The finish line should not be “raise money to fund public programs.”
The finish line should be “billionaires don’t exist.”
Financially speaking, helping the poor and hurting the rich are not the same thing, and it’s honestly concerning when I see people prioritize the latter over the former. Eradicating poverty matters infinitely more than keeping people’s net worth (which as a reminder, is just a guessed (there is no billionaire whose net worth is precisely known), hypothetical, fluctuating price tag on the stuff they own, should they decide to sell it) under some arbitrary maximum.
And that’s without even mentioning how much tax revenue is wasted on things that don’t actually serve the population at large. What good is an extra $X billion in tax revenue if it’s all pissed away anyway? As one example, the US government spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country, and yet we’re far from #1 in most healthcare categories. How does that make sense? We’re already not getting what we’re paying for, fixing things like that is more important than simply increasing the amount of money going down the same wasteful hole, I think.
Edit: That argument is just “trickle down economics” with extra steps.
I disagree.
Billionaires have outsize influence. They buy politicians to set public policies that affect the working class and divert billions of our dollars into their pockets.
If you put all of their money in a pit and set it on fire, it would have a greater impact than just taxing them 2% and spending all of it on public programs, because they would no longer be able to do harm on a billionaire scale.
The people could heal.
We’d still have other beasts to deal with, but the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.
Edit: That argument is just “trickle down economics” with extra steps.
Trickle down economics is the argument that financial benefits given to the wealthiest will naturally make their way down to the rest, so there is no need to aid the impoverished directly.
There is literally nothing in what I said that suggests that course of action, at all. My talking about how taking direct action to eradicate poverty ought to be the top priority is literally the opposite of that. You’re full of it.
the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.
The correlation is in literally the opposite direction as what you claim. How do you reconcile these facts with your assertion?
Its very easy to make an incorrect correlation like this when you are using faulty data like the FPL.
All it takes two seconds to find out the poverty line in the US is literally just 3 times the monthly minimum spend for food for one person. That doesnt factor in the extreme inflation on housing, medical, student debt, utilities, phone plan costs, taxes, etc. While food prices are inflated they are not nearly as inflated as the other areas critical to survival which are not calculated for the reporting of offical poverty figures. Once you actually account for all of this and look at what percentage of the population fails to meet basic needs you get to a more staggering 43% of the US living in poverty and even thats a rough estimate due to missing data points that might make it higher.
I think you don’t understand what “correlation” means. The correlation is clearly and inarguably what I showed it to be: billionaires per capita went up as poverty went down. That’s a plain fact.
43% of the US living in poverty
I’m not going to bother examining how legitimate this stat is, because even if I just take this at face value, what is that compared to the 40-60% I cited? It still does nothing to support the point that billionaires are ‘holding the working class down’ to any statistically-significant degree. If we take the bottom of the range of the estimate I got, 40%, and took your figure as-is, 43%, then a 7x increase in billionaires per capita increased poverty by 3% total over 100 years! That stat takes “nothingburger” to a whole new level.
That doesn’t do much of anything to support the assertion that billionaires are ‘capping the lives of the working class’, when there being seven times more of them makes no statistically-significant difference in the poverty rate.
Not to mention that 1925 is in the midst of the roaring twenties, before the Great Depression, and your article was written a few years after a global pandemic that wreaked havoc on the world’s economy—two facts that both skew things in favor of your claim.
Even if I had asserted that billionaires cap the lives of the working class to the poverty line (which I didn’t), the poverty line is an outdated, unserious measure of how Americans are doing.
More about the FPL
My assertion is that billionaires are a cap on the lives of the working class, not that the cap is set at the federal poverty line.
I can’t see your links (imgur says their servers are overloaded), but I’ll use US figures for the sake of argument.
The [federal poverty line is] derived from the official poverty thresholds, which were originally developed in the 1960s based on the cost of a minimum food diet multiplied by three — reflecting the “fact” [quotations mine] that food makes up about one-third of a typical family’s budget. (What is the federal poverty level?)
Look up “average American monthly expenses”, and you’ll see that food consistently accounts for less than 15%. The FPL is outdated and has been for decades.
There’s controversy about the right way to measure poverty, but no one serious on either side of the argument points at “the percentage of the population living in poverty” and calls it a day.
The majority of Americans support progressive policies. But whether or not a policy is passed depends on whether or not it has the support of the billionaire class.
More on the popularity of progressive policies and the impact of wealth on policy change
Over half of Americans say they lack the cash to cover a $1,000 unexpected emergency expense. Increased earnings — not lower spending — is main driver for boosting emergency funds. The most common cause of emergency expenses in the United States is a medical emergency. Regardless of whether or not they meet a 1960’s definition of poverty, Americans are not, by and large, financially well.
