday party. Steyer is a fraud and primarily interested in the promotion of Tom Steyer
2
Go, Farhad!
The long view that you invoke here is *exactly* why it was so wise of the NYT to give you the freedom of a column of your own this year. (Maybe your colleague Mr Eligon can learn from you and overcome his horror over people wearing “Japanese attire”.)
But if we levied a 100% marginal tax rate on the disgustingly wealthy, then they would all move to the moon to create a thriving, exclusive lunar commune and leave the rest of us to languish and starve for want of their revolutionary ideas and sisyphean work ethics. You wouldn't want THAT now would you, silly liberals.
@Steve
Let them move to the moon. I'd be interested in seeing which currency they decide to convert their vast holdings to in order to have a functioning economic system. I'd also be interested in seeing how they get their vast fortunes there. There are functional problems with being a three day trip from your fortune.
As Winston Churchill said, "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of benefits. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
Mr. Manjoo wants to bring the rich down so we all share an equal level of misery.
3
I would prefer to abolish the dim, the lazy, the irresponsible, and the violent. For it’s the exploding numbers of them that is leading the rapid decline of civilization.
6
It must be great to be given a forum to spout drivel in a widely respected news outlet like The NYT (which WAS owned, and IS controlled, by a VERY wealthy family). Lessee, here’s the gist: very wealthy people have more power than people with less wealth. OMG!! Very wealthy people frequently use their wealth to display their status. Who could have guessed!! Very wealthy people don’t need all the money they have. What a revelation!! This has never happened before!! I guess this is a surprise if your idea of studying history is re-reading yesterday’s breakfast menu. So, here’s a few thoughts: human social groups have been hierarchical in the distribution of wealth and power for hundreds of thousands of years. Ancient civilizations (Google ancient Egypt for example) were hierarchical in wealth and power thousands of years ago. Medieval Europe was hierarchical in wealth and power hundreds of years ago (Google feudalism for example). Many of today’s “socialist” societies are hierarchical in wealth and power today (Google the USSR). Religious organizations are hierarchical in wealth and power, and always have been. Perhaps there’s a pattern here. Sorry to have to break the news.
3
Billionaires take note. Your gated communities won't hold back the mobs and pitchforks after they realize Fox "News" has been lying to them.
I'm middle class to the core but I'd certainly like to see the Times abolish opinion writers who regularly churn out ludicrous ain't-gonna-happen-in-a-million years ideas that are undoubtedly quite popular in the free-stuff-for-everybody! precincts but otherwise quite laughable in the real world. Stiff progressive taxation sure, but what you're advocating Mr. Manjoo is pretty Marxist and we all know how well that worked out. And why limit it to a billionaires? I think most folks could live happily ever after if they had ten million in the bank (I know I could) so why don't we confiscate everything over that amount? And I can't help but wonder what Mr. Manjoo's net worth and salary are. If they're more than he needs to live comfortably I'm sure that many folks living in grinding poverty around the world feel it only moral that any amount he has over a comfortable living standard be confiscated and given to them. I loathe Trump more than anyone but proposals like this and similar others put forth by the delusional left are going to guarantee him a second term.
5
I commend Farhad for this column.
1
Yes take their money!
Wait .... what money?
They live off debt service ,not cash!!!!!
Their wealth is divested so we cannot take it unless we change the rational for having an IRS collecting taxes ,into an agency taxing capital gains and; leave the middle class hourly wage workers out of the payroll tax deduction picture altogether
Allow the middle class to transfer weekly funds to savings plans
You know like when there were functioning unions to help hourly wage earners
Once trump goes .... retool the IRS to collect a lot from the billionaires
These devils will react by starting a war somewhere .... maybe here!
Btw we would have to declaw Citizen United and fire all congress persons who make over $500000 per year.
Sounds about right!
And change our voting system and add more house of reps per capita to reflect population density
Eliminate the Electoral College
Pass these bills without a Constitutional Convention
Are you reading the Comment Section
Candidates ?!!!!!!!
Hope so.....
3
To paraphrase the author's "Abolish Billionaires" literally:
"Roll the tumbrels. Off with their heads!"
It's always easier to destroy than to build.
Just cut the link between economic power and political power.
2
Please just remove money from politics.
1
I’m down with this.
2
Wow! What an anti-thesis of yesterday’s OpEd by Samuel Abrams of the American Enterprise Institute.
Now time for the synthesis: Bernie and Liz 2020
2
The author’s argument falls to pieces for its numerous illogical fallacies including absurd generalizations. I thought I was reading the Onion. Economic disparity – a valid issue – will never be resolved by such crude "logic." It’s further proof that the internet is filled with bad writing. What ever happened to critical thinking? All voices are not equal.
2
How does an article like this even get published? Manjoo clearly has no understanding of finance or economics.
No one forces you buy an iPhone or use Facebook. Billionaires make their money because they create a great product that you VOLUNTARILY choose to buy. Furthermore, most billionaire's wealth is tied up in stock or real estate -- it can't just be divided up among employees. Furthermore, taxing billionaires into non-existence wouldn't work -- they would just leave the country and take their productive capital elsewhere, which would be bad for everyone.
The author seems to think billionaires are greedy but doesn't stop to consider that demanding other's hard earned wealth just because you aren't as rich is the epitome of greed and envy. Inequality is a stupid issue. What matters is poverty, and the fact is that productive capitalist enterprises have lifted billions of people out of poverty over the least 30 years.
Shame on the NYT for publishing any uninformed person with a radical opinion -- clickbait is not worth the degradation of intellectual standards in journalism.
5
does health insurance fall into this category?
Sour grapes.Communism doesn't work.
1
@skanda Nobody's recommending communism. I see you capitalized it. Los Angeles, China?
@skanda
Yes. Taxes = Communism.
OH NO. Who has the NYTimes hired: Farhad Manjoo! How does he identify politically? Socialist (Communist, Marxist)?
Democrat? Liberal? Green? Republican?
I only hope he doesn't think we need a revolution/Civil War like those our Congress and presidents have supported abroad!!
Taxing fairly/correctly would be a start -- perhaps. 80% bracket; 5% lowest bracket, cap gains taxed as income after 125K in income, luxury tax on every body's toys, no more charitable deductions. Get rid of political corruption -- and having citizens pay for business (Foxcomm, e.g.).
I wonder what Oprah who has no progeny will do with her billions? (Maybe she could finance lots of family planning clinics thru out the world.) There seem to be some enlightened billionaires out there.
Abolish the weapons build-up. How do we do that one?
The problem is not the billionaires per se but the species homo sapiens not as smart as he may think.
Maybe people should stop buying Khloe Kardashian's makeup? (Problem-solution -- you can be part of both!)
2
Not sure if billionaires should be abolished, but a conversation about concentration of obscene wealth and the system that creates them should take place. Studies show that rich people are more likely to lie and break laws and think it’s okay. If Howard Schultz was only worth 10 million dollars, would he dare think about running for president? We’re all responsible for his kind of thinking. We have to fix it.
1
It's not the billionaires that need to be brought down a peg, it's the political power which that wealth enables that needs to be reigned in with campaign finance reform.Sticking it to those lucky enough to have fortunes doesn't work so well as they will find other havens to either live or move their outsize wealth.
One step would be to close tax havens, world wide! We all need, and most of us non uber rich, pay taxes. It is a necesary element for a collective society to exist. One simple step at a time.
1
Do you folks objecting to Manjoo's argument understand how much A BILLION DOLLARS is? He`s not even talking about multi-millionaires with 900,000,000 dollars.
2
Fundamentally, people have a right to what they earn; they do not have a right to what they do not earn, or what somebody else earns. Society gives whiners something of what others earn to shut them up--they are in effect tolerated and carried by the earners. Now these people not only want what they do not earn, they want to stop others, of whose opinions they do not approve, from earning, and if they can't do that they at least want to say how others can spend their own money. They are Self-righteous, free-riding, leftist totalitarian bullies.
1
Take the number 1,000,000,000 and play around with it for a while.
Q #1: How much would you have to blow through a day, every day (Sundays included) to rid yourself of $1,000,000,000?
A #1: $2,739,726.03. What you'd find to spend your last 3 cents on could be a major problem. What costs $0.03 nowadays. A stamp, maybe? And remember, the Post Office is closed on Sundays.
Q #2: How big would your garage have to be if you spent $1,000,000,000 on $500,000 Maseratis?
A #2: Would you believe 2,000 bays? To drive them all, you'd have to rotate through 11 cars every two days to make sure every one was started at least once a year. Sounds more like work than fun.
Q #3: If, in order to receive $1,000,000,000, you had to count to 1,000,000,000, and had to do so without a break for a nap or a pit stop, and you could average 3 numbers per second, how long would you be awake with a bursting bladder before you collected your prize?
A #3: 1,000,000,000/(180x/min)=5,555,556 min, which divided by 60 min/hr = 92,593 hours which, divided by 24 hr/day = 3,858 days, which, divided by 365 days/yr = 10 years and 7 months. Think you're up to the task? Would it be worth it?
Q #4: What would you --yes, you-- do, really, with $1 billion dollars?
A #4: .........
No idea?
Me either.
2
@Glen You realize most billionaires aren't sitting on cash, right? They own illiquid assets or companies that are VALUED at billions. It doesn't mean they have billions of dollars to spend every day,
1
@Glen
Sorry, I meant to have a 1-year time frame in the first example.
There is only one effective way to get rid of billionaires follow the example of the Russians who got rid of tAristocratic.
2
Kill the billionaires, the millionaires and, wait, you are next. Cuba, The Soviet Union, and all the countless communist countries where hundreds of millions were killed by those who wanted power over you. Purge the billionaires, the producers of wealth and lets all be poor. Free college, what about those who already have college debt, or just paid it off. Free health care to those who are obese and neglect their bodies. Where does it start and where does it end? Nice idea but it doesn't work.
1
@one percenter
"Where does it start and where does it end?"
Where we say it does.
1
Manjoo for president!
But I think we should cap wealth at much less than one billion dollars. How much is enough? How many cars does a person need, how many houses, how much of all those things we can't take with us when we depart the planet? "Share the wealth." Is this such an anti-American ideal?
3
One more thought: Extreme wealth creates its own moral hazards, including detachment from society, reality, and, ultimately, one’s own humanity. Read this depressing article as a prime example of what I’m talking about:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
A startling number of uber-wealthy people world-wide want nothing to do with average folk; not now, not ever. I find it hard to imagine how or why you’d want to live out your days in a decommissioned ICBM silo after the world’s incinerated in nuclear war. If having less money means they might—just might—be more engaged in communities, then it can only be a good thing.
3
Can we abolish tech writers.
Especially those (e.g., Swisher, Manjoo) who appear to have strayed far beyond their levels of competency to weigh in on non-tech issues.
2
Is this article really from a Russian troll farm with the playbook to re-elect Trump: Scare voters into believing the left isn't grown up enough to have any plan for how to go from here to there. They just want to take money from the rich. Oh, and they swear that cap is on billionaires, not those with 4x median income. When democrats sit at the big table with an actual plan they may recapture the white house.
2
Apple finally just paid 500 million $ of fiscal settlement to the French government lagging for years . But it is peanuts compared to the fiscal fraud operated and also at the scale Of Europe where it makes 64 billion $ per year .
eFor those who can read French . Of course it is not in the NYT .
https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2019/02/05/apple-solde-des-arrieres-d-impots-et-verse-500-millions-d-euros-au-fisc-francais_5419400_3234.html
Get rid of billionaires? Yes, please. Tax them into non-existence. Nobody will get hurt in the process, only a few bank accounts.
And at the same time: bring back the anti-monopoly movement. Break up the big corporations, or turn them into publicly controlled nonprofits.
It's time to get Big Money out of public life.
2
"...an industry that belches up a murder of new billionaires annually,"
Are billionaires crows? I like crows. Why the murder?
Why would you target Tom Steyer?
That turned me off - the whole essay lost its worth with that.
Maybe envy and jealousy should be abolished or perhaps held in check.
3
When Democrats and leftists scheme to take money others have earned through their own initiative and ingenuity, I am reminded that no matter how much Dems take, it’s never enough. And sooner or later they’ll get around to seizing what’s yours.
1
@EGD
I've said it before and i'll say it again: they can't take what I don't have.
These are the robber barons of our time. They are the Bourbons, the Romanovs and the Tudors. They take everything and do not see others except as they serve their need. They are the ones who foment revolution, war and discord. Their creed is greed. And when the executioner comes they are the first to cry `unfair.'
you can have great wealth or democracy but not at the same
a slight misquote from jane mayer’s “dark money”
1
Farhad Manjoo - you are my new favorite NYT columnist.
Your last two paragraphs: Brilliant!
Thank you. Keep shaking things up!
2
America wasn't created to live like a monk.
The idea that a rich person owes you something is absurd.
1
Last month it was open borders, now it's wealth confiscation.
Wouldn't you be happier writing for The Daily Worker?
2
I don’t care what you say. I like Mike Bloomberg.
In Europe, in France, it is part of high school curriculum to learn a basic education in philosophy and also in economy .
It is part of the baccalaureat, an exam where you have to sit and write 4 hour anonymous dissertations, to have a basic knowledge in philosophy : Aristote, Plato, Pascal, Descartes, Kant, Hegel,Marx, etc.. And also write a 4 h dissertation about a global economy subject for which you need to know the principles and realities of global economy and its problems. At 18 year old all students have to pass that stage to go to university . For free...
1
Yes, let's make it as unfriendly as possible for the small group of people that typically create the largest amount of wealth and invest the most amount of money within the country, just because it seems unfair that they have lots of money. We should just confiscate their money. They must have all gotten it unfairly because I don't have as much money so it's moral and just to just take it. I'm sure these billionaires will just let it happen and there will be no unintended consequences to such a policy.
In all seriousness this sounds like one of the Roman empire's worst policies -- if funds are running low, find someone rich and take that person's property. I'm not pro-billionaire and I think our tax code should be more progressive but if this is the sort of populist drivel that the DNC is going to embrace at any level, I will happily vote for anyone who's not pushing that sort of policy, including perhaps even Trump.
5
It is astonishing to read the complete ignorance of Americans about global economy . How capital is accumulated, how and where is it displaced and finally how it is used . Or not. Americans ate ignorant of the American economy. But they are even more unaware of the reality of the rest of the world and how their economy affects the rest of the world.
That ignorance is inherent to capitalism .
1
Yes, yes and yes. It should be forever illegal to have more than the equivalent of (inflation considered) $1 billion. And no hiding it all overseas, either. Good grief, no one could ever spend that much in ten lifetimes. (And their idle heirs can earn their own money...)
Give that money to the people, the employees, who made you rich to begin with. Pay them very well. All of them, except the CEOs - those idle sociopaths have enough now.
Put that extra into things that work - that recent article about the levels of poverty explains just what is needed in third world countries to raise people up many levels.
BUT let's not forget the US. That money must be returned to our population too, from whom it has long been stolen.
Get that idle money into the hands of people who will spend it, and keep it in their hands. The economy will once again begin to move, poverty will finally be gone, crime and drug abuse will automatically reduce - and the pitchforks will once again be used for straw and hay, not greedy gazillionaires. (And make no mistake, billionaires - if you do not change, and if our laws are not changed to disallow your billions, those pitchforks are indeed coming...)
1
@Lynn Taylor "That money must be returned to our population too, from whom it has long been stolen."
Stolen from whom exactly? Who did Jeff Bezos steal money from? The workers HE hired?
"that recent article about the levels of poverty explains just what is needed in third world countries to raise people up many levels. "
No economic system has brought more people out of poverty in the history of humanity than capitalism. None. Zero. Capitalism has virtually eliminated true poverty everywhere it has been adopted.
@BPD Huge corporation after huge corporation has NOT paid their workers anything near a fair compensation, considering that without those workers, those corporations would not even exist. One close look at Walmart - who finally raised their workers' pay after years of stalling - with a comparison of Sam Walton's heirs' incomes (in the obscene billions now) shows what happens when the ultra-rich steal from their employees. And it is nothing but theft.
As a teenager in the 60s earning for college with a minimum wage job, I could pay for tuition and books on a summer's wages.
Needless to say, it's a rare corporate employer who pays those same wages (adjusted for inflation), Costco being the only one that comes to mind.
UNBRIDLED capitalism is a scourge. Even Adams advocated for regulation with his system. We do NOT have any sort of "capitalist" system anymore. We now have employment, the market, and government solely "for" the ultra wealthy and their monopolistic, greedy corporations.
It has to stop.
@Lynn Taylor
LOL - of course I meant "Adam Smith," not "Adams" - typing too fast and no opportunity to correct on the NYTimes comments creates odd things....
Hilarious and frightening at the same time. Okay, we need another contest—what to call this group? In Renaissance times and later, wealthy and educated men would collect natural history specimens, small art objects and other items to make a “Cabinet of Curiosities” or “Cabinet of Wonders.” What to call this awful group? Cabinet of Horrors or Cabinet of Deplorables are appropriate, but not clever enough. Gail, put the challenge out there. Offer a prize if you can.
capitalism is the cure for poverty....
3
Let them eat three billions.
A limit. Should do wonders for the cost of real estate as a collateral effect.
There should never. Never. Be trillionaires. And we have our first sightings.
Call this level of additive avarice what it is. An illness.
3
@Mark Siegel
I think your comment is what is silly. Actually, not even silly it is banal. It lacks originality.
Billionaires get to be that by taking advantage of the installations out there by previous billionaires. The institutions of unfair taxation, deregulation, electoral college, gerrymandering, racism (slave ownership before that), gender inequality, imperial domination of weaker countries, unfair trade, plunder (what we did to natives) and so in and so forth.
Some robber barons gave back some of their unfair fortunes (Rockefeller gave us University if Chicago and MOMA, Andrew Carnegie gaves us Carnegie Hall (actually he didn’t call it that) and Carnegie Institute of Technology - now Carnegie Mellon) but still I see that as buying “indulgence papers” from the Catholic Church.
Read John Rawls. The society he advocated is just and fair. If billionaires come out of that society, I am willing to live with them.
2
I agree completely that no one should be a billionaire. There is no ethical way for one person to make that much money, especially while the vast majority of us are working hard to just get by. And I'm not impressed by the "good" billionaires who contribute a lot of money for various causes. It's a stupid country that depends on the voluntary generosity of billionaires to fund public health and safety. And why should Bill Gates (or the Koch brothers, or anyone else) get to set the priorities for our nation? I thought our elected representatives were supposed to do that. So let's eliminate billionaires, via taxation, regulation or any other means. They are a plague on democracy.
4
Who is the “We” that will constrain the “Billionaires?”. How will the “We” do the constraining? Will the “Billionaires” sit quietly while being constrained?
1
I love your ironic last sentences!
May I suggest the writer (and for that matter all of Congress) take a basic Economics 101 class.
3
Most of the disparaging comments here are missing the key argument.
It's not simply that a single person doesn't deserve obscene amounts of wealth in world of scarcity (although that's arguable, too), but that wealth is too often wielded over a society and its democracy.
Citizen's United is just one example of that. Trump essentially buying the election with his phony personal brand is another. I could go on, but...
2
@Eric
Well, if that is the case, then maybe the electorate should smarten up and start taking some personal responsibility before they go into the voting booth. Then again, maybe the electorate knows what they're doing and you don't agree with them.
See?
Sarcasm isn't a lost art after all.
Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai must be salivating that such ideas are being thought about in USA .
I bet there are not a lot of billionaires in unsuccessfull countries. And, why should I care if Bill Gates is worth a ton?
He has made my life better, the author has not. Michael Jordan is purported to be a billionaire. I got to watch him. He made my life better. Why do I care if he got rich on a bunch of Nike stock. Lebron James is on his way to billionaire status. Same thing, he has made my life better. The Harry Potter author, Rowling, is a billionaire , I read her books. She made my life better. I am happy she is wealthy. Howard Shultz made my wife’s life better.. she loves coffee. And so it goes.
2
Abolish ringworm! Oops, I'm a member of Congress...thanks to staff for telling me I meant hookworm.
1
I can't find Paul Krugman's (@paulkrugman) response among the comments.
The inability to acknowledge when one has enough, of anything - money, food, cocaine, whatever, is a mental illness. The mentally ill are not worthy of worship, just treatment.
1
Farhad Manjoo makes four arguments: economic, social, moral, and political.
The first three arguments are some combination of stupid, destructive, and irrelevant. The political argument, well, that is interesting.
Mark Zuckerberg earned his money fair and square. He is entitled to keep it and enjoin it as he likes. But, I do not want Zuckerberg buying my political representatives. It is bad enough that he has a monopoly on a service that looks more and more like a utility. He should not also have political power over my me. We need to think through this problem.
I must say, Mr. Manjoo's morality is repugnant. In making his moral argument, Manjoo lauds Tom Steyer, who is trying to nullify the political decision of 63 million American citizens, by funding a campaign to impeach the president they chose. This is not morality, this is fascism, plain and simple.
4
@Haim
"This is not morality, this is fascism, plain and simple."
Yep, you know, those fascist and their scary money.
Oh, and Hillary got more votes.
This column reminds me of how amazing HBO's Silicon Valley is at skewering tech and its insatiable quest for lucre.
A correction is coming. What came after the first Gilded Age?
1
Two comments: "Money buys everything except love, personality, freedom, immortality, silence, peace."
- Carl Sandburg
"If greed is your god, there is never enough."
- Me, O Smith
In addition we must recognize there are good journalists and bad journalists. I guess there is no need to keep the good journalists around because that will necessitate having bad journalists. so do we need to get rid of all journalists?
2
Typical, just as soon as more Black folks achieve this level of success, I read some want to "abolish" it.
I guess I shouldn't have told my kid to be like Oprah, Robert Smith or Aliko Dangote (look him up). These Black Billionaires are examples of what is possible (2 from America!).
For young Black kids, SEEING someone who has achieved elusive wealth is a powerful motivator- just see how excited and proud Black folks were and are seeing Jay-Z move closer to Billionaire status. Or Michael Jordan.
Likewise, no telling how many Black kids will cite SEEING President Obama as the moment they realized they could achieve more than they or society thought. [That powerful image of the little Black boy touching Obama's hair spoke to Black America.]
I guess that height of Black success is coming too late.
35
@profwilliams
You have an interesting and thought-provoking take on this. I like the way you're thinking but I wonder how many Black folks are exploited or are prevented from becoming millionaires because of systems, institutions, and individual behaviors (the hoarding and consolidation) of billionaires. I wonder how much more it would mean if the communities where Black kids live had more contact with wealth and knew more upper-middle class folks who had lives to which they could realistically aspire. Changing the systems that produce/allow billionaires would likely result in greater economic justice for disadvantaged communities and better outcomes for the very kids about whom you're concerned.
10
@profwilliams
You mean only having $999,000,000 is keeping them down?
14
@profwilliams
Success is measured in many ways. We keep placing so much emphasis on obscene amounts of wealth. Oprah gives a lot away and so do some of these other billionaires. They don't need that much money so perhaps we can help them find their worth and measure it in other ways.
7
@john, You said, "People like Bezos, Paul Allen, Bill Gates, etc. use their wealth to create new things....Bezos went from selling books to using that capital to innovate and expand cloud computing. Accumulating capital has to occur to push forward with technology, industry, services and real estate. When you attack capital accumulation you attack the entire notion of progress." The problem with your argument is that the billioaires you cite use their money to follow THEIR dreams which, because of their vast wealth and power, of necessity become our dreams. What if we want to follow different dreams? What if we want to have a pause in technological innovation so that we can consider its consequences and possibly slow it or redirect it? What if we want to put more land into public rather than private hands so that we can protect it? What if we really want to develop an alternative approach to the economy so that we are not oil-dependent? Your approach is kind of like saying lets keep the emperors because some of them will be good.
2
I am not a billionaire, but a millionaire. I grew up in a small town with a single teenage mother on welfare poor all that, never met my father. I guess I don’t deserve what I have worked my whole life for. If there are government plans to take my money and/or not be able to pass it to my kids I will leave the USA. There are plenty of countries where I could go. I am sure the billionaires could and would do the same thing. Then you rid yourself of billionaires congrats. Some other country will take them. Guess the companies and ideas go with them. The money leaves first, second the brains, third rank and file. If The Times is printing this, guess it is time to start moving some assets while you can. I will love watching the government taking from sports and movie stars, good luck with that one.
122
@BB
It most certainly is about Stefan, and every one of us. If the government decides it can just take, take, take, take, why stop at billionaires?
I despise Trump, and voted for Obama twice, but columns like this one today make me fear for my country just much as white supremacist marchers do. Birds of a feather, the hate's just aimed in different directions.
21
@Stefan
I have a hard time believing there's a millionaire who doesn't know about the exit tax.
13
@Stefan A millionaire is a thousand times removed from a billionaire. Imagine me worth $10,000 and threatening to leave the country if people who made a million dollars a year were taxed more highly!
35
I'm little troubled by the fact that most rich people, mainly the super rich Billionaire and aspiring Trillionaire class, are almost entirely motivated by money- far more than the challenge of making it. I still think the power of decision making, the joy of innovation/discovery, the ability to shape the company/society/world is far far more attractive than just running after money- that too when s/he has plenty of it, in fact, more than s/he can even enjoy. Such insane (by any standard) amount of money actually correspond to diminishing happiness, as per many credible research.
Probably, that's why those researchers and I never became even a simple Millionaire!
3
I'm little troubled by the fact that most rich people, mainly the super rich Billionaire and aspiring Trillionaire class, are almost totally motivated by money- far more than the challenge of making it. I still think the power of decision making, the joy of innovation/discovery and ability to shape the company/society/world is far far more attractive than just running after the money and that too when s/he has plenty of it, in fact more than s/he can even enjoy. Such insane (by any standard) amount of money actually correspond to diminishing happiness, as per many credible research.
1
The road to hell is paved with good intentions -- proverb
While taxing or controlling billionaires' wealth is very tempting and popular, the real problem is how. Much of their wealth is paper wealth, namely, the market value (often inflated for good or bad reasons) of company stocks. Taxing or capping their wealth must lead to massive sales or divestment of their stock holdings, and unavoidably to sharp falls of stock prices. We all know consequences of market collapse. As far as we, middle class families, are concerned, one thing is sure: our pensions and retirement savings will be hurt badly, let alone double digit unemployment and economic recession/depression. Capitalism has its own logic, unless we opt for some version of socialism.
1
Well, the class warfare desired by the democrats is unveiling itself fully, isn’t it? The NYT contains stories today of the “villains” that it argues President Trump “creates”, socialism. Of course, the abject failure of every socialist state is a matter of history; which is, of course, the President’s point so that true inexperienced loud-mouthed naive “leaders” like the lady from NYC, Ms. Cortez’s assertions are challenged.
NYT follows that up with an opinion piece attacking billionaires; next it will be those with only hundreds of millions, then merely tens; and, finally, in the infinite wisdom of the income disparity bunch just one or two.......all these arguments remind me of my old Western Civilization class, the French Revolution, the National Committee then with the Committee for Public Safety allocated grains and, memorably, instituted the Terror, to lop-off the head of any resisters. Just a matter of time for these self appointed experts, it seems to decide you in your single family home might be bordering on excessive wealth.
How one cannot see the essential fascism of the far left is puzzling to me.
1
Three hundred years ago, the same argument would have been: of course you must obey the king. It is his natural right to rule, and your obligation to obey. Today, how we define who rules has changed, but the shape of the argument has not. It is up to us to define who leads society and why. Money has no more natural right than kingship, victory in war, or any other manmade model.
3
Have we established that the only way to treat AOC's hookworm patient is by socking the billionaires? Why is everyone on the left this lazy?
2
A billionaire will simply transfer his or her shares into a foundation and retain the voting power of the shares. You will get a result of gigantic eponymous foundations, with family and friends on the board as warren Buffet dies, that likely live on for centuries and the government not getting a single dime more. There, are you happy? Then you will have to blame someone else for your lack of success.
2
This is a new low even for the NYT Opinion Section.
Fantastic.
You've outdone yourselves once again.
You should be embarrassed, but I know you aren't.
5
Such a typical far left, socialist article. The author doesn’t have something so no one else should. He praises billionaire Tom Steyer who commits the described sin of using his money for political purposes but is given a pass as he hates the current president. The Koch brothers are “bad” billionaires because they didn’t like our 44th president. The latter employ tens of thousands of people, Mr. Steyer.?..no one. It’s the age old story, “if I don’t have it you shouldn’t...and if you do, give it to me and my like minded friends “.
4
Wow. Nice close.
One would expect a Times columnist to understand the simple proposition that highly mobile billionaires, threatened by confiscation of most of their wealth, will merely relocate.
Did Mr. Manjoo miss the news earlier this week about New York's own tax shortfall, to the benefit of Florida and Texas, which followed a wealth transfer scheme concocted by DJT?
1
This writer is a communist. Is everyone’s memory so bad we don’t remember how awful that system was?
The billionaires would be foolish to resist since the back up plan includes guillotines.
2
What a lazy diatribe. And citing an academic from the exclusionary environs of Princeton is a bit oxymoronic. It’s influence and power, not wealth, that seem to be the issue, so in that vein let’s limit the tweets of AOC, POTUS, and while we are at it, restrict the circulation of the Times, let everyone into Princeton, and get rid of all the columnists.
5
I object to the negative branding, the punitive, witch-hunt air in which the concept is presented. That’s not civic or positive. Some other way to propose the concept and support it with facts, should be sought. One-liners are stupid.
1
Sure let's let the losers and diminutives have the power over the winners and the successful.
In fact, let's celebrate and empower the lazy and the ignorant to run the good 'ol USA - er, I mean the ugly and corrupt American meat grinder.
5
Obscenely wealthy people are parasites; vampires sucking the life out of everyone they can; stealing the worth of others work and falsely claiming they work harder than their victims. They buy our legislators and rewrite our laws to enrich themselves further and more deeply entrench themselves in their degenerate power structure.
Another good democratic party idea! lol
3
Financial gluttony is just as disgusting, if not more, than gluttony for food or sex.
Billionaires are shameful gluttons - a pox on all their houses.
The problem is endless greed. In the suburb of a large city where I live, within a 10 mile radius, Walmart has just built a fifth huge Walmart- in this area which already has almost 15 mega grocery supermarkets, a Costco, a Sams's, club, home depot, Lowes, a huge indoor mall besides all the usual Targets, Marshals, and perhaps hundreds of small and big strip centers.
Each of these Walmart and Super markets like Kroger are built on almost 30 acres of concrete jungle. This endless commercial building spree is a colossal hazard to climate, takes humongous electric power to run and maintain and is the cause of regular flooding.
Why there has to be a Walmart at every nook and corner and why it has to monopolize selling everything . Same is true with Amazon and many silicone valley companies who "disrupt" people's lives and their livelihood for economic dominance and control on every facet of our lives. Yes there are admirable men and women who do great things with their money and serve humanity. But will the evil and corrupt billionaires who suck the blood of others to enrich themselves ever reflect as to what is the use of their mindless greed? When will they voluntarily imbibe the moral code- Live and let other's live?
Death is inevitable- even for billionaires, and we all know that we can not take a single dime with us.
1
I think a better idea would be to get rid of all leftists.
4
U.S.S.A. here we come!
2
What a dumb idea. Billionaires will simply move. US of A is not the only show in town.
1
Another gem of a stupidity. Lets take away the loopholes, capital gain but abolish billionaires. Whats next Venezuela and gulags and caravans travelling to Alaska.
And wonder why Trump wins when left has such nut bags, we all know too well they are no lover free enterprise but forced redistribution ----- Lenin here we come.
1
Donald Trump is the best argument against excessive accumulation of wealth. (The wealth he claims, very likely not his actual wealth.)
How many of billionaires in proportion to the population are in any of the enviably well-governed, prosperous, and near-egalitarian societies like Sweden, Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands?
1
The ability to become bigger and more powerful than governments should not be allowed. That is what this is about, not money, power. The billionaires around the world who control states are a dangerous problem. Remember Russia? The state and its rich are one and the same and instead of existing and negotiating with the world they use assassins, wreak technological havoc and use criminal activity to get what they want. This is the trap of the rich and a few may not step in it but too many do. We have an entire propaganda system owned by one rich guy that has 1/3 of Americans convinced that climate change doesn't exist. If that is not an example of the horrific power of money I don't know what is. Once the attainment of "more money" is no longer the point it logically follows that the lust for power becomes the point. I am not sanguine about Gates and Buffett nor do I look forward to seeing a Koch Brothers name on the new dinosaur exhibit. (Yeah, the guys behind the Tea party and entire institutions dedicated to denying climate change) Philanthropy is a red herring the billionaires throw us to make us feel better about their billions. I don't like it. Society is better equipped to take care of society through democracy. These billionaires have become greater and more powerful than our own government. There is something very wrong with that.
1
Sure. Let's get rid of Google, medical inventors, and Amazon and turn into another Venezuela. I'm surprised that the NY Times would even print such "radical" ideas.
2
While we're at it, let's abolish sensationalist, ill-informed, opinion columnists. Deal?
6
Only this colonist would call for such absurdity, this guys topics are so out of line, I almost think that they’re supposed to be funny on purpose
1
Farhad-
Please stay in your swim lane and write about tech trends. Not sure if you’re bored with tech or NYT wanted to experiment, but this new column is not where you should be focused. There is SO much going on in terms of the tech companies and regulation and ethics etc- why aren’t you covering that?? You and Kara should be able to play nicely together.
5
Ours are the conditions that breed Bolshevism. Eat The Rich!
1
What a stupid idea. Even if you make US billionaires give up their wealth by coercion how are you going to make billionaires in China, India, Europe, Russia and rest of the world ?
NY Times used to have writers like James Reston, Tom Wicker,Abe Rosenthal etc. What happened ?
2
@Batuk Sanghvi
On those writers: They are dead. A while ago.
Let American billionaires move to India, Europe and Russia (actually part of Europe). Good riddance.
Shut the loopholes and make offshore accounts illegal. Taxation of income of wealth is a privilege we give Soverigns by choice in democracies. That does not include the right of Sovereigns to allow some to avoid taxes. An international treaty is required to get that done. Piketty, Saez and Zucman have written extensively on it.
To save capitalism from vandalism that is around the corner (the income and wealth distributions are literally L shaped) we have to do all this.
Watch out for the next Great Leveler.
That would require a GLOBAL agreement, as otherwise they would move . Try Putin to sign up !!
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-20921208
1
"Do you know what only two commas means? Do you?? It's the difference between having a car with doors that do this" *hands move out sideways* "and a car with doors that do this!" *hands pivot up and out at an angle*
Which God/Mother Nature would allow/create a world where 26 multi- billionaires have a much wealth as the 3.8 billion bottom half of humans combined?
Lucifer's? Abraham's? Jesus's ? Muhammad's? Buddha's? Copernicus's? Galileo's? Newton's? Darwin's? Bohr's? Einstein's? Hawking's? Morgan's? Rockefeller's? Ford's? Carnegie's? Vanderbilt's? Kushner's? Trump's? Zuckerberg's?
1
This article is good, even important, but the author needs to put the thesaurus down.....
Hmmm. How many h-bombs could Zuckerberg afford?
How long before this wannabe fascist and his fellow travelers lower the number to a half-billion?
5
It's true that $1.00 won't buy what it used to. Nor $5.00. Or $10.00 or $100.00.
But the more zeroes you add, the fewer things you can name that are no longer within reach of a given sum. $1,000.00 used to buy a decent used car. Still will, if you are an astute shopper. Coincidentally, this sum used to be the approximate price of a new 19" color TV. Today, a boob tube 3 times that size costs 1/2 as much.
The lower 5 figures will cover most new cars; the upper five gets you a serviceable roof over your head. Six figures and the housing begins to get pretty fancy. Abodes beyond that price range get you into narcissistic territory. Look at what I got!! It's a showy crown when what you really need is a hat to protect you from sun and rain and cold.
Above $1 Million, with only the exception of health care as we continue to allow ourselves to be punished --for being citizens of America-- for how it is offered and delivered, there is very little in the way of "needs" to be found. Let's round it off at that one thing.
When you get down to it, the only thing a billionaire "needs" is more $billions. And for what purpose? The only thing that level of wealth accomplishes is an addiction to more wealth.
The most generous person in the entire bible is a widow, and she gave her last mite to help those in worse straits than she. The wealthy made fun of her for the paltry sum she contributed.
No one, absolutely not one single person on this planet "needs" a $Billiion.
This is the second silly article by Mr Manjoo, but since the NYT likes him, let's play.
Why not abolish anything you view as bad to society? Jews have a disproportionate number of billionaires. Abolish them!
Ya know, many of them are men. Abolish all men (this is the fantasy of the angry left, may as well combine them)!!
So let's think about this- the wealth isn't going away; the super wealthy would hide it appropriately; the poor would suffer.
And when this brilliant idea fails......
6
Laughable...there is a whole world outside the bubble all of you live in. You are missing out.
3
Sure, and while we're at it let's abolish ill-informed, sensationalist opinion columnists. Deal?
6
.This Ocasio-Cortez has some weird ideas, a person who can't string logic but appeals to exaggeration and emotion: equating billionaires with lack of health care.
I don't hear a single one of the anti-wealthy saying that the US military budget is immoral, I don't hear any of them concentrating efforts on real efforts to lower taxes on middle income earners. It is quite well known that one of the reasons the super-rich stay rich is they have fancy-pants accountants and lawyers to keep them rich.
Pass all the laws you want, Ocasio-Cortez & Company, your ideas are fluff & self-promotion.
I never met a person, rich or poor, who wants to pay taxes. Instead why don't these idealists create incentives for the mega-rich to give a substantial portion of their money to things like scholarships and medical care?
2
@Svirchev
"Instead why don't these idealists create incentives for the mega-rich to give a substantial portion of their money to things like scholarships and medical care?"
[Sigh]...or we could tax them and have both right now, instead of when the mega-rich feel like it.
1
We should all be so grateful that we have someone with Farhads vast intellect, that could determine how much we are going to allow someone to make. What's the cutoff Farhad? 100 million? 500 million? You do realize that if we did such an asinine thing, we wouldnt have the iPhone. What you are doing is limiting opportunity. Opportunity is what makes this country great, and why so many folks around the globe want to come here. Its pretty clear that from one article after another of yours (the open borders article was a doozy), that you don't belong here.
1
Nice column.
But misses the point, made here and there, e.g. by Michael Moore, that nobody gets rich by themselves. They critically depend on a society which provides the basics: a stable, relatively free economy; good laws and law enforcement; provision of public utilites, etc.