When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
…
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
Working class Americans (and not just those at or below the federal poverty line) support policy changes that would materially improve their lives. When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.
Irrelevant, as I never claimed such. I pointed out the lack of correlation between billionaires per capita increasing over time, and poverty over the same period of time. Not all correlation is causally linked, but all causally linked things are also necessarily correlated. But if two things are not correlated, then they can’t be causally linked, either (at least not to a statistically-significant degree that isn’t wiped out by other factors), and that’s what I pointed out.
So, by which financial measure would you say that working-class Americans in 1925 are doing better than they are in 2025, then? There must be at least one, if your assertion is correct.
Then that should make the question above, all the easier to answer.
Working class Americans (and not just those at or below the federal poverty line) support policy changes that would materially improve their lives. When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.
Are you seriously suggesting that legislation that is detrimental to billionaires never becomes law?
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, among other things, imposed an excise tax on stock buybacks, something that will literally never impact anyone who isn’t significantly wealthy, and that passed. A year before, the Corporate Transparency Act passed, and basically struck the death knell for shell company schemes, (not a whole lot of that happening among the working class, lol) by requiring “Beneficial Owners” to be reported to FinCEN, so they know who the actual human beings who own them are. Billionaires lost the ability to hide assets and real estate within anonymous LLCs.
It’s ridiculous to think that billionaires are all just smiting any and all legislation that would negatively impact them at will. You are clearly deep in some echo chambers.
A year before, the Corporate Transparency Act passed, and basically struck the death knell for shell company schemes… by requiring “Beneficial Owners” to be reported to FinCEN, so they know who the actual human beings who own them are. Billionaires lost the ability to hide assets and real estate within anonymous LLCs.
You mean the same Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) that Trump and Musk killed the enforcement of after a tweet? (Both billionaires, btw.)
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, among other things, imposed an excise tax on stock buybacks, something that will literally never impact anyone who isn’t significantly wealthy, and that passed.
Are you arguing that a 1% excise tax limited to stock buybacks (even lower than the 2 and 3% I already argued won’t change the status quo) in any way counters the well-documentedfact that billionaires and corporations have dozens of ways to avoid paying taxes?
Corporations even managed to dodge the IRA's headline tax: the CAMT
(2022)
Part of the IRA was budgeted for hiring more tax auditors. Corporations underpay every chance they get and won’t pay a penny more until an auditor can prove the difference.
Under Trump (2025), the IRS has shrunk. In theory, the IRA should have led to increased taxes. In practice, corporations were able to stall until they had an administration that gutted the IRS’ ability to collect.
Your headline of “we passed a law that says they’ll pay” doesn’t match the reality of “but not this year because they say it’s too complicated, we don’t have enough staff to audit them, and they have more accountants than we have people who specialize in legally hiding their assets and cooking the numbers.”
For every legal loophole that is closed, the ultra-wealthy find or create two more.
Meanwhile, programs designed to serve the needs of the working class are pushed back with “how are you going to pay for it?”
Answer: With the money that billionaires and corporations should be paying, but aren’t.
Are you seriously suggesting that legislation that is detrimental to billionaires never becomes law?
Once in a blue moon, a law will get passed (as you’ve demonstrated), that they will then ignore, delay, defang, or lobby into irrelevance (as I’ve demonstrated).
What I am saying (and have been since the beginning) is that the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.
Financially speaking, helping the poor and hurting the rich are not the same thing, and it’s honestly concerning when I see people prioritize the latter over the former. Eradicating poverty matters infinitely more than keeping people’s net worth (which as a reminder, is just a guessed (there is no billionaire whose net worth is precisely known), hypothetical, fluctuating price tag on the stuff they own, should they decide to sell it) under some arbitrary maximum.
And that’s without even mentioning how much tax revenue is wasted on things that don’t actually serve the population at large. What good is an extra $X billion in tax revenue if it’s all pissed away anyway? As one example, the US government spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country, and yet we’re far from #1 in most healthcare categories. How does that make sense? We’re already not getting what we’re paying for, fixing things like that is more important than simply increasing the amount of money going down the same wasteful hole, I think.
Edit: That argument is just “trickle down economics” with extra steps.
I disagree.
Billionaires have outsize influence. They buy politicians to set public policies that affect the working class and divert billions of our dollars into their pockets.
If you put all of their money in a pit and set it on fire, it would have a greater impact than just taxing them 2% and spending all of it on public programs, because they would no longer be able to do harm on a billionaire scale.
The people could heal.
We’d still have other beasts to deal with, but the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.
Trickle down economics is the argument that financial benefits given to the wealthiest will naturally make their way down to the rest, so there is no need to aid the impoverished directly.
There is literally nothing in what I said that suggests that course of action, at all. My talking about how taking direct action to eradicate poverty ought to be the top priority is literally the opposite of that. You’re full of it.