So the society is entitled to a big part of the success and earnings of some. Whether this starts at a billion or earlier is to be determined.
This article just takes a reasonable and already political and popular idea, like increasing taxes on the super rich, and rephrases it as a revolutionary slogan. There is no benefit to doing this since people who already support the idea are unlikely to now somehow support it more, and people who oppose the idea are likely to now oppose it even more because of the threatening and un-American nature of the argument.
Software, by its very nature, would not drive concentrations of wealth if antitrust laws were updated for the modern world and enforced. For example, what if facebook were required by law to have a set of open APIs so that people on similar social media platforms, perhaps ones that cared more about personal privacy and provided a better user experience, could share with their friends and family who are still on facebook? Or what if Amazon were required to let users use any intelligent device on its interface, and not just Alexa?
Keeping antitrust law up-to-date and vigorously enforcing it would go a long way towards eliminating billionaires.
1
This concept misses the point. For one thing, where do you draw the line? A capitalistic society rewards those that successfully implement their ideas. The money gained is a by-product of that success. The efforts of some billionaires have changed our lives dramatically for the better because of their quest to succeed. Should there be some graduated tax or other reasonable measure in place to contain ridiculous levels of wealth? Of course. However, our focus should be on how to cultivate the next generation, instilling good values that drive behavior becoming of a society that must live and work together, and give those less fortunate every access to a proper education and healthcare so they can excel and realize their dreams.
Our problems go much deeper than a handful of billionaires.
4
The idea that the accumulation of capital promotes innovation is a complete myth . On the contrary .All the cash amassed illegally, because accumulation of capital resides in illegality , fiscal fraud . is used to buy more capital or raise the value of real estate. It is just used in speculation.
The GAFA (Google ,Amazon, Facebook, Apple ), are all fiscally settled in Europe , and thrive on a fiscal fraud of trillion Euros per year, while invading the European market .Destroying the European economies.
How about requiring that corporations over a certain size give part ownership to employees, and that the salaries and benefits of executives be capped at a certain ratio of the top earner to the lowest earner?
The first part in exchange for lower corporate taxes.
In considering taxes on large fortunes one thing I have not seen mentioned is that a billion dollars is essentially infinite money. I don’t think a wealthy person would accept less than about a 10% return on their money. For a billion dollars this is $100 million a year. That is about $250,000 a day. In the time it takes me to drive down to the local Lamborgini dealership and negotiate the purchase of a new Lambo, I will have gained in interest more that the cost of the car. Paul Allen promised to give away a large part of his fortune. In the time between the promise and his untimely death, he tried to make good on the promise and saw his fortune increase by a substantial amount.
Or, in the words of one successful American following the 2008 financial debacle, “What’s a billion if you’ve got five.”.
I think no-one should have or make $1 more than me. That seems fair.
Seriously, though, isn't that the point? There is a moral case for not having great extremes of wealth. But "great extremes" is often in the eye of the beholder.
If you take the moral case seriously, the dividing line between "rich" and "poor" is going to be a lot closer to $1 million than $1 billion. And that's certainly not going to work in the USA, where freedom from the "moral case" is our (whoops, almost said "God given") right.
Let's adjust the tax code to reduce society-breaking wealth inequality. But maybe do more to create heroes of those who serve then those who make a fistful of dollars.
4
@Ned
"But "great extremes" is often in the eye of the beholder."
Which is why ideas like this will work in a democracy where we all vote on what that number should be. It's also why arguments that we'll become like pseudo-socialist Venezuela or the USSR are ridiculous. The only person that mattered in those countries was Stalin or whoever is in charge of Venezuela's military. Their eye was the one that mattered. Here, if you don't like the level, vote for someone who wants to change it. There, if you don't like the level, I don't know...try to get to know Stalin before he labels you a rebel and has you executed?
Elimination of all campaign contributions.
Slightly higher taxes on the wealthiest would cover that expense. That would be the least they could contribute to an environment so seeded with profit potential.
Do we then want to abolish/inhibit their success? Not I, good fortune to all. But when deserved, I will allow you to play a more significant role in the evolution of our society.
It will be your honor.
Fascists in Germany had the exact same idea, cut the throats of the capitalists and the bankers. The lure of the concept is rooted in the nutcase notion that if you think you have a really good idea for a Utopia, no level of "rights" should prevent you from carrying out that idea. The good of the state is paramount!
Do we really have to re litigate Fascism and Bolshevism? Perhaps we do, at least in part the paper of record in the US is a dystopian tabloid of Trump derangement, identity politics, and special pleading.
3
I know I'd sleep better if the government confiscated the majority of Oprah's wealth. At 2.6B her reign of terror must end. And what about Spielberg (3.7B)? He should have been forced into retirement after E.T. And Paul McCartney (1.2B)? If he was forced to play for free, I would definitely be able to afford tickets to his summer tour. Wait, forget Paul. He's one of the 75% of billionaires who aren't American. Do we use the military for that?
Yes, purposefully silly cherry picking. And yes, it's easy to find examples of billionaires who are damaging our politics (not that you need anywhere near a billion to buy a politician). And income inequality will get worse and must be addressed. Aggressively.
But can we please focus on appropriately high income tax rates for the wealthy and corporations. Perhaps a wealth tax if that makes sense. Close up loopholes in estate taxes as necessary. Hire enough IRS agents to enforce the tax laws. Capital gains rates, carried interest, the list is long. Money made unethically through financial manipulation, environmental degradation,monopolistic behavior, etc. should be stopped upfront..
Just stop with the "abolish billionaire" rhetoric. It sounds arbitrary, punitive, unworkable, and like one of those sound bites secretly pushed by the Koch brothers to make the left seem like they are not ready to run things. No need to make it easy on them.
521
LT,
I doubt the sincerity of their billionaire-busting. These types have become obsessed with the Overton window since Trump won, and their radical proposals are an attempt to reset the parameters of debate. I predict it will backfire and scare more people off. (It was the realists who flipped all those Republican seats in the midterms, not hardcore progressives.)
9
@LT
Reducing income inequality, funding policies that will save human civilization from the effects of climate change, eliminating the anti-democratic, extra-constitutional political power of the hyper-wealthy--you've already ceded the tax and finance mechanisms to make these things possible. In what sense are these things "unworkable"? Or "punitive"?
58
Certainly, it is reasonable to suggest that the numerical figure of $1B is somewhat arbitrary, but the point is not. The point is that it is time to have a serious discourse about where to begin to reverse both the income inequality as well as the plutocracy that exists in America today. Whether that figure is $1B or $500M or $1.5B can be calculated with some reasonable analysis. In addition to net worth based taxes, there are ways of taxing consumption of extreme luxury that could and should be considered. Every NetJets flight is a missed opportunity.
72
Taking a 2 or 3% wealth tax and confiscating most of the wealth of a billionaire are quite different things. Liberalism was founded on the belief that society works best when individuals have the freedom to say what they want, do what they want, and spend their earnings as they see fit. The right of an individual to his or her private property is a cornerstone of Liberalism. Limiting the power of the state meant limiting the state's power to censor, the state's power to dictate the actions of individuals, and the state's power to seize an individual's property.
We limit the ability of the state to confiscate the wealth of billionaires because a confiscatory state will not stop with billionaires. Why should it? What principle remains? If billionaires are bad, why are millionaires good, or thousandaires? Why shouldn't the state take whatever, in its great wisdom, it needs, from each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs?
I get very tired of columnists spouting nonsense, with no sense of historical perspective, no principles other than how something makes them feel today, no thought as to the unintended consequences of their flights of fancy. Why is this drivel given a place in the NYT?
8
The problem is not flesh billionaires, it's corporations which are legal persons which have (increasingly) all the rights of flesh persons, but none of the obligations of flesh persons, and are potentially not only billionaires but potentially trillionaires and potentially immortal. The fight is between flesh persons and corporations. Personifying it by making it about "millionaires and billionaires" is where Sanders, and sadly much of the left, goes wrong. They might get rid of the flesh billionaires, but the fundamental dynamics tending towards flesh persons as mere mortals, mere second-class citizens, will not improve. Read, for instance, "We, the Corporations" by Adam Winkler.
107
@hag Corporations might even join the fight against "millionaires and billionaires" since eliminating them eliminates a threat from flesh people becoming too individually powerful.
1
@hag this is an insightful point, but, post-Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, it's a non-starter without a constitutional amendment. Corporate persons are real--so says our jurisprudence--and wishing them away is like counting angels on a pinhead.
2
@hag: EXACTLY.....Apple is a trilion dollar company, with its assets hidden overseas. So is Facebook, Google and Amazon.
Going after rich PEOPLE might be satisfying in the short run, but won't do anything about COMPANIES.
Also, if Mr. Steyer is so altruistic....when does he not liquidate all his assets to charity NOW and keep maybe 1-2 million to live on? Hmmm?
3
Set up a one-time "guillotine tax" of 90% as soon as they reach $999,999,999. No deductions, no exceptions.
You ask `Who needs a billion dollars?´
I would ask `Who needs 100 million?´
I have read this before. Why should anybody have a billion dollars when others are poor? What about a million? Isn’t it obscene that a man may contemplate buying a new sports car when a family cannot fill their pantry? A million is too much. But what about a hundred thousand when others don’t have a hundred bucks to rub together? It is unacceptable that one person may be rich when others are poor, that anybody can have more than anybody else. Radical equality is the only solution. Do you know where I read it? In the testimony of Comrade Duch, Pol Pot’s right-hand man when he tried to explain to the International Court in The Hague why more than a million people where murdered in the killing fields.
7
I honestly do not know why The Times publishes essays like this one by Mr. Manjoo.
What HE FAILS TO UNDERSTAND is that NO ONE SETS OUT TO BECOME A BILLIONAIRE. Men like Bill Gates (and the late Paul Allen) had what is now the brilliant idea of putting computers within the reach of all people.
The reality is that those who have become billionaires have devised products and services that the Public determines THEY MUST HAVE. A market has been created when there wasn't one before.
The fortune amassed by former Mayor Bloomberg is a case in point. No one was exploited or taken advantage of in the amassing of his great wealth.
Rather than vilifying such people, we need to honor them and learn from their successes. In many cases, success was begotten by multiple failures. We dust ourselves off and we try again.
The USA has been the magnet for such entrepreneurship and innovation for more than one (1) century. Doing what is suggested would render it nearly impossible for someone who is successful to invest in other potentially ground-breaking work; since these funds would be taxed away.
Stated differently, I'd like Mr. Manjoo to go to a major museum or hospital in a large American city. I would like for him to look at the plaques near the entryways in these facilities. He will find the names of those who made significant donations.
In the world THAT HE'D IMPOSE ON OTHERS, the likelihood of such generosity becomes nil; and it no longer reflects the America that I love.
7
A great idea! If it doesn't work, go back to what we have now. James Madison knew a huge wealthy elite endangers democracy. They form a quasigovernment. Additionally, I'm always amazed how people swallow the rich's public relation scams. The Koch brothers are such nice philanthropists as the roast our planet. Andrew Carnegie built and donated library upon library while he kept his employees on sustenance wages. And those generous Walton kids who put their employees on food stamps and Medicaid subsidized by us. And finally the Kochs who sponsor ALEC which buys favorable state laws for their businesses. No one elected them to any office. But give they all will, fractions of their immense wealth as they think to themselves, suckers!
2
According to today's The Guardian (Wed. Feb. 6th), Howard Schultz thinks the word "billionaire"is a disgusting slur. He suggest that we use "people of means" or "people of wealth" instead.
When billionaires start to go underground, it is a sure sign that things are about to change.
What do you think?
1
Please name just one other group that can be called out with a pejorative like “Robber Baron.” Just one.
@From Where I Sit
Just one? Well, women as a group have been called a lot of things, some of them not very flattering.
Pure oxygen:
"But the adulation we heap upon billionaires obscures the plain moral quandary at the center of their wealth: Why should anyone have a billion dollars, why should anyone be proud to brandish their billions, when there is so much suffering in the world?"
What a breath of fresh air. I haven't read Farhad Manjoo before. Will be.
1
Those who are “suffering” didn’t combine a GUI with the PC to revolutionize the home and office, they didn’t start an online bookstore that grew into the world’s largest retailer, they didn’t devise an investment technique that parlayed investors funds into trillions.
1
A modest proposal that lacks the satire. . .
1
Abolish the American dream?
3
They are indeed a "murder' of billionaires (or just murderous), but when they get to Davos they start thinking they are a "Parliament" and that they have the right to rule us peasants for their personal gain
1
Well well Mr Manjoo. You do realize that the billionaires own and run this country, right?
So the only way you pull this off is full scale revolution. And since the owners control the government the military is at the beck and call leaving revolution a fools errand.
I say we just need to accept the crumbs tricking down and pray for a peaceful and quite demise.
So someone comes up with a great idea, spends years working it, makes it big...but they can't enjoy the spoils of their hard work and ingenuity? Now, according to this silly piece, it's just undeserved "booty" that should be shared with everyone. Doesn't that go against the foundation of what this country is about?
4
@Mattbk
This country was founded on the idea that each person should have a say in their government if that government is going to ask them to pay taxes and serve in the military, among other things. It was not founded on the idea that you get to keep whatever you can grab however you can grab it.
And let's get that J.K. Rowling while we're at it. How *dare* she write a brilliant series of books that turned children around the globe on to reading??!!
2
This column is just silly. Billionaires are easy targets, but they are few. The truly corrosive effects within our society are those that let the "ordinary" bankers run wild. They break laws, and are permitted to settle for civil fines that enable them to continue to operate within the system, while their criminal conduct should have disqualified them from further operations, cleansing the system. This lack of cleansing has made society more and more corrupt.
1
This article is so full of wishful thinking and misconceptions that one does not know where to begin to point out its fallacies.
First of all, why start at a billion? Why not a million, or even a hundred thousand? After all most of the world lives on less than ten dollars a day per capita. Mr. Manjoo's arbitrary cutoff of one billion is just that - one person's opinion.
Second, his proposal (abolish billionaires, presumably by confiscating any wealth above that) makes no economic sense whatever. Other than inherited wealth, and a few oligarchs/monopolists around the world, most of the world's billionaires arrived at their wealth by making products and services that people want and are willing to pay for. Does Mr. Manjoo want to abolish that too? Go to a command economy like the former Soviet Union? One can make a good case for a higher inheritance tax, a wealth tax and higher marginal tax rates, but to destroy all incentives for innovation and success does not make any sense.
Instead of making fanciful prescriptions, Mr. Manjoo should have given a reasoned proposal about how we can reduce income inequality.
1
You Mr. Manjoo, would make an excellent dictator, preferably, I'm sure, of the communist variety. You don't think billionaires contribute to "society" (ie, to you and the people you know) so you want to send out the tax collectors to confiscate their wealth.
Here's a thought you might consider: The "lucre" that billionaires amass are generally businesses. I know you have the image of Scrooge McDuck bathing in gold coins underlying your thinking, but in fact billionaires, unlike you, do not count their wealth by the amount of money they own, but rather by the value of the businesses they own. It just might be that many of these billionaires are better at the tasks of wealth management and business strategy than the most ivy league educated bureaucrat you would send to confiscate their assets. While many wealthy people have gotten that way through political connections and access to taxpayer money via political hacks, most (not all) billionaires actually provide significant value to our economy.
You need to let go of your wealth envy. It is unhealthy.
7
- How did you achieve your great wealth, sir?
+ I was born.
- Ah, well deserved, then.
come on now. get your money up and stop bringing down those who are richer than you. no matter how, we all trying to get rich.
1
QUOTE - And some, I assume, are good people. - END QUOTE
BOOM !!!!
1
Interesting...
For Trump Derangement Syndrome to fully take hold, Trump had to be actually elected...
Here – the Bloomberg strain is already spreading like measles in a left-coast state...
And the guy hasn't even declared his candidacy...
So – as part of the continued valiant effort of Journalists Without Careers to verbally vaccinate the public against this scourge...
Why not ring up an expert or two at Johns Hopkins – starting with the student financial aid office...
While you’re sweet-talking them into divesting their investments in fossil-fuel companies, politely suggest that they disgorge the $2B that Bloomberg bestowed on them, because of its immoral billionaire beginnings...
Besides, that vile loot is just going to sit in a corner of the bursar’s office and gather much dust and little interest...
After all – what self-respecting JH undergrad would take such tarnished tribute to buy three-hundred-dollar textbooks...
Especially when Bernie’s telling them that – if he’s elected – the book is going to be free...
'It’s the perfect way to blunt tech-driven inequality.'
Want to blunt 'tech-driven inequality' ? Simple. Quit using Twitter. Dump Facebook. Donate your Apple watch. Don't 'Google' it, go to the library. But you can't. Can you. Can't live without your 'tech' gadgets'. Every time Apple comes out with a new iPhone, you're the first in line. So, you're making your own monsters. Why complain.
If your goal is to destroy the Democratic Party and our political system with it (both Trump’s goals, also the “why?” behind his alliance with Putin, assisted by Republicans’ malfeasance) this kind of “abolish billionaires” talk will do that nicely.
Be warned: Franklin’s Republic resembles the dying Late Roman, its predecessor and model, more and more with every passing day. Then, as now, there were conservatives and liberals. It had its version of our Republican Party, one called the “Optimates”, composed of the “first” or “best men (think “McConnell” or Romney”). A long-standing alliance of ambitious prominent men of the first social rank of patrician families long and deeply intertwined through marriage — clans, really — controlled the Senate, diplomacy, military and high politics. A closed system. It also had a Democratic Party, called the “Populares” — an alliance of disparate factions drawn from the lower “plebeian” classes, the up-&-coming have-nots led by “new men”. Cicero was one.
Optimates fought Populares in a series of vicious social wars that consumed at least six generations. The most dynamic players were groups of second- and third-tier Optimates who, having lost intramural struggles with more powerful relatives, turned their backs on their class, crossed the social divide and led the Populares to some temporary victories. Caesar was one.
Their struggle for power ultimately destroyed the social glue that held their Republic together. And ours, if we let it.
1
I'be been wondering when you would stray from writing about technology to jumping on the communist bandwagon like all your colleagues. Here it is.
2
Forgot about taxing billionaires out of existence. Let's eat them instead. I bet they taste like chicken.
3
Well there goes several of the Gomers running for President. For that reason alone good idea.
The people have been trained to be serfs and they love their cruel masters. We have democratically elected leaders who give them what they vote for. How hard was it to see that Trump was a liar and inept at leadership? Not hard at all and yet many thought him preferable to anyone else.
" if we aimed, through public and social policy, simply to discourage people from attaining and possessing more than a billion in lucre, just about everyone would be better off."
No. No one would be better off. The idea that we, as a society, are somehow better off when society, collectively, is poorer, is beyond stupid. This is akin to the Joker's idea: take a big pile of money and set fire to it. Who benefits?
No, "Inequality is not the defining economic condition of the tech age." Envy is. The economically illiterate left prefer an economy which does not grow at all rather than tolerate one which grows unequally. This is beyond stupid.
There is no "moral quandary" about letting people keep the fruits of their labor; the "moral quandary" should be wrestling with the absurd idea that theft is permissible when someone has "too much". Put simply, "ringworm" (in the words of our resident economic genius) will continue to exist among the poor whether someone has $1B or not. Because destroying wealth does no one any good at all.
And Singer - he for whom some animals are more worthy than some babies -- is hardly qualified to pass judgment on anything.
THAT SAID, preaching to billionaires about the merits of charity? GREAT! Consider the Catholic schools they could fund, saving kids from horrible public schools. Stop spending $$$ on politics; help the poor. Every $ Steyer spends on "progressive causes" consigns some kid to hook worm. He should be ashamed of himself.
3
This idea is quite dangerous... while he may have good intentions, the author clearly comes from a place of profound naivete about how socialism takes root in a society. This is how. It starts here.
1
@Maximus
"This is how. It starts here."
I've heard this quote before...I think it was in the 1960's with Medicare and civil rights...no, the 1930's with the New Deal and SS...no, the 1900's with demands for clean water, etc...no, I've heard it in any commentary from any time period since Marx about how satisfying the basic needs of a population will cause society to collapse.
2
Billionaires such as Schultz tend to point to their “genius” and work ethic for the successful accumulation of their vast wealth. As the coffee mogul likes to remind us , he is the embodiment of the American Dream, (which for many of the 99% is a nightmare)
But the ability for the successful entrepreneur to create and retain vast wealth is not the result merely of individual effort, nor is it an accidental benefit of our “free enterprise “ capitalism. Nor is the danger of disparate accumulation of wealth as a threat to our collective well being a newly understood phenomenon. Anti-trust legislation, progressive income tax and estate tax laws were reactions to the late 19h century “Guilded Age.” And mega rich philanthropists, who graced society with portions of their largesse, which was accumulated on the backs of exploited labor, are not 21 century innovations. (ie the generous union busting Andrew Carnegie)
The ability to obtain, multiply and retain such levels of wealth is the by product of tax and regulatory legislation and lax enforcement, bought by lobbying and donating on behalf of the monied interests..Legislation the Roosevelts fought for to protect the economic well being for our society as a whole, has successfully been watered down thorough relentless attacks by theUber rich and their government representatives.
.Despite the quest for perpetual “growth” our economy is a pie. The wealthy want bigger slices ala mode, expecting the rest of us to eat stale crust.
3
Sorry, got so caught up in my basic math that I forgot to figure the interest at an annualized rate. But, even dividing my previous interest earned amounts by 12 (200 k, 2 mill, or 20 mill /month), I think my view re: the actual spending still stands.
@Bigg Wigg
Geez, still got my math wrong.
Correction: 2 mill, 24 mill, and 240 mill / month...
I respect Mr. Manjoo, but this a silly, ill-informed and wrong-headed column. I agree that the super-rich need to pay more, much more, in taxes than they do now. Yes, close tax loopholes. Yes, make hedge fund operators pay income taxes and not lower capital gains taxes. But claiming that billionaires are ipso facto bad? Come on. People like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, among others, have pledged to give most of their vast wealth away to worthy causes. Others are doing good on a variety of funds. Yes, there are some bad and greedy billionaires. There are also some good, thoughtful ones. It is not money that’s the root of all evil, but rather, the love of money.
86
@Mark Siegel "People like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, among others, have pledged to give most of their vast wealth away to worthy causes. " But they are the ones choosing the worthy causes. That's not good.
34
@abo
Appreciate your thought but don’t agree. One example: Jeff Bezos bought and in so doing likely saved The Washington Post. He in no way has a hand in the paper’s coverage. Joan Croc gave a huge bequest to NPR a number of years ago, securing that wonderful organization’s financial future. Absent the wealth of Carnegie, we would have no public libraries in the US. The Museum of Modern Art would not exist without Rockefeller wealth. Don’t get me wrong: The ultra rich have to pay much more in taxes. But to propose abolishing billionaires simply because they are billionaires is an idea Karl Marx would have liked.
13
If you are so smart at knowing how to make and spend money then why aren’t you a billionaire as well?
I trust Bill Gates a lot more to give his money away to a good cause than a 27 year old former waitress/first time congressperson with ZERO experience.
16
One problem with this thinking is that there are many billionaires in other competing countries, Russia, Asia, Europe, so that if we decide in the U.S. to tax billionaires out of existence, we tax ourselves out of a competitive race.
There are things that billionaires do, that exhibit power for a country, that can keep a country going, and exhibit power in front of other countries; and this can be important and useful.
I'm all for feeding everyone, but let's think twice about doing away with billionaires just because they have what they have. First let's take a look at whether they are useful on the competitive international plane, at least.
31
@Thinker Ridiculous idea but typically American .
What is Jeff Bezos doing for the grandeur or power of the USA ? Nothing. You don't measure the image of a nation at the money concentrated in a few hands . It is a weak nation .
9
@Thinker
This is an absurd argument.
By eliminating inequality, more than just the super rich will be able to contribute to our country. That alone is a good reason to do it.
You do not have to be insanely wealthy to matter or contribute. Or at least that's how it should be.
5
@Thinker
Oh no! We're in danger of falling behind in the billionaires race!
Except that when it comes to a health economy and society, less is more, and none is best of all. The numbers of billionaires is a measure of an economies decay and corruption, not health.
8
Get rid of billionaires? that would go against the Gospel of Wealth that girds the US attitude towards the rich: God likes you, you are a good, moral, and of course fantastically smart person and so deserve all that money.
2
This is ridiculous and obviously written by someone quite ignorant of how the economy works. Billionaires or even millionaires do not have most of the money attributed to them in hidden treasures chests full of currency or of gems and gold. Neither do they, for the most part, consist of luxury goods that they use in daily life. They are invested. Those who acquire wealth for the most part have it invested in productive properties -- both private and public -- via equity shares and bonds; sometimes in agricultural or commercial real estate. They have acquired control of the those funds because they invest well. How would one appropriate that wealth to spread it around? If those investments were taxed away, they would suddenly flood the market to raise cash to pay the taxes, with no one able to buy them. If they simply were appropriated and handed out as equity shares of bonds to people unaccustomed to handling investment, most likely the same would happen. Totally ridiculous!
If you look at countries like Japan, there is a very low number of homeless and almost no billionaires. It's because of the tax system which makes it almost impossible for people to become disgustingly wealthy. Even the few homeless here live much more luxuriously than in the west, often with power generators, mobile phones, and cigarettes among their blue tent villages located in Yoyogi park or under the highway in Shinjuku. Capitalism has run rampant in the U.S. for far too long...get it under control.
3
So those who work hard should not be entitled to the fruits of their success?
should we all wallow in mediocrity?
those who work hard and make $$$ should keep it.
those who have to work at lower paying jobs, need to look at what they need to do to improve their lot in life.
dont steal the money from those who have already sacrificed and endured to get where they are.
Billionires should be abolished because they form an oligarchy which is detrimental to democratic government.
2
Billionaires are a plight on current civilization. The rich, for that matter, have have always destroyed what’s good in the world, including the world, to be rich. They would go on to destroy other worlds if they could.
1
I think that kibbutzs in their original form is where the argument about abolishing billionaires gets you. It did not take off. Why try again?
I am of the opinion that columnist who propose to steal other people’s hard-earned money because he does not think they deserve it, or, more to the point, because he does not have it and is incapable of earning it, are immoral. We should strip them of their First Amendment rights and subject them to social shame into rituals.
The above, which I do not agree with it all, follows the same logic as Mr. Manjoo’s article and jumps to a conclusion that is just as ridiculous.
1
The more I read pieces like this, the more inevitable 4 more years of President Trump appear. I can't believe we are trying so hard to blow another presidential election.
2
In the last six months, Amazon vans and trucks have begun to crowd the major highways of the Research Triangle. They look like an invading army, sent by the richest man in the world, to warn everyone that the end has come - the end of local commerce, the end of the planet. I write this as the low temperature this morning is 63 degrees, a new record. This is not good.
People in my neighborhood work from home, order deliveries of goods and foods to their doorstep, and vote Democratic seemingly without realizing that their lifestyle adds fuel to climate change by putting more cars, trucks and airplanes on the road, and in the air and adds thousands more pounds of garbage to the landfill and recycling bins. To say nothing of all the non-environmentally manufacturing done in China to supply these deliveries. Hello, is there anyone at home, even though they rarely leave it?
Tech is not only making a few superrich folks at the expense of everybody else; it gives consumers a false taste of royalty themselves, as their every click becomes manifest with a ring at their doorbell. Tech makes a few billionaires and makes the rest of us lazy and stupid.
Well, time to go to work which takes longer now that the commute is filled with Amazon vehicles. There's another class system tech is creating: poor suckers who still have to physically engage a work environment and those who live happily after after in a little tiny tech world of We Work type living.
Let's call it for what it is--a mental illness. The feeling of not ever having enough and needing to take more and more, even at the expense of others, is a sickness of the soul. Get thee to the nunnery, billionaires.
1
I am pretty much okay with somewhat higher tax rates but as some readers have pointed out we are not playing a zero sum game. Bill Gates wealth creates more wealth for others but people still think in terms of he has more,so I have less. You win more support if you show an understanding of capitalism.
And as one reader pointed out, if you make $35000 a year you are in the top 1% in the world. Do you not have the moral obligation to give part of that money to help the world’s poorest residents?
This topic makes everyone stupid. The simple answer is to talk about what our tax rates should be to effectively run our country. Tax rates are not moral codes they are practical limits used to fund our needs. If we still have billionaires after raising the tax rates then so be it.
Exhibit A for abolishing billionaires: Robert Mercer.
2
@JP Exhibit B The Koch Brothers.
2
Great wealth is never earned, it is acquired. Acquisitiveness is not personally admirable and great wealth is never acquired without harming others along the way. Stop fawning over colossally selfish people.
1
Today, the billionaires. Tomorrow, the millionaires.
Next week: You.
1
@Patrick Calahan
There's no point in coming after me. I have nothing.
This is the type of question Carl Marx pondered before he wrote Communist Manifesto - a very heart soothing challenge for an intellectually stimulated mind. Question is can a policy frame work or a political system designed on this principle can work in human society. The answer is NO. The technology has given tremendous capacity to human race to solve the resource problems of human population - today we can generate sufficient foods, clothings, Shelters. Schools to meet the demands of the world populations. Why that is not happening - human minds distortions. To address this malady, we need to focus on human minds not a new communist manifesto. The Western thought process since Plato and Reformation side lined the deeper human instincts of “oneness” and focused on the diversity of outside world. The deepest problem of human progress will need to focus inside as Bernard Russell said in his Darwin centenary lecture in 1959. Let us be sincere at our mind to focus on human progress and stop monkey jumps in 2019.
Singer as your ethicist. Fail. One should not confuse ethics, a practical concern, with morality, a decidedly ideological concern, nor their students.
1
Bring back the inheritance tax it is a great leveler over time. You don't want to make the tax code so onuris that people leave to find success.
It’s hard to see this as about anything other than envy and hatred. The writer has seen many people work hard and, against the odds, create successful and valuable businessses. Their just desserts? To be crippled (“kneecapped”) and have what they have created taken from them. Hard to see the morality in that.
1
It is far easier for a Camel to pass through an eye of an needle, than for a Rich Man to enter the Kingdom.
1
This is an excessively bad idea. At the end of the day, we kill all the three commas people, then that will not be enough and we will do away with the two commas people (why do you really need a billion when school is free, and health care etc.?), and in the end you run out of other people's money, and we end up like Venezuela.
And please, grow up: if having money was all it took to get the state to dance to your tune, Trump would have been impeached by now, and Bloomberg would be president.
This is such nonsense as to defy any norm of rational thinking, or it is the sad result of a poor grasp of history.
4
I'd go father...get rid of centi-millionaires, too.
1
Why are liberal writers the most opposed to billionaires? I have literally heard no one offline make such an argument.
Envy is a deadly sin as well as avarice.
3
26 people own 50% of the wealth on planet earth. Why should people be dying because they can’t afford insulin? Wealth inequality is literally killing us. Kochs don’t like fossil fuels? No climate change. Saudis want to kill journalists? Fine. Putin wants to take down democracy in the US? Who is to stop him?Billionaires have become Mafiosos.
1
All I can say is, Good luck getting at their dough.
And after we get the billionaires, then we get the nine-hundred-millionaires!
Billionaire are robbers ? most of them became “ rich”, because of their hard work, valuable inventions, dare devil, risk taking entrepreneurship⋯⋯the list goes on
Real massive robbery happened as “ lottery “, which amassed millions of people’s money, and achieved less than 0.00001% of winners to become multi millionaires!
1
Wealth can only serve the needs of the individual who “earns” it, and those who depend on him/her, to a finite limit. Homes, cars, food, comforts, vacations, college tuition, toys, jewelry, art.
Someone who possesses billions of dollars can realistically only buy so many homes, so many luxury cars, swimming pools, yachts. For their patents, their children, for other family members. Unless you give the money away or gamble it away, it’s REALLY difficult to spend billions or tens of billions.
So. After you and everyone you love has everything they desire, what are you going to do with all that money?
Invest it? Buy stocks or profitable businesses?
That’s just going to make you richer. You’re already so rich it doesn’t matter.
What to do? What to do?
USE THE MONEY TO GAIN POWER AND INFLUENCE!
Deny the one man/one vote constraint.
Gain a hugely disproportionate share of real power!
Control the outcome of elections.
Manipulate public opinion!
Control the legislative process.
Now you’re cooking.
Now your life really matters.
Wealth status POWER = A meaningful life.
I not only made a ton of money. I MATTERED. I influenced the lives of others. I influenced the bills that were passed into law. Mayors and governors and U.S. Senators vied for my attention. I used my money to get power, and I used the power to prove how much more important I am than common people!
____________________________________________
No one should possess billions of dollars. It damages democracy.
2
I haven’t always admired Microsoft but I will take likes of Bill Gates and Jobs any day over mooching, hypocritical politicos who waste billions and use their positions for personal enrichment and power. Likes of Gates do far more public service than these so-called ‘public servants’. True leeches in this world are these ruinous career politicians who have never done a honest day’s job and have become multi-millionaires on tax-payer’s dime by gaming the political systems.
They tried that already in a few countries. Didnt work out too good. For example: Putin(Richest man in the world), Chavez's Daughter Richest person from VZ($4B)
DJT said it Tuesday night , "we will never be a Socialist Country".
Just to be clear about your point, less than 10% of billionaires have signed the Giving Pledge—and one can argue that even those who have signed have their own particular agendas, which may or may not align with what the public good needs. But it’s a whole lot better than nothing, and what does it say about the other 90 %? I shudder to think.
One critical component of making any serious inroads on this problem is that it’s become a GLOBAL issue: The super-rich have ample opportunities to shift their money and squirrel it away in tax shelters and havens, some of them legal, many not so much. The Panama and Paradise Papers give us a glimpse of the murky world of uber-wealthy tax avoidance, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Only through international cooperation and (much) tighter rules will significant progress be made on this front, and I guarantee that won’t happen with the current occupant of the White House alienating all our allies, for starters.
And if you think the US is some sort of global inspiration in this regard, think again: “The Tax Justice Network ranks the US third in terms of the secrecy and scale of its offshore financial industry, behind Switzerland and Hong Kong but ahead of the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg.” Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_as_a_tax_haven
“American Exceptionalism” in this case means we’re one of the world’s biggest tax-fraud-promoting countries around. Fewer billionaires would help.
Zillionaires? It’s not exactly important where you draw the line it’s important that you draw the line. If the billionaires want to take their money out of the country then strip them of their citizenship. The priority of money has to have it place. It’s not a quirk of genius that someone can amass a fortune, it’s simply too much greed. Shame them, their associates, even their families. The world of 7 billion which can only afford 10 billion cannot afford an extra jerk who cares a grandiose lot more about themselves than others. Surely we have learned that much.
I adhere to the definition of real wealth as « having 10%more money than your brother-in-law. »
An intelligent conversation can be had about higher income taxes on the wealthy and even taxes on wealth. And one on why legal reforms are needed to limit the power of wealth in influencing politics. But a conversation about "abolishing" billionaires reeks of stupidity, and serves no purpose I can see other than oversimplifying the problem, and irritating ALL very wealthy people, not just billionaires, and despite their political leanings.
Manage money now! Do not leave it up to billionaires. We don't need them. What we need is the kind of government that will take the money from everyone and put it to work governing people and keeping their roads and common property up to par. This would be a fair and just balance. Those who have great ideas can prosper as well but the amount of money that they maintain must not be as much as they want. They may be good at devising a new telephone but not as good as devising a new form of government. I once heard Jeffery Bezos say he would like to start doing interstellar missions. Is that what we need?
For what it is worth, I have a PhD in economics, and I agree with ever single word of this. You just don't get to be a billionaire and stay a billionaire by enriching society. You get there by figuring out ways to game the system. Billionaires extract wealth from the rest of society. We would all be better off without them. When we hear of their threats to take their "abilities" elsewhere, our response should be, let me buy you a first class ticket.
3
The only reason it seems in any way 'radical' or 'out there' to talk about enormous tax rates on the uber wealthy (the threshold is far below Billionaires) is b/c we've been brainwashed to overlook basic morality.
The fact that a man can spend $250 million on his 5th home while people in the same city are forced to starve and sleep on the streets is sick -- incomprehensibly so.
2
Looking forward to seeing Mr. Manjoo's scorecard for how to delineate between "bad" and "good" billionaires. Publish it soon, please.
1
Scapegoating is great fun, I guess. In the recent past, our favorite targets have been the dreaded “elites” who were imposing their will on the rest of us.
(Most of the members of this dastardly group were elected officials, but never mind.). Now, it’s billionaires. Doesn’t matter how much money they devote to charitable giving, we seem to think they’re evil because they have the money in the first place. Sorry, but this is populist nonsense.
Let’s talk about higher taxes, not some imagined enemy of the people.
1
A comment by Sir Winston Churchill just comes to mind:
“Many people see the Capitalists as a wolf that must be abated, many others see them as a cow to be milked, very few see them as the horse that pulls the cart”
Certainly Capitalism is not perfect and lends itself to abuses but spreading poverty and mediocrity as Socialist always preach and do is not the answer. Just look at all and any country that tried it.
Arbitrarily outlawing billionaires without exception. That's rich.
1
"At some level of extreme wealth, money inevitably corrupts. On the left and the right, it buys political power, it silences dissent, it serves primarily to perpetuate ever-greater wealth, often unrelated to any reciprocal social good. For Mr. Scocca, that level is self-evidently somewhere around one billion dollars; beyond that, you’re irredeemable."
Nonsense, I know plenty of people who are irredeemable; not a single one of them is a billionaire.
How about we radically alter those Mega Million and Power Ball jackpots and continue picking numbers until we have several hundred millionaires instead of one winner who will not know what to do with--or simply hoard--all that money? Spread the wealth!
Just bring back a proper tax system where you don't have the top percent of the wealthy getting away with paying less taxes than the working class. What have these billionaires done with their excess wealth? Corrupt the political system in their favor. All governing instutions are currently in their pockets. Gee, I wonder why we have pathological economic inequality?
1
Billionaire “ beef “ jerky. Sounds like a great idea, for meat eaters. I think this is about right, NO one NEEDS more than a billion dollars. And their Children certainly don’t deserve it, while people are hungry and can’t pay for basic healthcare. TAX them, heavily. And Tax “ Churches “ while we’re at it.
2
Billionaires are a symptom of market failure.
No one would become that obscenely wealthy in a true free market.
1
It's a sad irony that ever since Freud (if not Augustine), we have have been taught that we should "sublimate" (great word, turning the word "repress" into something more positive) the naturally-arising endorphin rush which powers the SEX drive into more "productive" drives. In other words, we are actually encouraged to not just give free reign to but to welcome the endorphin rush which comes when we achieve POWER of one sort or another. And one of the best manifestations of power is money, the more the better.
Maybe it's time to treat addiction to money (and, frankly, other sorts of power) the way we treat addiction to sex -- shame it.
2
This is a very dangerous race to the bottom.
Why stop at billionaires? Frankly, millionaires have more than 80% of the American public, so why shouldn't they also be stripped of their wealth?
And don't stop there! What about the guy down the street who owns a $75K BMW? Or the house that's worth double yours? Or the guy who takes fancy holidays? Of who wears $300 t-shirts???
This is a slippery slope to disaster. Just read a history book about what happened in eastern Europe and Russia in the late 1800's/early 1900's. All that envy led directly to the most terrifying, predatory, anti-human state in human history: the Soviet Union.
Now imagine what regime could be constructed with today's modern technology?!
Yes, there is an issue of rich people unduly influencing the political process. But, I have news for you: THEY ALWAYS HAVE, SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME!
Instead of legislating some arbitrary monetary figure as "immoral" and "excessive," it might be time to "pull the plank out of your own eye" and deal with your own envy issues.
1
@JOHNNY CANUCK
"This is a slippery slope to disaster."
Well, compared with a monarchy, democracy is just a step on the slippery slope to anarchy. And no one wants that!
Let me know when the IRS is employing enough people to determine whether you are wearing a $300 t-shirt.
1
Abolish billionaires. For sure. Remove the outsized role they play in our society, so disproportionate from the rest of us. Good riddance to the Kochs, the Mercers, and the Zuckerbergs. And in their day, the Rockefellers and Hearsts.
But let's also remove the ridiculous conceit that is Citizens' United. Less to do with money and more to do with rights. Corporations are not people. If they were, they'd be psychopaths. Thank you for your article.
1
A most XL-ent article. After reading, I concur 100% that we should "Abolish Millionaires". Now lets get together and abolish all the poor folk. You know, the one's who leach off the rest of us and don't contribute to 'our' society.
I never realized that Steven Speilberg was the cause of poverty. Steve Jobs too. We need laws to make people like them stupider so they won't be able to create such good movies or phones and that should solve all our economy ills. What an enlightening article. Thanks for wising me up!!
Why draw the line at a billion? There's little difference between a billionaire and somebody with $999 million.
This idea is naive and ridiculous. The ultra rich have always been among us. Who do we celebrate, admire and elect president? Rich people. Gawking at the lives of rich people online, on television, in magazines is a national pastime and a multi-million dollar business in itself, and we can't get enough of it. Americans crave the royalty we ditched 300 years ago, and rich people fill that void. Nobody will ever vote to put a poor person in the White House.
Then quickly back to The Major Oak!
Dear Mr. Manjoo,
Where does one begin? Even if all we did was colllect a flat tax from everyone, the billionaires would be paying thousands of times more in taxes than the average person, generating thousands of times more in commercial surplus and jobs than the average person, while catching thousands of times more in grief.
What you’re truly seeking to abolish is humanity’s obsession with relentlessly seeking wealth and power and status, and to see society strive for justice, fair play, and the higher pursuits of art and literature.
And I’m with you, all the way. All we have to do to accomplish this worker’s paradise, this socialist dream, this aesthetic utopia, is to abolish human nature. I’ll see if I can create an app for that.
Cordially,
S.A. Traina
Convince me that the money taxed would be more wisely spent by mediocre bureaucrats. Better they should be directed to donate it to established charities.
I seem to remember a feisty little group of rebels who said: "Huh, maybe monarchs shouldn't rule us any more" and the world was shocked at the very thought! What will we do without our beloved kings and queens? But our forefathers had an idea, and they ran with it. It was a mess, but it seemed to work for the most part. We've been fine-tuning the experiment since then, progressing to better lives for more of us.
But we can't have nice things, and all good things must pass. Because the fact is, billionaires and oligarchs currently rule over us like monarchs via the purchase of politcians. They use their money to change our laws to their monetary benefit, to conform with their religious beliefs, even just to their whims. They control how little we're paid and destroy our attempts to create unions. They even kill us when they abolish govt healthcare programs or start wars to line their pockets. They squeeze our cultural advances by buying up IP and extending copyright to ridiculous lengths. They are currently eliminating inheritance laws so their illiterate princeling spawn can retain those billions and easily step up and take over after they die.
Eliminating billionaires would be like casting down monarchs. Let's stop fawning over them and reduce them to mere multi-millionaires. They won't notice the change in their lifestyles, except that they won't be able to use the power of their missing billions to rule over the rest of us.
1
I stopped reading when he quoted Peter Singer on ethical duties and morality. Singer is famous for contending that it is morally permissible to euthanize a disabled new-born baby. I'll get my moral lectures elsewhere.
1
Next week: Abolish the Poor - perhaps with a nod to Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal."
Rather not turn this into a religious discussion, but this idea has been around for a long time (see below). However, 2000 years and we still haven't learned.
"I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the super-rich simply don't care.
1
First, the notion that all billionaires equal a policy failure is a call-back to the zero-sum notion that wealth is the result of exploitation.
Sometimes that is correct - Aldrich Rockefeller monopolized oil, driving up prices for everyone who used it directly or indirectly (ie, everyone). That IS exploitative, and is also barred by antitrust law. Break 'em up!
On the other hand, some people have breakthrough ideas that enrich us all. Who did JK Rowling exploit with her Harry Potter monopoly? (Then again, George Lucas is also a billionaire and if social policy had made him stop already with the Star Wars films after "Return of the Jedi" I'd have been a backer).
As a tech writer Mr. Manjoo is well positioned to understand this, as is every New Yorker who ever bought a lottery ticket or went to a restaurant staffed by aspiring Broadway stars. People line up for a chance to win $500 million in the lottery. Do they stand in line for $50,000? The prospect of an Gyneth Paltrow/Hugh Jackman type payday inspires hundreds who never make it. Would capping a media star's pay enrich or diminish our cultural life?
Tech is like Hollywood. Venture capital is looking for the NEXT Facebook success. However, most of The Next Big Things won't be. Tut-tutting at Zuckerberg's payday overlooks the huge number of ideas (a few of them good!) that got funding based on his example.
If there are antitrust problems with Big Tech, apply the law. Don't trash the whole process.
Good luck collecting the tax revenue. It's already off-shore.
Of course Tom Steyer favors a wealth tax that he know won't materialize at best and will avoid at worst. He might own a Volt, but I'm sure he doesn't live next door to me in the burbs (apparently he's got at least one residence in San Francisco's Pacific Heights). And he's only pledged 50% of his 1.6B, which leaves him close to a billion that he probably also doesn't need.
Steyer's a political poser (and another failed candidate like Clinton, O'Rourke, and Abrams).
Nice try... to imprison the billionaires with 70% tax will only
move them to re-up themselves with the snatch of government. The result being -- an even wider gap between the average and the super wealthy.. PS: there is one billionaire who's working for a buck a year at 1600 Penn.
Love the way it ended!
The power and privileges of beauty are far greater that of a billionaire. Donald and Melania are a perfect example. Melania does what she wants when she wants and as she has told us, she don't care. Donald is stuck in a job he doesn't like and worried about what everyone thinks, especially regarding his future. Melania will get off scot-free but billionaire hubby won't.
So would you rather be the beauty or the billionaire?
1
Billionaires are by far the biggest polluters internationally. Directly and by association. How is this? Their products, if not their usage patterns of planes and luxury goods - we are talking the pollution trajectories of their industries and the distribution of that industrial output through the populations.
The drive towards wealth is in and of itself antithetical to human survival. Radical statement? Its called cancer. Sociological cancer. Anything on a fast burn will incinerate itself eventually. Hyper capitalism is expressed through the billionaire. The appalling reality of Agent Orange in the White House illustrates the piggishness of the billionaire perfectly.
Research and Development have nothing to do with individual billions. R and D arguably waste resources. Going to Mars will "waste" trillions of dollars. The billionaire is the same fat cat he always was. The reaper of R&D in its distribution but also the halting of that very R&D.
Steve Jobs was best when scared and a bit hungry. As was Gates. As was Zuckerberg as a college student.
Innovation happens at lower income streams.
We are killing education in this country. All the kids wanna be an American Idol and billionaires. There's no longer any substance.
Tax the rich.
1
"Asymptotic Greed" should be defined as TMYHTMYW (hard to pronounce), meaning "TheMoreYouHaveTheMoreYouWant." It should be in DSM-6. It's a well-documented mental disorder. I think it happens at about $10 million, never mind a $billion.
Therapies would include working at a food pantry, standing in cold rain waiting for a bus, solving a real medicine-or-rent problem and a bank balance of zero for the last week of every month.
1
So if robots will inevitably take most of our jobs, as the writer notes, what's the Democratic argument for unlimited illegal and legal immigration? The robots aren't just coming for manufacturing jobs. Quite a few exist and are being developed for agriculture.
As for the billionaires, an overwhelming majority are globalists, which means even if they support Republicans, it's for the same overwhelming policy proposals of the left. A tax the billionaire to death plan would crush tech CEOs actively censoring little baby Facebook groups because CNN determined them to be fake news, Catholic websites that criticize the corruption of the Catholic Church (life site news lost their registrar for awhile), or who manipulate trending news on Twitter or Google search algorithms.
By all means, eat the billionaires. We really would be better off for it, just not for the fantasy reasons you hold to.
Liberalism is all about the idea that if you can't succeed, then everyone else deserves to fail too. It's the new form of socialism and socialism has never worked.
I can only wonder, when this author thinks of “abolishing” billionaires, is he talking about stoping people with great ideas and entrepreneurial spirit actually implementing their ideas, or confiscating their money, or lining them up against a wall and shooting them ?
I know that these days it’s totally not fashionable to look back at history, but having lived and worked in a communist country, I know exactly how all of the above options get implemented. I don’t know if the author of this article was born in 1989, but he might want to “expand his mind” by reading a few things about this kind of ideas, how they have fared in history and how they have destroyed the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Yesterday it was about guaranteed jobs, today we hear the far left talking about eliminating billionaires. Really, is there even one sinister, absurd and bankrupt idea from the communist textbook that the new left would not regurgitate ?
Billionaires: they aren’t pulling their weight; they are tipping the scales.
1
Our dear and respected Statue of Liberty was given us by a then brand new State that was achieved in great measure by a group of little old ladies knitting to count the removal one by one of their equivalent of Billionaires.
1
This is a fantastic idea! Let's take those people who create the products and services that we value the most and force them to stop producing those things for us! Because we can't handle the fact that some people are very successful and somehow their success is our failure.
It was a joke. You overreact.
Nobody advocates divesting them, locking them up or "terminating" them.
Taxing them progressively has a rational basis, because they benefit from government exponentially compared to middle class taxpayers.
2
It should be illegal to be a billionaire.
They will just go some where else??
The more money floating around...the more progress in the human existence takes place. All people benefit ...just some more than others.
Democrats want something for nothing. They sell class warfare, helped by journalists and op-ed writers who believe they are the truly deserving ones to possess wealth and determine elections. It starts with the 1% then the 10% then the 20% then we just get to socialism.
Nobody needs a billion dollars. Having billionaires has been a social disaster and we need to get rid of them. That can be achieved by very high tax rates on income, capital gains, and estates or by the pitchfork and guillotine. The responses of the billionaires themselves to the former proposition suggests a willingness to run the risk of the latter.
The real question isn't whether we should get rid of billionaires. Its how much further we should chop from the top. Nobody needs an annual income of $500,000 or $250,000 either. Research strongly suggests that the returns in terms of increased happiness per dollar of additional individual income drop off pretty quickly after $75,000 per year and cease altogether above $105,000.
After that you are mainly buying junk you don't need to feed your vanity.
The rich like to flatter themselves by thinking that their higher incomes incentivize productivity-increasing innovations, but the evidence seems to be that they rather incentivize sociopathy. In any event, increases in productivity mean little when the returns on it are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands where they end out financing the dismantling of democracy.
Unfortunately, trying to raise taxes on the super-rich is unlikely to really work. Even when the highest marginal tax rate was around 90% the rich found all sorts of ways hide their wealth and income. The hard truth is that it is going to take a revolution to actually be rid of these parasites.
1
I have been pushing this idea hard for the past few months. I am so glad Farhad is onboard! There is simply no good reason for them to exist, period. For anyone who was compelled to build a business in order to become a billionaire (essentially nobody), I can find dozens if not hundreds of people who will do it to maybe be a millionaire, or heck, even do it just to make a positive impact on the world, in a real way that benefits actual people. I even think we should cap wealth closer to $100-$200 Million, period. We'd be living in a Star Trek utopia.
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"Inequality is the defining economic condition of the tech age."
Yeah, that's because *real* poverty has virtually been eliminated. Unless you're mentally ill or a drug addict, poverty is pretty easy to avoid in America.
"Software, by its very nature, drives concentrations of wealth. "
Software doesn't concentrate wealth any more than anything else. Educate yourself about the Pareto principle. If you're so worried about inequality, lesson yours by getting a better job or starting your own business.
"It could mean preventing people from keeping more than a billion in booty"
Billionaires only spend a small fraction of their money on themselves. The vast majority of it is invested. Having the government seize it would be a massive blow to the economy. But hey, then we'd all be equal right? Equally miserable.
Good idea!
But it first needs to said that these people are sick with a hounding greed and a snarling competition. They are dangerously demented. How is it that greed isn't accounted a serious mental illness? But it isn't only or even mostly the billionaires themselves; it is their satellites, lawyers, sooth-sayers, fixers etc, that also are as sick as sick can be.
Much of this greed-compulsion is competition with each other to see who's swiftest at making money. Probably within that broad heading are all sorts of various sub-disciplines of searching for Humanity's soft spots that can be taken advantage of. That's how they did it? Right?
This sort of alpha chase can be controlled and handled in better ways.
The Catch and Release fisher is one example. One that has it's own moral questions....but that aside: fishers are often very competitive. And people are greedy, especially competitive ones.
But nowadays you can take a photo of the trout you just released and be a big time hero with that particular world. You don't have to kill the fish to prove you are a great angler! So too ought Billionaires and Multimillionaires be handled: their destructive competitive genes are funneled into a safe venue: they gotta release most of their wealth.
That or Potlatch.
Very thought provoking. In fact, it provoked me so much that I began to wonder when you will realize that you have aimed too high. I mean, when, according to the comment by FunkyIrishman, four-fifths of the world lives on less than $10 a day, why put the cut-off so high? Why is a third comma necessary to raise your ire? Can't the same argument be made for three-quarters of a billion? Or half a billion? Or, or, or.... Or maybe we should ask the four-fifths of the world living on $10 a day, what their ideas on the topic are. I suspect that many of them can't imagine ever having even a five digit bank account. Should that be the limit? Arbitrary cut-offs, however well-intentioned, have a way of slipping when put into place.
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Mike Tyson blew half a billion bucks in a few years. Who knows - maybe a billion isn't much after all.
Indeed, do what the title suggests.
Unless, of course, you're a billionaire.
There have been so many columns lately advocating radical progressive ideas...abolish billionaires, implement open borders, centrists are fanatics, etc.
While on the right, we have David Brooks writing about kindness and Stephens saying maybe we shouldn't look to Venezuela as a model economic system.
To balance out the left-skewed radicalism, I think the Times needs to start running some pieces by techno-libertarians and Social Darwinists.
So like instead of abolishing billionaires we'd have government by local warlords competing with each other for citizens who can choose the best society for them.
Isn't fantasy fun?
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Thank you, Farhad Manjoo! Your plea is one which I and many of my friends full support, and you have laid out good foundational arguments in support of it.
People like to joke that a million dollars just won't buy you enough of anything nowadays. But to most of the world's population, having that much money on hand, let alone a 1000 times more, is the stuff that dreams are made of. And the injustice of such massive inequities in the distribution of wealth are hard to joke about—especially given the harm the very rich are capable of inflicting on the democratic process.
This is a ridiculous idea, for various reasons. First, it would never succeed in the USA. Second, the allegation that the rich have too much political power can be controlled by other methods; for example in Spain and the rest of Europe the millionaires have no political power; we should adopt the their parliamentary system and elections by proportional representation. Third, the billionaires do not really enjoy their wealth; seeing poor Trump eating a bowl of Mexican food and gorging on hamburgers and french fries makes me feel sorry for him. As for buying political power , is not so convincing since Trump did not spend any of his money and won! This is not the solution. What kind of Revolution does the left want? A Communist one like China, Cuba and Venezuela? Count me out; a counter revolutionary, he,he!
I’m a Democrat and believe in progressive taxation - bring back the 70 percent top rates, high estate taxes, etc. But for Democrats to start calling for taking people’s property? (Which the author says may be one way of doing it). Saying billionaires are bad people? That goes against everything America and our Constitution stands for.
That’s just irresponsible, and clickbait.
Grow up.
Sounds a little like Pol Pot getting rid of the elite and intellectuals. Manjoo is obviously aware of his own mistake, that he's stereotyping while missing the point. The discussion should be about the need to reform a system that fails to regulate capitalism to protect the common good, allows people to make billions without penalty from things like fracking, sweatshops, payday loans, casinos. The Republican orgy of deregulation is exactly wrong, a much better answer is to throw them out and regulate effectively responsibly to solve our well understood problems.
It is interesting that some young people finally renew the interest for culture instead of money.
How do we care about money ? It is juste a capitalsit ideology made to erase all differences contrary of what the partisans of liberty say.
What about expressing a difference because you can create, play music, write ,speak in public, paint, sing, etc...
That is why all the frozen bourgeois are so scared .
Because they are unable to do anything creative for the community except abusing others to submit to them with MONEY !!!
This guy is full of fuzzy analysis and fake ideas. If you can make a billion legally, more power to you-- provided we have the right tax and antitrust systems in place. If we do, then you can make the money, and society will still benefit, including fighting inequality. See: there is analysis and a plan in one paragraph. And I didn't get paid to do it. And you're free to argue with it by challenging my assumptions and/or conclusions, unlike the hot air of the article.
So, you take a person’s assets above $1B. Then their assets grow naturally above that amount. Take it. Grow it. On and on...
When does the serial billionaire get jailed?
Will there be a mandatory fiduciary analysis to prevent wealth accumulation back above $1B?
First of all, I'm glad to be reading this column again, now that you are writing it instead of that silly song and dance man, Pogue, who has also ruined Nova....
Yes! If you are a billionaire, you're doing it wrong. And by "it", I mean capitalism. Capital is like blood it must flow to all parts of the body. The foot doesn't hoard all the blood just because it can.
The billions that are hoarded by billionaires doesn't truly belong to the billionaire; it belongs to the body of society.
First they came for the billionaires, and I did not speak out—because I was not a billionaire.
Then they came for the millionaires, and I did not speak out— because I was not a millionaire.
Then they came for the thousandaires, and I did not speak out—because I was not a thousandaire.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
All well and good talking about 2200 billionaires. But there are a fair number of people who could rightly see millionaires from the same perspective. The logical extension of this has been tried and failed. And do you really think that any of these people wouldn’t drop their US citizenship in a heartbeat if this was tried. Good luck with that. Author, please stick to iPad reviews.
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Bravo! Take the money of the billionaires, but why stop there? Take the money of ALL the rich people and give it to the people. Then all the factories and assets can belong to the people along with the means of production!
Oh, reminds me of a failed fascistic experiment (Soviet Union, Mao and China, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela)? The problem comes when YOU decide who "should" have what. You did not earn it, you envy it, and want to "redistribute it fairly" -- all the simple slippery slope to fascism. Success does not mean immoral achievement and "social justice" does not mean stealing from others. Should a professor who wins a nobel prize be forced to retire so others can "have a chance" to lead the department? Should the best-selling author step aside so small voices can be published regardless of merit or demand? Where does this ideal of "justice" come from?
To be equal before the law, and society is not to all have the same property. If you want success try focusing more on what you can do to earn it and less on how to take it from others. Otherwise other countries will quickly overtake us -- just ask formerly communist China, they went from your "social justice ideal" riding bicycles in 1970 to dominating technology manufacture -- lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty to the middle class in one generation as soon as they abandoned "social justice". The tech for your social experiment is 150 years old, it didn't work then and it won't work now.
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Some climb the highest mountains, others cumulate wealth up to one billion. They both think they are great, Guess who is not.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a more important column on how to fix the economy and politics at the same time.
And those last two paragraphs, this guy should run for President.
I’m a medical doctor. Yes, I make more than $100,000 per year.
I busted my tail for years and years to get to a point where I can make that money.
I was the top of my class in elementary school, junior high school, and high school—so I could get into a good college (where, of course, I was at the top of my class). I got into medical school, where I got good enough grades to get a top residency.
While most people were partying and watching “Friends”, I was doing overnight call taking care of patients on 36 hour shifts.
Please don’t sicken me with your “income inequality” garbage. It’s work inequality. Pure and simple.
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@BNS I am grateful that you were able to use the opportunities you had so well. I worry about the people without your brains and opportunities, who also work nights and weekends and long hours, but will never see the benefit of having done that hard work. What would you suggest for those of us not as gifted as you and people like you?
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@BNS
Let's say your hard work and good fortune meant you were earning $300 K / year (you said over 100 K, so presumably I'm padding that at least a bit), for a lifetime (let's say 40 years). you would have earned 12 mill. Does your training and hard work mean, that if able, given the problems our nation and world faces, it would be completely ethical for you to accumulate 100/1000/10,000 times that amount? That's what being discussed (not the accumulation of tens of millions of dollars)...
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@BNS
It seems that you have worked hard and achieved many things worthy of respect and, more mundanely, generous remuneration.
However, I simply cannot agree with your conclusion that 'work inequality' accounts for income inequality.
A single mother could work two jobs and put down significantly more work per week than your thirty-six hour shifts, and still not be able to adequately feed or clothe her family. You might argue that her job has less social utility than a medical doctor's, but in response I'd ask whether the difference in 'worth' is such that if a doctor and a struggling working class person work the same hours, one should be afford an upper class lifestyle while the other can barely remain above poverty.
Moreover, it is disingenuous to assert that everyone has equal access to opportunity. Your own profession is one which requires an exceptional education which, frankly, is not reliably provided by the US public school system. The issue is not that you have not earned a high-paying career; it is rather that those who can't or haven't for any reason barely scrape past poverty, and the solution can't be to tell everyone to get into specialised, elite professions or be poor.
Finally, you can never, ever as a doctor put in enough hours to become a billionaire. Money at that level is not connected to 'hard work' - it is about access to capital. Ultra wealth only is accessed by a self-selecting group of individuals who have more money than can ever be spent.
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I've been amazed by extreme wealth accumulation for decades now, and how seemingly clueless the masses are re: how much we're actually talking about.
How about some basic math perspective: You could spend 2.739 mill a day for a year before the billion was gone. If that billion was in, say, T-Bills, earning the current lowest rate (1 mo = 2.4%), that would be 24 mill A MONTH...
Now multiply up the ladder: 10 bill = 27.39 mill/day to spend, or 240 mill/month of 2.4 % interest; 100 bill = 273.9 mill/day to spend, or 2.4 bill/month of 2.4% interest. So, it would be extremely difficult to actually "spend" a billion dollars, and practically impossible to spend multiple billions (especially given the interest accumulating while you're spending). At those levels the accumulation is all about vanity, or greed, or multi-lifetime, multi-generational wealth, or POWER (probably all the former)...
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@Bigg Wi
Bigg Wigg
Florida17m ago
Sorry, got so caught up in my basic math that I forgot to figure the interest at an annualized rate. But, even dividing my previous interest earned amounts by 12 (200 k, 2 mill, or 20 mill /month), I think my view re: the actual spending still stands.
ReplyRecommendSharegg
@Bigg Wigg
so what!.
its the individuals money to do with as he/she want
Bad idea! All billionaires are not created equal.
Some billionaires earn wealth by the sweat of their brow. Their wealth is invested in the enterprises they creat. Still, they were overpaid and under-taxed for their effort. A million-dollar net income would have been enough incentive to keep them working and creating.
Some billionaires inherit their wealth. Inherited wealth is unacceptable in an "equal opportunity" society, and immoral in any society. Wealth is power over people, to be granted to those who are worthy, not lucky.
Some billionaires obtain their wealth by exploiting the mechanisms of the economy. These billionaires are parasites created by a defective tax system that treats the gains from manipulation and idle speculation the same as work and investment.
Billionaires can exist only in a society with warped values and a defective tax system. Let's tax their income on a parabolic scale, exempting only charitable contributions. Let's tax inherited liquid assets as beneficiary income. Let's treat inherited real and investment property as property acquired at no cost on the date of distribution by the beneficiary.
How would these tax adjustments solve our billionaire problem? Economic creation, hard work, and smart investing would be rewarded with sufficient income to incent, but not retire or reign. Accumulated wealth would be distributed to worthy causes selected by the benefactor, and inherited wealth would be taxed fairly without confiscation of capital.
@AynRant
so we should re -tax the wealth that has already been taxed.
what right does society have to tell an individual what to do with their possesions(money).;
What is the actual goal here - to get rid of Billionaires in the United States, or a Global (as in the entire world) redistribution of wealth.
If it's the former, than all we will do is bankrupt America as all the Billionaires here will presumably leave for other countries who aren't as anti-Capitalist (and presumably their businesses and commerce will follow with them). If it's the latter - good luck with that.
The very wealthy have in common the aim of protecting their wealth with the help of some of the most astute lawyers in the land, and the help of political causes to which they contribute. Far from being a new phase of capitalism, this reality has been true to varying degrees throughout our history. If there is any change in the near future, I think it will be in the direction of increased legal and political maneuvering to protect and enhance the already supercharged privileges of the wealthy.
I am 68 years old, my wife and I are not billionaires. We come from modest backgrounds and have achieved our goal of the American dream after starting and building a small business. Because of my length of time on earth, I have seen the evolution of wealth accumulation.
So here is my opinion...Work within our existing structures. We do not want to stifle people from taking risk which limits innovation. At the same time our forefathers recognized that the concentration of wealth through generations by inheritance was a problem. They created the estate tax system to address this. In simplest terms, once a married couple both die, the value of their estates above $10 million dollars is subject to a 50% tax. This current system will automatically redistribute the wealth. Many billionaires have created charitable foundations to address the estate tax and that will redistribute wealth for charitable purposes, though in general only 5% of the assets need to be distributed each year. Allow these to continue with modification with tax incentives that encourage successful people make charitable contributions sooner. Limit the accumulation for foundations; once they reach some defined limit they must distribute a larger percentage of their assets. Continue to provide opportunity, encourage hard work, reward people who strive to achieve and climb the ladder of success. Redistribution to someone without requiring they put forth effort within their ability is bad policy
For all of the commenters here who are wringing their hands over the possibility that Oprah, Steven Spielberg and Paul McCartney might be carted off to the town square to be drawn and quartered, STOP IT!
Mr. Manjoo's point is that we - if we are to claim that we are a moral society - have to wake up and demand policies that will move us toward economic justice. And our current taxation system does NOT go far enough. Not NEARLY far enough.
Raising marginal tax rates on the wealthy is both fair and immensely popular with the American public. Remember that during the Eisenhower years, the marginal tax rate on individuals making over $200,000 was 91 percent. In comparison, AOC's proposal of a 70% marginal tax rate on incomes over $10 million hardly seems radical.
So let's start shifting our paradigm here, people - back to where it once was. A truly progressive tax system IS part of our heritage and our values. We need to return to it - now more than ever.
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"Abolition" of billionaires? I am not against the idea, but I don't get the details.
Let's take Bloomberg for example.
He is a billionaire because he owns over 90% of Bloomberg LC which he created from scratch to the benefit of many. I'm pretty sure he does not have 10digit bank accounts thousands of homes, truckloads of cash or other easily divisible property.
In cases like this what should the "abolition" look like?
Maybe banning billionaires isn’t the best solution to the problem. The article doesn’t address an underlying problem. As technology advances perhaps we should view it the same way we look at highway construction. Since we can’t individually construct interstate highways, we all agree to tax ourselves and pay for them collectively. Since we all agree that the highways are necessary there is little if no resistance to building them.
Isn’t the internet just a more modern method of transmitting a necessary “product?” We wouldn’t allow one contractor to build all of the highways, it wouldn’t even be possible. Why should we allow tech company’s to do so just because it is possible? If the internet and the innovation necessary to produce and maintain it are as necessary as highways shouldn’t we view it as a public necessity like highways, the military, air traffic control and other public “utilities?”
I’m not an economist but aren’t anti-trust laws meant to prevent monopolies? Many of these billionaires have the power they do because they are essentially monopolies in industries that provide a public necessity. I hate to use the word “nationalize” but it seems obvious that some form of that may be necessary. Like the military we need them. Let’s recognize that and craft policies and laws accordingly.
I wrote a comment that said yesterday’s Samuel Abrams OpEd on the fairy tale called “the American Dream” was antithetical to Mr Farhad’s excellent article. I also said that a Bernie and/or Warren ticket for 2020 would form a synthesis which will present a way forward.
The censor didn’t like the comment as is his or her wont.
Capitalism leads to excesses (socialism does too). Billionaires mostly become that by discovering a way to do things differently in a less costly fashion and typically more efficiently. Creative distruction follows. People and lesser business fail. The median misery increases.
Walter Scheidel’s excellent book called The Great Leveler brilliantly explains that throughout a couple of million, we needed massive wars, plagues and revolutions to undo the damage called inequality.
Let us hope that a progressive government in 2020 will create an exception to the historical precedent. And FDR inherited great levelers before he did his work. To World Wars and the Great Depression in between.
Bernie and/or Liz may be a little luckier if we exercise our democratic rights rather waiting for a bloody revolution and/or a natural catastrophe before we wake up.
See if the censor can read English and has a sense of decency this time around.
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Pure capitalism is an impossible way to run a country. There must be some social responsibility. Most countries have some kind of healthcare and many have social assistance, you might call this socialism. There needs to be an equitable balance because rampant capitalism is destructive to both the environment and the people.
Also, there needs to be an instrument of protection for the natural world, or there will be no future for anyone, regardless of ideology or party.
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From the Financial Times, October 27, 2017, discussing the result of then PM Hollande's introduction of a wealth tax on French millionaires (not to mention billionaires):
"In 2016, [the French Wealth Tax] was levied on 351,000 households who have personal assets of more than €1.3m, out of a total population of 67m. It yielded about €5bn — or less than 2 per cent of France’s tax receipts. Since 2000, France has experienced a net outflow of 60,000 millionaires, according to research group New World Wealth."
Just as in physics, every political action has some type of reaction. Just food for further thought.
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@Joseph Grant
Since 2000, France has experienced a growth of 20% in the average wage while the US has only experience 15%.
Maybe allowing the millionaires and billionaires to have all the money isn't the answer?
@Joseph Grant Excellent point. Do we really think that the Billionaires, their businesses and commerce will just sit pat while we tax them out of existence? Or is it more likely that they will merely move to another country with more favorable tax rates? What will the America they leave behind look like when all their money has gone elsewhere?
Read the subsidies the government gives for broadband in rural areas and think tech billionaires along with increased advertising revenue A four computer household has always had to purchase 4 Microsoft Word's which put a burden on many families. As for the Giving Pledge, how many companies pay a living wage to their employees privately or corporately including contractors, cleaners, landscapers or office staff? Rather than waiting until death think of improving the lives of people in their states, rec centers that would include music, art, cooking, theaters, pottery, community gardens, day cares and pools for adults and children to learn skills and a sense of working together for all families. Armenia has invested in their towns and cities along these lines and it has proven to be very successful. It creates jobs within the community as well.
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Americans don't like abolishing billionaires because so many of "us" are under the impression that it's possible to become one someday. It's not.
Milan Kundera said it best, though he didn't know he was talking to the average American: "You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers."
It’s thinking like this that feeds the beast. I’m a responsible, clear eyed, tax-paying American who voted for Obama once, Clinton, and most certainly the most inspiring and visionary leader of my lifetime, Ronald Reagan, but I did not vote for Trump. If talk of socialism becomes anymore serious than it is now I will damn sure vote to keep your tormentor-in-chief around for four more. So will my many friends.
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The problem is not inequality. There will always be inequality.
The problem is DISPARITY. When a society has hopeless masses toiling away to scratch a living out of the earth, and at the same time a very few who control that society's wealth, access to privilege, and political power, that society is on its way to self-destruction. And that is not radical Marxism, by the way. It is as old as the biblical Book of Micah. Look it up.
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America has a more progressive tax system than European countries, bar possibly Ireland depending how you measure, as social spending is usually funded by regressive value added taxes that make stuff expensive to buy, especially for the poor. Our poor are much better off than the poor in poor, often socialist countries... and I know from having meet both. Taking money from the rich makes them less well off (but they'll just go elsewhere), and funds bureaucracies of people who were effective bundlers for some candidate, but doesn't raise the standard of the poor. Free markets do, as they have in America, Hong Kong, and elsewhere (a bar on tariffs or quotas between States is in the current Constitution, adopted after the first constitution nearly bankrupted everyone due to trade barriers). And redistributive countries have done less well. Sweden chose to implement school vouchers, knowing that choice and self betterment are the way forward, even in a country that famously helps the poor. Rats in a barrel tearing each other down isn't.
Those in places where they can't afford the sewage systems to prevent hookworm should move to booming places that are short on labor, like the Colorado or Utah front ranges. They'll find a choice of jobs, and well funded charities to help get them on their feet.
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Manjoo seems to lack an understanding of basic economics: If you have a capitalist system, you must have capitalists. The main economic argument for capitalism versus socialism is that having individuals allocate capital on the basis of maximizing their own income and wealth turns out to be more efficient and effective in the long run - under non-emergency conditions - than having disinterested persons such as commissars do it.
The trouble is that there is apparently no state of equilibrium in the accumulation of private wealth and power. If the system is left to itself, the imbalance will generally continue until just a few people have everything. The real problem in the US is not so much that some people are rich, it is that non-skilled workers have not increased their real income in over 45 years. There is an excess of private capital and a lack of aggregate demand because of the lack of increase of wages.
For the capitalist system to work, government basically has to take the side of workers, that is non-capitalists, in various ways to increase their income and limit the imbalance. The system is far out of whack now, but just taking wealth away from capitalists, while necessary, is not sufficient. If there is a real emergency, such as war, governments have always had to take over economic decisions and this changes the way income is distributed. Private wealth may even be preempted. Global warming is probably an emergency of this type.
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The fear of abolishing billionaires is exactly why Howard Schultz is thinking of running for President. He is running scared. He doesn't want to improve living conditions for the middle class but just assure himself he will not have one more penny taken from him.
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I wouldn't care how many billionaires we had in our society, so long as they were forbidden to spend their wealth attempting to influence public policy.
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A tax on industrial robots has to be part of the plan. Human labor and its profits have always been taxed. Why should society not profit from the machines that create unemployment and reduce the average family incime?
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I personally would love to see a cap on Republican billionaires, even those who give generously to hospitals, museums, etc. But liberal ones like Gates and Buffett, Soros, Steyer, Schultz, and a few others have done a great deal of good with their money. As to reality, however, a cap on wealth is simply madness. A billion dollars today is the equivalent of $100 million a few decades ago, and probably $10 million at the time of Teddy Roosevelt, so rightly quoted by RLS. A second objection is that any such cap is easily gotten around--note the maneuvers of the Trump family avoiding inheritance taxes. Anyhow, the real problem is not with wealth as such, but with the grotesque legal and tax structures that make vast accumulations so possible.
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No, but this is insane!
Clearly the Founding Fathers had at least three principles in mind in writing the Constitution: unfettered access to the accumulation of unlimited numbers of weapons of mass destruction (or whatever the latest euphemism might be for the weapons of choice in school shootings), enforced full-term births in all pregnancies, and the primacy of capitalism, wherein all young boys (and boys only) have the right to see fulfillment of their childhood dream of becoming a billionaire.
Of course, I studied con law in college, and I don't recall reading or learning about any of these so-called rights in the Constitution. Clearly I had an inferior education. Or could it be that I had the good fortune to be educated during the 200 years before the radical right got its stranglehold on the party of Reagan?
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I did a very rigorous and thorough scientific analysis and came to a startling, unexpected conclusion: billionaires are people. Some are "good people", and "play by the rules", but some are objectively "bad people" and exploit loopholes and opportunities for influence that can amplify their voices & power.
As far as solutions go, we can either draw an imaginary line between having $999,999,999.99 and $1B, and decide that the addition of that next dollar is the difference between one's existence being legitimate or not, or attempt to seal off or minimize as best we can the links between money and politics.
In deciding, we should keep in mind that politicians are people too, and that they love your money all the same whether you're a billionaire, millionaire, etc.
It is not to anybody's benefit to draw lines around a particular class of people and apply moral judgments to them. Recognize that people can act self-interestedly regardless of their status, and adjust the rules of the game, as best you can, to make that self-interest work for the benefit of everyone.
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I think it's useful to consider the ratio of the highest to lowest incomes, i.e. how large the highest earner's after-tax income from all sources compare to the lowest earners (including any payments from the government. Should it be ten times as large, 20 times, 50, 100, 1000 ... ?
I got interested in this question 3 years ago and did some analysis using the best data I could find on U.S. family incomes. I developed an algorithm for a progressive redistribution to achieve the target ratio in such a way that each earner's "rank" in the economic pecking order is unchanged; that is to say it guarantees that if Smith has more pretax income than Jones, Smith will not have less after tax income than Jones.
I was pleasantly surprised by the results: With a target ratio of 10, the rate on the highest earners would need to be only 35% to bring the lowest earners up $30,000. The highest earners would be left with no less than $300,000.
The analysis, complete with the computer code and output graphs is viewable at https://github.com/Michael-F-Ellis/MIRRA/blob/master/MIRRA.ipynb . It's wonky, but that's unavoidable.
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Billionaires and growing inequality are just symptoms of a world-wide economic and political system that is rigged to favor the wealthy at the expense of everyone and everything else. Taxing the ultra-wealthy may be needed to provide immediate symptom relief, but in the long run we need to change the system. I would rather see a system in which more people benefit directly, rather than through taxes, since taxes are likely to be captured by the still wealthy individuals and corporations that will always exist. Profit sharing, true living wages, mandatory raises for true inflation, a form of universal healthcare, and strong worker organizations, should all go far toward correcting the system. Stronger oversight of banks and Wall Street, along with strict enforcement against monopoly and monopsony power, and extreme restrictions on political influence of large companies and the wealthy, are also needed. At some point a UBI is likely to be needed as well. Taxes will be some part of this, but a fairer system that ensures a fairer free market (not the distorted one we have now), should be preferred over a system that tries to squelch the inequality through brute force redistribution.
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Campaign finance reform. Medicare for all. Affordable college. With that guaranteed for all citizens let those who have the luck and ability keep their billion.
Farhad, you don't want to do away with billionaires per se. You want to limit the political influence their money can buy, which they use for their own personal enrichment. 99.9 percent of the country wants that, too. And there are already mechanisms in place to bring that about.
Let's start with repealing Citizens United. Reducing all the dark money it allows would help curb wealthy influence a lot. Do away with tax loopholes like the way the new tax bill encourages companies to offshore their profits to lower tax countries. Make it illegal for companies to spend so much on stock buybacks and dividends. Tax speculative capital gains as ordinary income. Institute a reasonable wealth tax and estate tax. And there are many other devices which would help reduce inequality, too.
Just targeting people because they're billionaires isn't the right solution to inequality. Target the mechanisms which they use (and abuse) to get so rich instead, if those mechanisms are unfair. But if someone builds a company and manages to accrue $150 billion of wealth in the process, like Jeff Bezos did, good for them, so long as they did it ethically and respectfully for their fellow citizens. Not that Amazon does that, but the concept is clear.
But the business world is a dirty place. Clean it up and make it fair, and inequality will take care of itself. That sounds simplistic, but so does just targeting people because they happen to be billionaires.
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No, he wants to do away with billionaires per se.
According to Forbes, there were 2,208 billionaires worldwide in 2018, 585 of which live in the U.S. Most of the 585 are billionaires because the companies they created are incredibly successful (i.e. consumers love their products and services). If we would like for most, if not all, of these U.S. billionaires and the companies they created to leave the U.S., let’s pursue this plan.
BTW, if we pursue this plan, we should expect to lose not only jobs, but the philanthropy these billionaires contribute to society (think the Gates Foundation), not to mention the huge amount of tax they already pay. Perhaps we should celebrate billionaires, rather than villainize them.
1
@Mark Evers
"If we would like for most, if not all, of these U.S. billionaires and the companies they created to leave the U.S., let’s pursue this plan."
Hmmm...Amazon is going to fold up shop because Bezos can't keep his 200 billionth dollar? Microsoft is going to stop selling in the US because Gates has less to donate to charity? Facebook is going to close because Zuck has to pay more in taxes? Really? Really?
Or perhaps you prefer the framing: Amazon is going to get rid of it's US staff so that Bezos can keep his 200 billionth dollar. Microsoft is going to go to the mat for Gates, their ex-founder who no longer really runs the company. Facebook...well, we might just have to lose Facebook...oh well.
According to the U.N. the world will reach a population of 10 billion in 2060. Some believe that is the number of people that the the world can sustain. As an individual country China instituted a one child per family policy under Deng Xiaoping, and I remember stories of baby girls left outside to die as a consequence. When the world reaches untenable circumstances radical solutions will surface. Maybe a random drawing from the Forbes list once a year? Maybe a red line of $80,000,000 in honor of Vanguard’s leader John Bogle? Or will it just be chaos and walls?
2
People generally don't understand how large a billion is. A million seconds is a little over 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.
We need to eliminate a few myths about billionaires and the ultra-wealthy. First, that people who attain this level of wealth do so out of sheer, unique brilliance, when in reality a fortune this large is often extracted from exploitative labor practices, short-changing the infrastructure of the society it emerges from, and often by severely polluting our environment and exacerbating climate-killing industries.
Second, that success in one field automatically implies ability in other arenas. This is not true. More to the point, our government is not a business and should not be run by those from the business world. They are often abject failures in politics and worsen problems rather than solve them. There are many brilliant people in the middle class who would be excellent leaders.
Third, we need to stop relying upon the largesse of the wealthy, as superficially magnanimous as it may be. The solution to societal problems should not rely upon the whims and pet projects of oligarchs. That's the job of our government, which should reflect the will of the citizenry. In order to do that, we need to get money out of politics, and require that the wealthy and corporations finally pay their fair share. We are living in a neo-Gilded Age. Our democracy, our society, and our environment are being destroyed because of it.
16
Using scapegoats is the wrong way to correct deep-seated economic injustice in our country. We don't need symbolic persecution of our 0.1% - it's the unfair advantages for the upper 25% that need to be corrected! We need to make income opportunity fair, that is, equivalent (not equal, of course), for all Americans. If we can use 'social and public policy to discourage' advantages for the upper 0.1%, why stop there? Advantages of the educated and professional class making up the upper income quartile is the FAR more significant cause of our country's socioeconomic hardships.
Correcting this would not be symbolic.
4
@carl bumba Historically the rich have brought about more revolutions than any bolsheviks or anarchists. They do this because built into economic systems are all kinds of incentives to exploit labor, consumers, little children and everyone. When things get so bad people take up arms to remedy the situation. They never self correct by themselves unless they stop to listen to people who are on the receiving end of their avaricious behavior. Look at Wal Mart - America's largest corporation. Check the labels of where things are mad . 9 times out of 10 it's China. Where is their sense of patriotism toward their fellow Americans - it's in the wallets of the Walton Family. Donald trump had absolutely no qualms about hiring undocumented workers or having his junk made overseas (he still ain't brought them back here to the USA!). So if the scales ever fall from people's eyes perhaps they will try to remedy this disparity through legislation but those fighting hard to maintain their superiority will be the rich. We've always had class warfare in this country unfortunately it's always been the carried out by the rich against the poor.
1
@Mike
Thanks! Yes, revolutionaries "revolt" against something (unfair) created by others. I wouldn't buy into the various Trump vilifications. He's definitely no Bernie, but his fight against globalization is real and will help the working class here (and probably everywhere, in the long run.) He's a true threat to the establishment.
Get rid of the tax loopholes and instead of raising taxes on these very wealthy people add a line to tax forms for a set percentage of income to be donated to IRS approved charities. This will
force people like Jeff Bezos and Trump who I have read barely donate anything to charity to give to good causes
1
I don’t know how much is Trump and his family worth, but according to NYT’s column by the time he was 3 years old he was worth $300,000 in today’s currency. Since then his family has evaded taxes. Just imagine if they had not evaded taxes and paid to the US government what was due, we wouldn’t be discussing who will fund the wall since the US would be wealthy enough to fund it with ease and not at the cost of putting hundreds and thousands of federal employees at risk of losing their paychecks in a partial government shutdown!
3
Whichever Democratic nominee takes the hardest line on this policy has my vote in the Primaries, as this issue lies at the base of all of America's (and the world's) most urgent problems.
Opioid crisis
Climate change
Populist authoritarianism
Nepotism and corruption in politics
Voter suppression
Trump and his cronies have showed America the true face of Billionairism, and they might actually end up being the cure for our economic perversion, so together we can finally pull America slowly back to the path of democracy.
The Supreme Court ruled correctly on Citizens United. The right to Free Speech is fundamental to our democracy. The right to own billions of dollars, however, is not. 2016 was about overturning Citizens United. I would like to see 2020 be about overturning Reaganomics.
4
I never understood why some people should be billionaires.
Take the tech industry. It relies on semiconductors.
- are the physicists who invented modern physics billionaires? No.
Take the banking industry. It relies on speculative models.
- are the economists who work on these models billionaires? No.
Take the pharma industry. It relies on biological models.
- are the legions of researchers, faculty, postdocs toiling away in labs billionaires? No.
So how come the last guy in the chain - the salesman - is a billionaire? He's no more a risk taker than the academic who is exploring speculative ideas. He's not smarter or at least he may be smart in a different way, but it isn't clear why that is worth so much more.
5
When a person doesn’t receive the same money as a person who starts their own company it is because they are working for a company or university who is providing them with facilities and salary and very little risk. Those people who become successful company owners are not just as you described “salesmen” but high risk takers
@Peggysmom
"...and very little risk."
Ah, yes...tell that to all the factory workers in Trump country.
@KS. He is more the risk taker than the inventor who was working for a salary at the time. It was his company, paying him with no promise of any return, that took a risk.
Well I don’t need a deep study of Anthropology to know that soon after a billionaire it would become a millionaire. That’s just the way it goes until we all are equal. But we’re not all equal that’s a fact. Also I think it is unAmerican. It would squelch dreamers and visionaries. Even artists make billions. I can’t imagine a world without imagine. So yeah bad idea. Good idea is a flat tax however. We all get taxed the same ,I’ll vote for that!
1
@J Clark. Why does anyone need more than $10mm. Lets take their, oops, the governments money which was immorally diverted, from them also.
So how does this work? What about the idea of modest tax on trading stocks? Even a few cents a traded share nets some serious cash for Congress to squander. Exactly who does the taking and exactly who does the spending of the taken lucre and how does that not end up as corruption? The devil is in the details.
2
A couple of decades ago when the concept of US Billionaires came to my attention, my thought was: why would any American citizen need a billion dollars when we are living in a country with so many benefits: free libraries, parks, freedom in general, a passport welcome in any country. But, given increasing population and worsening resource conditions, I thought, these Billionaires are consciously or unconsciously aware that the only way to protect their heirs will be to afford to live in a bubble, with clean air and water and a security force...They aren't citizens of the U.S.A., they are free agents who can afford to buy whatever, wherever to secure themselves....They are traitors to the general population who could never protect themselves given political, environmental, viral upsets. If they are going to benefit from our free economy they should not be so far apart from other Americans.
They can afford the best healthcare, education and access to the whole global scene, whether that is stashing money in tax free foreign countries or just being able to travel in luxury. It looks like the time is soon upon us, where the conditions on the globe will be chaotic and those billions will be very very necessary to their survival. Now with the Trump tax cuts, they have more billions.
If they want to remain American citizens they should forfeit some of those billions so ordinary Americans can have more than measly health care and a very debt ridden education.
10
@judy dyer. Our government spends $12billions a day. This money will buy little other than relieving your sense of unfairness; actually, i bet it will not even buy that.
Abolish plantation style colonialist government.
In the U.S., Citizens United has given corporations the same rights as individuals when it comes to tax time allowing for tax breaks, influencing elections for their own benefit from oversight and regulation. Business has the room to invest and play the market until they don't, pulling out when they've got the bubble right where they want it (or bailed out with corporate welfare if they blow it) the workforce is their ace in hole, always available to perform the money laundering of production. ie: employment of the masses to tax and reap from consumption. Break the glass and pull the cord when all else fails, wind up the turbines and order more toilet paper they force us into systems of credit we are unable to manage usually ending in some kind of medical extreme that drains us of every penny we are sharecroppers now in a field of that is supposed to be self sufficient but is heralded at the same time as dependent on the likes of Honduras, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia sometimes with sometimes against Russia we protect companies interests with the citizens' dollars for the benefit of Citizens United, Citgo. Amazon. Microsoft. Apple. Starbucks. Taco Bell. Phillip Morris all with the great overseer hired by the Saudis: Blackstone who have Erik Prince's phone number just in case all spinning on the taxpayer's dime.
One minute we drill baby drill, the next invade Venezuela. That's not Socialism, it's a global plantation.
2
Let's face it most billionaires and trillionaires are keeping all the profits of their industries to themselves despite the fact that consumers and their workforce got them where they are today. There should be regular pay increases, profit sharing, healthcare and retirement benefits going on for their workforce and they should be taxed accordingly.
There are moral taxes on their venality but that accountability is left up to God. There are also many, like the Gates, who share the wealth through foundations and rewarding their workforce. Those are the ones I applaud and who are giving back. The rest are despicable people like the Trumps for the most part.
8
First they came for the billionaires. Then they came for the millionaires.
Next they came for the almost millionaires.
Then they came for the middle class. Me.
No.
7
@Olivia Actually, no. They've already come for the middle class. It's the billionaires and millionaires who remain untouched. That's the whole point.
1
@Olivia - I believe you have it backwards. First "they" came for the middle class, which has been shrinking for decades.
And who are "they"? Perhaps it's the billionaires, who pour vast sums into efforts to smash unions, destroy voting rights, repeal Obamacare, and cut their own taxes.
But the problem is not billionaires per se. It's inequality. Economic inequality begets political inequality, which begets further economic inequality, which ... . Capitalism and democracy have never been terribly comfortable bedfellows. The only way to preserve the latter is to limit the corrosive effects of the former.
1
There is no slippery slope.
The United States invented the income tax a century ago. It took a constitutional amendment to make it stick. The trend over the last 40 years has been to make it ever LESS progressive.
Your formulation likens the government to a foreign power, not government by consent of the governed.
You also — disingenuously, I think — liken taxation to discrimination. The most important political difference is that as you go down the income scale, you’re talking about more and more people. That’s more and more people who’ll vote against the tax increase. Unless you view government as a foreign menace, that scenario is unimaginable.
Criminalizing wealth creation is a great idea. How come nobody has ever thought of that before?
7
If limiting the influence of the rich is our new global moral imperative, this piece doesn't go far enough. Nearly everyone speaking to, writing for, or reading the NYT is a global 1%er. All it takes to be on the global 1% rolls, for income is $32K a year. Since Moses came down with the tablets, morals were made to be absolute, not relative. If AOC is worried ring worm for folks in Birmingham, then she should also be concerned about those who have it in Rio and Lagos too. We need innovative risk takers as they create industries, jobs, and pay taxes. Just hitting them with high taxes alone won't solve inequality, though it will help some. Gagging them politically won't work until CU is overturned. The main cause in wealth inequality are politicians (...and over population). In a global race to the bottom, every country has lowered it's corporate tax rate to attract a slice of the US economic pie, so much so that even a so called 'socialist paradise' like Holland, which they would never call it, is the no. 1 tax haven for US corporations. If corporate directors and executives personal had legal accountability, regardless of tax situs, as they used to, you'd likely see lower executive pay, and higher local wages. If the moral imperative is to share more then ALL the nouveau riche (global 1%ers) need to follow the old guards' noblesse oblige. While we are at it, politicians need much greater accountability too. The present system ensures none.
4
The main cause of income inequality isn’t politicians. Politicians are only doing what they’re elected to do. Imperfect system, sure, but not their fault.
Capitalism produces income inequality. Whoever deploys capital to economic purpose owns the return. It has a name: return on investment. As the author points out, technology makes the investment cheaper and the return greater, witness the top names in the S&P 500.
Globalization enables wage arbitrage: firms can seek lowest wages and weakest regulation.
These two forces have produced the greatest inequality in living memory. It is exacerbated by a flattened progressive income tax.
The only remedy is higher taxes on the wealthy. Without that, wealth will continue its 40-year trend toward greater concentration, and take down our democracy with it. See my first point about politicians and imperfect elections.
Forget a billion, why not a million or two? Maybe three. Or perhaps cap income at 250k per year? No one needs to have any luxury with so much suffering. Why is it ok for someone to ride a $2000 Peleton when a homeless person is sleeping outside their apartment in a park? Why not feed or house that person what that money? Actually, how is it moral for an American to make even $75,000, when a child in Bangladesh is starving and could be fed for $2 a day? It’s not! Cap it! Take it!
If this makes sense to you, please, please, for your own good see a psychiatrist. Same if the authors ideas make sense to you.
12
@DRS
For starters, the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy. The author does not propose anything you suggest here, and there is no indication that he should be understood as to advocate for it.
However, that said, why is what you're saying ridiculous? Why should you spend $2,000 to put a bike in your living room when the winter is reaching record cold and the homeless risk freezing to death? If you could save the life of a child for less than the price of coffee per day, is a principled stance against any redistributive policy really worth letting a child die?
To every reasonable policy proposal, there is a ridiculous straw-man caricature.
There is no principle that requires society to passively accept the product of capitalism. You don’t think there is, do you? If so, why? If not, why not address the actual proposal instead of ridiculing a straw-man imposter?
@DRS
Yes, please see a psychiatrist. Or, better yet, a math teacher. Or a history teacher. Or a reading teacher. That way you'll learn to read a piece accurately, think about it effectively, and understand why it exists more fully.
Or, you could just string a set of thoughts together, add some exclamation points, call it an argument, and post it to the comments section.
Perhaps five centuries ago, back when capitalism was practiced on a much smaller scale and not named as such, there was a more extreme wealth concentration when we had kings, queens, sultans, etc. The Ottoman Empire's land, people, slaves, camels, mosquitoes, belly button lint, cacti and coconuts belonged to the sultan. Make that: The Sultan. He wasn't alone in his extreme privilege. The same system prevailed elsewhere in the world's kingdoms with one dude, or every so often one dudette, owning everything. Not saying that was good, of course. Just that there has been gigantic progress since then vis a vis wealth distribution.
I recommend what we've long been planning to do here in New Zealand: just eat them.
1
If billionairedom was bringing such goodness to the world, why are so many of the rich and famous buying their gold plated survival pods in "out of reach" places like New Zealand to prepare for the future when economic and ecological collapse hits the places from where they "made" their billions?
5
I saw someone else comment on social media (sadly, can’t remember who) that a billionaire is just a dragon in human guise, sitting atop a hoard of gold.
1
Abolish Billionaires.
Abolish the Republican Party.
Restore our Democracy.
Yes, mainstream, old guard, neoliberal, corporatist Democrats also support billionaires - almost always the good billionaires, though Howard Schultz just demonstrated that even what we think of as the good billionaires are still a problem. But Democrats have not lost their collective minds. Republicans have lost their collective minds and the party is now beyond repair.
4
Communist countries mastered billionaire abolition more than a century ago. It only cost about 100 million human lives. A small price to pay for equality.
6
Don’t confuse communism with autocracy.
It’s a favorite staple of the right to pretend economic policy led to the impoverishment and misrule in Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, China, take your pick. What they have in common isn’t communism, but authoritarianism. None ever had a stable democracy.
We can tax the rich and preserve democracy. It’s not obvious we can preserve democracy without taxing the rich.
1
@Alan Some communist countries spawned billionaires by the hundreds.
Imbalances in the U.S. economic system once resulted in robber barons. Good laws & good government later resulted in relative economic equality—for white people. Imbalances can be corrected. Racial, economic, & climate justice are possible with good laws & good government.
3
I hope Tom Steyer and the rest of the liberal billionaires, who like all billionaires should be praised and emulated for achieving the American dream, read this rhetoric and realize that they are contributing to the destruction of capitalism, and with it America. Wake up!
2
FDR saved capitalism from itself.
Congress has had the power to tax since 1789. Capitalism seems to be doing ok.
What taxes support capitalism, and which ones destroy it. Inquiring minds want to know.
We don’t need to abolish billionaires. We just need to stop buying the goods and services their companies sell. Pretty soon, they will no longer be billionaires. If people stopped staying in Trump hotels, pretty soon Trump wouldn’t have any hotels. Just pick a billionaire you hate and organize a boycott.
2
“And some, [billionaires] I assume, are good people.”
Wrong. There is no distinction to be made between good and bad billionaires. A billionaire is by definition evil.
2
Almost all of the big tech companies which have revolutionized the world over the last generation have been American. If we had a tax policy designed to guarantee that no one ever got super rich would though companies have been American? Or maybe all those visionaries would have taken their ideas to a more friendly place. Put these neo-Marxist ideas into practice and we will find out going forward.
2
Do you seriously think being a billionaire motivated the founders of Google et al? Ask them. Answer: never once.
$100 million is an unimaginable amount of money. Most people would be secure with a 1/10 of that. $1 billion is 10x more. When you’re founding and managing a company, the tax on your future billions is the least of your worries.
@James K. Lowden. Maybe a 100 million is unimaginable to you.
1
No no human is worth a billion dollars. Our so-called "economy" is a farce and the news media among others have been complicit in this ongoing charade. Clean up your act guys and together we can set things right.
5
Great piece! I hold a similar view. The economic inequality in the US is having a very negative effect. When so few hold the largest portion of assets, we all suffer. My view is that it is a rigged game. Many, not just billionaires, are overly compensated. No CEO is worth thousands more than the peon line worker. Corporate management is an insider's game. Corporate boards decide the type and level of C-level compensation. It goes like this. I am CEO of Global-reach corp. I attended Rich white boy university with my drinking buddy Chip. Chip is CEO of World-greed corp. I recommend Chip for a position on my corporate board, while he recommends me for his. Presto! Overcompensation! That is why we need to return to truly progressive tax rates.
3
Gotta love a system that allows people to detest folks who have been more successful then they have been. Even beter take their earnings!
6
Not detest. Manage. I don’t have to hate billionaires to be concerned about what they can do to the rest of us with their money. You don’t, either.
I know a few billionaires who are good people, some inherited wealth, some homemade. I have been a responsible business guy my whole life. I've had conversations with other business folks about a "limited" yearly income and a limit to a family's wealth. We all landed on roughly $100 million in wealth and $2mm in annual income. Above those levels the marginal tax rates hit somewhere north of 90% (91% with communist POTUS - Dwight Eisenhower). Kennedy dropped the top marginal rate to 71% in 1960 and then Reagan cut that in half. Trump's cabal of the extremely greedy cut it to about 21% - this is sick. Anyone who tells you they are a "self-made "man"" is a liar.
26 American billionaires have more money than the "bottom" 3.8 billion people on earth.
When Howard Schultz says we must balance the budget, live within our means and not raise taxes, think about that. The re-distribution of wealth from the middle class to the rich has been stunning over the last 40 years. This is what they meant by "highway robbery" - they just don't use highways anymore - fiber-optics is their highway.
Time for this conversation. To see some filthy rich guy pay $238 million for his 24,000 sq foot "shack" in Manhattan that he'll rarely use is truly sick when so many in America and world are in poverty. Time for the revolution. A good start - throw all Republicans out in 2020. Their lies and politics over last 40 years are the underlying cause of wars, severe inequality, climate change & much more.
4
This sounds like a contemporary version of Swift's "A Modest Proposal".
1
@Juanita
A marginal tax rate which makes it impossible to own upwards of $1,000,000,000 is akin to satirically advocating cannibalising children?
'A Modest Proposal' is generally read as a condemnation of the type of economic policy which brought us fortunes of this size.
1
Timid and unimaginative in the extreme.
Why be satisfied with knee-capping billionaires? Way too small of a scapegoat cohort. Let's apply these rule to anyone, including underworked, overpaid college professors and journalists, who make more than the median wage.
2
Okay so 2200 of them.
8 billion of us.
You don’t need a Ph.D. in statistics to tell you the odds are looking quite good in our favor.
1
This proposition reminds me of the joke about attorneys ...
What do you call 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea!?!
A good start.
Sadly, it isn't just billionaires. It's people (and institutions) that just AMASS wealth. Do people think that money and value just materializes out of thin air?!?!
Wasn't it Lauren Hutton who had the towel theory (or philosophy?!?)? She said something like this: You can only buy a certain quality of towel. You can get cotton, and then nicer cotton, thicker cotton, a bigger towel, and so on. You can have it laced with gold thread if you want. But at some point, you can't BUY a better towel.
In short, there are limits.
1
That's the loonies in our tent.
All philosophical questions do not have a policy response. Philosophically I will be okay, but not sure that may be economically feasible.
Higher marginal taxes, wealth tax on non productive incomes, land taxes, and inheritance taxes are fair responses to creating a transfer system, than engaging in this lunacy.
4
This story, and just about any political tale you are going to read, points to the Achilles heel of elections in democracies. It also suggests a solution: Abolish private funding for public office.
6
A liberal campaign to "abolish billionaires" as a way to indirectly achieve political outcomes is the obverse of the longtime conservative campaign to achieve a political outcome (reducing the influence of the federal government) by "starving the beast" (i.e., reducing federal tax revenues). Starving the beast hasn't worked for conservatives, and "abolishing billionaires" is unlikely to work for liberals.
I think it is preferable to focus on systemic issues, like improved voting systems and replacing private campaign money with public money, and solving actual substantive issues like laying the groundwork for prosperity for all, rather than focusing on demonizing billionaires (and no, I am not and never will be a billionaire).
On a related point: I frequently hear liberal politicians talk about the rich paying their "fair share of taxes." However, I have yet to hear a single such politician offer a definition of what constitutes the "fair share" of the rich. We already have a progressive income tax system rather than a flat tax. I would really like to see these candidates step up to the plate and offer an actual definition of "fair share" rather than just a sound bite.
47
@Ronny "Why should a minimum wage worker be taxed 15.6% on the very first dollar earned, while Billionaires don't even pay that on their last dollar?" You are talking about the payroll tax, as clearly a minimum wage worker is not taxed on the first dollar earned under the income tax system. The payroll tax is a regressive tax, and there are many sound proposals to fix it like expanding the social security tax base, replacing a portion of the payroll tax with a carbon tax, etc. However, you won't fix the issue of "billionaires" by fiddling with the payroll tax. Also, I dispute the notion that we have 2 tax systems. We have 1 very complicated federal tax system. (I am a tax professional and have worked with taxes for over 25 years.)
15
@James Grosser
If a billionaire earns $100 million in a year that 15.6% represents a tax increase of $15 million dollars per year, not enough to effect his standard of living; but, enough to pay for a thousand college students to attend college for one year. Or, we could tax all incomes and lower the rate to 10% for everyone.
11
@Ronny
If every dollar earned without deductions and without distinctios was taxed rate would probably be even lower
2
Capitalism has lifted boats, but is not an ends in and of itself. Look to Canada and the northern Europeans for the best ideas on how to squelch and choke the terrible instincts of capitalists - which is only to make more money.
Or don't. Go ahead and go tilt at windmills while billionaires and capitalists are given every perk. It begins with laws that choke the moneyed once they get to a point. Sure I can dig no billionaires, but then all of them will have 999,999,999.
I ain't for arbitrary numbers, etc. Instead the very notion of free enterprise needs to be choked and scrutinized.
I’m hoping that Howard Schultz throws his hat in the presidential ring, because there is no better example of a person accumulating obscene wealth – based on more or less dumb luck.
The guy goes to work for a coffee maker manufacturer that nobody has ever heard of and visits a coffee shop client in Seattle. He then goes on a buying trip to Italy, where he has the brainwave of adding espresso to the drip coffee being offered.
The guy didn’t exactly cure cancer. But he now feels he’s qualified to be the leader of the free world because he realized the country was ready for fancy coffee.
This guy is the poster-child for a 70% marginal tax rate.
102
@Scott
It's a far more impressive resume then Trump had so while unlikely if he runs he might win.
4
@Scott
Howard Schultz' wealth was created because he realized that there were tens of millions of people like me who wanted the equivalent of a decent European coffee house in which I could sit and read and think and drink and munch. That was not luck - that was thought.
And if he is unqualified to to be president even though he is running, he stands in company of hundreds of similarly unqualified Republican and Democrat officials who did the same.
8
You’re kidding, right? This guy had the vision to create the international behemoth that is Starbucks, all from his ingenuity and stick-to-itivness.
His brilliant realization and drive provides employment (at well above minimum wage) for tens of thousands of people around the world.
Obviously, this not qualify him to be president, but look what we have now. But still...
@Scott, what similar business have YOU created?
8
Seems to me this is a fools errand. Setting an arbitrary limit on individual wealth won't solve the problems in rural or urban areas. I have more confidence in business eaders than I do in career politicians for allocating capital. There is plenty of excess money being wasted on the US perpetual wars. Let's stop spending those trillions first, allocate those resources to benefit those in need and revisit tax policy after if necessary.
23
@MrT Except so much of those trillions spent on wars are related to the billionaires of the military industrial complex.
4
It is obscene, in my opinion, that a corporate CEO should rake in millions but the workers whose labor enables their success make minimum wage. Could large corporations afford to increase workers' wages if those at the top made less money? Perhaps we can legislate a reasonable formula to regulate this differential: say, the highest paid employee at the company cannot earn more than 100 times the lowest paid employees (no loopholes allowed; this includes benefits, stock options, etc.). One can dream...
6
To the proponents of abolishing billionaires;
Just a quick question: once and if you decide that billionaires should not exist, what exactly are you planning to do with or to them?
You may want to consult as manuals some history book about the Russian Revolution. Please be reminded that in addition to you becoming murderers and thieves the end result was not exactly a great success
49
@Daniel Messing
...haven't heard (yet) any mention of a violent, revolutionary overthrow of the government
5
@Daniel Messing It is precisely doing nothing about obvious social inequity that leads to murdering and thieving. Billionaires should start coming up with real answers or what will happen to them is the same thing that always happens to elites when they start talking tone deaf nonsense while the people suffer. (let them eat cake!)
2
Well, touche'. And good luck with your idea. It is hard to imagine a time when this could be approved by a majority of Americans. But things could change when: global warming decimates our coastal cities and threatens agriculture, China becomes the new world Superpower, the European Union falls apart, NATO weakens, etc. THEN some really radical changes will be possible, just for our survival. I will be gone, but my grandchildren will be witnessing these things. Then we will see how robust and resilient the American Experiment is. I certainly hope it will be!
3
It's the American State which made Bill Gates a billionaire. It gave him what amounts to an eternal license on Windows software and it abandoned any pretense of anti-trust enforcement, allowing him to stifle and buy-out his competition.
Much the same with Facebook, Google, etc.
Remove these golden protections, and there'd be no billionaires.
4
@jrd
You got the same help from the American State that Bill Gates did.
How come you didn't come up with an invention that created jobs for millions, increased productivity thousands-fold, and gave prosperity to millions of people who hold 401k accounts ?
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@G
These companies employ remarkably few people, measured against their assets and profits, which is why we no longer have a viable middle-class, despite being a much richer country than we were 40 years ago.
However, it is true that people already rich enough for sizable 401Ks do benefit from State-protected wealth creation, just as they benefit from State protection of the stock-market (the "Fed put", for one). This does makes the rich richer, but it doesn't do much for the asset-less, which is about 40% of the country now.
As for productivity increases -- you may have noticed that workers no longer share them.
@jrd
What do you think would happen to creativity And advancement?
Comrade
Similarly, exceptional athletes should be abolished - it's embarrassing to other players, no matter what the sport, to see dominant players take to the field of play and do better than ordinary athletes.
As well, exceptional athletes get to play more minutes, they get to land big endorsement deals, and generally (to add insult to injury), they also attract the most beautiful women or the handsomest men.
Often the most exceptional athletes have a very strong work-ethic, to enhance their skills.
It's simply NOT FAIR.
Slow athletes have rights too. Especially slow and lazy athletes who have a poor work-ethic compared to exceptional athletes.
It's time to end work-ethic privilege.
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@Maurice Gatien
Billionaires are not gifted with some divine work-ethic; the vast majority either inherited their wealth or benefited from extreme privilege or even luck. There is no reason why anyone's wealth should be such an obscene amount, when there are millions living in extreme poverty or homelessness.
Furthermore, to your point, being an exceptional athlete does not harm others. Billionaires, however, are capable of using their immense power and wealth to manipulate our political system, starving others of the very privileges they took advantage of to become so wealthy in the first place.
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Athletes don’t save planets. The billionaire class has the might to save our planet. It doesn’t seem to care though. Sad.
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@Maurice Gatien - an exceptional runner doesn't run even twice as fast as an average runner, let alone a billion times.
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Had you written this in the 1700's with the title "Should kings even exist?", it would have sparked the opposition of royalty everywhere. Essentially the same today.
Of course the existence of billionaires is wrong. They exist because we neglected to put the concept of social well-being in our legal and financial contracts, and finally lionized private wealth, as if the "successful individual" were all that counted in this world (segway to every commercial with happy successful people you've ever seen).
The exaltation of the individual. How pathetic in a century where billions of us live and work on one planet.
These types of articles are possible now only because the wealth has become obscene. The reaction to this new consciousness has also set in --see Trump's SOTU focus on the evils of "socialism". Expect lots of antediluvian protests from reader ostriches. Ignore them and soldier on to a more meaningful social contract!
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@jim guerin I agree with you and also appreciate the irony that you used "segway" for "segue."
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A prime example of disordered thinking. I'm reminded of having lunch in 1978 or so while in law school. In the cafeteria, a member of the "Spartacus Youth Brigade" (?!?) was standing on a table, shouting "When the revolution comes, the intelligentsia will be the FIRST TO GO!!" On a college campus, mind you. Not being able to help myself, I stood up and said, "In that case, YOU obviously have nothing to worry about."
So we should find terminal fault with Bill Gates. Warren Buffett. Michael Bloomberg. How DARE these people use their smarts and creativity to start companies providing products and services which didn't previously exist, and amass wealth along the way?
Billionaires would have no more political influence than the rest of us, if there were sensible limits on campaign contributions from individuals, and NO contributions allowed from corporations. How about addressing the root cause of corruption in politics, instead of simply railing at those who have more?
What's next? Abolishing intelligence, good looks and height? There is plenty of evidence showing that people with more than their "fair share" of these traits are more likely to succeed in life than those who didn't get the full deck at birth. What does AOC, the new sage from Mt. Olympus, think about that?
As children, many of us read the fable of the Dog In The Manger. Apparently, some people need to go back and read it again.
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Just ban private body guards. Bezos has his own private army. Without it, he would soon be a millionaire.
I would consider myself more left than right, but this is a preposterous discussion. We are free people, and someone that has the intelligence and fortitude to become a billionaire should not be loathed or treated as property of the government. It is their money they made it. It is not an asset of everyone else. It is his or hers. Of course the person, in part, has been successful because they have enjoyed our public education system, roads, military, patents office etc, and they should pay an appropriate amount of taxes, but it is THEIR MONEY. When we start from the position that it is the governments money to take, we destroy one of the greatest hopes of freedom that the United States provides. Everyone should pay their fair share and that should be debated vigorously, but to make the statement that no one should be able to be a billionaire is to negate one of the basic values of what it is to be American.
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Another knee jerk, simplistic solution to the inequality of wealth problem.
All great leaders from Washington thru Lincoln thru the Roosevelts believed in basically the same thing.
People should make as much money as they can in a capitalistic society subject to the following and these are key.
1-They pay a fair share of their taxes not onerous or non existent.
2-The guy on the bottom enjoys or at least has a good attempt at a middle class living.
3-Along with #2 that includes the necessities of life like health care, food, lodging, SS etc. Anything above that is not guaranteed.
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It’s ironic that in the land of the self-proclaimed American Dream, we have less upward mobility than most European countries (yes, those so-called Socialists). Our income and wealth inequality is exacerbated by our taxation policies, which are designed by the rich and the politicians that they employ to function exactly as they do. The rich will get richer as long as capital accumulation occurs faster than wages accumulation, which it inevitably does. The social question, it seems to me, is what limits should we have. If a billion dollars was the limit, I would have hard time feeling sorry for those subjected to a wealth tax. Nine zeroes is enough. Seriously, can anybody the case that it is not?
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@Mike Iker-thank you for your reply. Mike, I sense a little intellectualization going on by you.
Drink a little of your great calif. wine and read my post again.
I kinda simplified and listened to history a bit more and cleaned up what you said but basically am saying the same thing.
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@Paul
"We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men. If on this new continent we merely build another country of great but unjustly divided material prosperity, we shall have done nothing; and we shall do as little if we merely set the greed of envy against the greed of arrogance, and thereby destroy the material well-being of all of us. To turn this Government either into government by a plutocracy or government by a mob would be to repeat on a larger scale the lamentable failures of the world that is dead."
Theodore Roosevelt, via www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org"
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Civilization is expensive. While there will always be income inequality, we can at least tax wealth at a level that recognizes fairly the contributions of those who do the work to keep it functioning.
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Wanda, you are so reasonable! As a nation we are hideously wealthy and what do we choose to do with it? We elect people who fall all over themselves siphoning that money to the heedless, rabid rich, who in turn fund their reelection campaigns just so they can spend their lives in DC.
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sadly, I doubt if it could ever be pulled off, but a girl can dream.
nobody is the true author of their circumstances and billionaires have no place in a compassionate, prosperous future. Any disagreement on the issue is a symptom of mental illness.
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People hear that somebody is a billionaire and immediately assume they're a snake. Why? "Nobody deserves that much money" people say. "However this person ended up with $1,000,000,000, it's can't be right".
This seems like the core reason why people want to get rid of billionaires. It's not because they want to make the world a better place. There are plenty of other ways to more directly improve our problematic systems. Strengthen unions, expand anti-trust action, close tax loopholes, etc.
Getting rid of billionaires is just to right some perceived wrong in these individuals. It does little to fix the core issues in the imbalance of society.
But "presumtively getting rid of billionaires" then is just fundamentally unjust. These billionaires get no trial. They are presumed guilty by pure nature of their wealth. Good or bad, corrupt or philanthropic, no matter. You take away their money, not with the goal of raising revenue, but with the goal of taking away their money. "You don't deserve that money! Give me that!" It's really sad to imagine. I really hope this billionaire-hating fad goes away soon.
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@Simon Alford I am afraid you and others are failing to recognize the damage extreme wealth is doing to our democracy as billionaires work to subvert our political system to their benefit and politicians crawl to their alter for contributions because it is easier to milk one cow than 100. And if that one cow gave as much milk as 100 others you would surely pamper and protect her.
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@Simon Alford Behind every Great Fortune is a Great Crime.
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@Simon Alford
It's not "give me that!" It's more like: "Why I am I living paycheck to paycheck and have to worry about health care and educating my kids? Why do the Scandinavian countries and most other civilized nations take better care of their citizens?"
Look, I don't hate billionaires. But, I'm an engineer and I know plenty of brilliant engineers who work tirelessly on scientific issues relevant to making life better for all. For that, they live comfortably enough on 200K salaries, but they'll never be billionaires.
Then, there's Mark Zuckerberg. He fools around at Harvard creating an app to make it easier to rate girls. He collects all our data and sells it off so people can sell us more stuff we don't need. Is that really worth billions?
Then, there's Jeff Bezos. He puts virtually every ma and pa business out of business. The thousands upon thousands of warehouse workers boxing up his stuff (finally) make $15 an hour. Gee, thanks.
Listen-- Zuckerberg, Bezos, and most of the rest make their money from all of us. I'd like nothing better than for every human to stop using facebook and just stop buying anything but bare necessities for one year so the global economy could screech to a halt and these 'geniuses' might finally figure out that we, the consumers, are the ones who have made them this rich and maybe they owe something to society.
What these billionaires have actually done for humanity just isn't, in social terms, worth billions.
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