Billionaires (inflation-adjusted, of course) per capita in the US increased by about 7x compared to 100 years ago, while the percentage of the population living in poverty is 4-6x lower today than it was 100 years ago, compared to what it is today.
The correlation is in literally the opposite direction as what you claim. How do you reconcile these facts with your assertion?
Its very easy to make an incorrect correlation like this when you are using faulty data like the FPL.
All it takes two seconds to find out the poverty line in the US is literally just 3 times the monthly minimum spend for food for one person. That doesnt factor in the extreme inflation on housing, medical, student debt, utilities, phone plan costs, taxes, etc. While food prices are inflated they are not nearly as inflated as the other areas critical to survival which are not calculated for the reporting of offical poverty figures. Once you actually account for all of this and look at what percentage of the population fails to meet basic needs you get to a more staggering 43% of the US living in poverty and even thats a rough estimate due to missing data points that might make it higher.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-many-are-in-need-in-the-us-the-poverty-rate-is-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/#%3A~%3Atext=Forty-three+percent+of+all+families+in+the%2Cfamily+budgets%2C+versus+37%25+of+white+families.
I think you don’t understand what “correlation” means. The correlation is clearly and inarguably what I showed it to be: billionaires per capita went up as poverty went down. That’s a plain fact.
I’m not going to bother examining how legitimate this stat is, because even if I just take this at face value, what is that compared to the 40-60% I cited? It still does nothing to support the point that billionaires are ‘holding the working class down’ to any statistically-significant degree. If we take the bottom of the range of the estimate I got, 40%, and took your figure as-is, 43%, then a 7x increase in billionaires per capita increased poverty by 3% total over 100 years! That stat takes “nothingburger” to a whole new level.
That doesn’t do much of anything to support the assertion that billionaires are ‘capping the lives of the working class’, when there being seven times more of them makes no statistically-significant difference in the poverty rate.
Not to mention that 1925 is in the midst of the roaring twenties, before the Great Depression, and your article was written a few years after a global pandemic that wreaked havoc on the world’s economy—two facts that both skew things in favor of your claim.
Correlation is not causation.
Even if I had asserted that billionaires cap the lives of the working class to the poverty line (which I didn’t), the poverty line is an outdated, unserious measure of how Americans are doing.
More about the FPL
My assertion is that billionaires are a cap on the lives of the working class, not that the cap is set at the federal poverty line.
I can’t see your links (imgur says their servers are overloaded), but I’ll use US figures for the sake of argument.
Look up “average American monthly expenses”, and you’ll see that food consistently accounts for less than 15%. The FPL is outdated and has been for decades.
There’s controversy about the right way to measure poverty, but no one serious on either side of the argument points at “the percentage of the population living in poverty” and calls it a day.
The majority of Americans support progressive policies. But whether or not a policy is passed depends on whether or not it has the support of the billionaire class.
More on the popularity of progressive policies and the impact of wealth on policy change
Over half of Americans say they lack the cash to cover a $1,000 unexpected emergency expense. Increased earnings — not lower spending — is main driver for boosting emergency funds. The most common cause of emergency expenses in the United States is a medical emergency. Regardless of whether or not they meet a 1960’s definition of poverty, Americans are not, by and large, financially well.
The majority of Americans support progressive programs that address the causes of this precarity: paid maternity leave, childcare support, boosting the minimum wage, free college, and Medicare for All.
But what we want doesn’t get passed.
Working class Americans (and not just those at or below the federal poverty line) support policy changes that would materially improve their lives. When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.
In other words, they put a cap on it.
Are you seriously suggesting that legislation that is detrimental to billionaires never becomes law?
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, among other things, imposed an excise tax on stock buybacks, something that will literally never impact anyone who isn’t significantly wealthy, and that passed. A year before, the Corporate Transparency Act passed, and basically struck the death knell for shell company schemes, (not a whole lot of that happening among the working class, lol) by requiring “Beneficial Owners” to be reported to FinCEN, so they know who the actual human beings who own them are. Billionaires lost the ability to hide assets and real estate within anonymous LLCs.
It’s ridiculous to think that billionaires are all just smiting any and all legislation that would negatively impact them at will. You are clearly deep in some echo chambers.
You mean the same Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) that Trump and Musk killed the enforcement of after a tweet? (Both billionaires, btw.)
Are you arguing that a 1% excise tax limited to stock buybacks (even lower than the 2 and 3% I already argued won’t change the status quo) in any way counters the well-documented fact that billionaires and corporations have dozens of ways to avoid paying taxes?
Corporations even managed to dodge the IRA's headline tax: the CAMT
(2022)
Part of the IRA was budgeted for hiring more tax auditors. Corporations underpay every chance they get and won’t pay a penny more until an auditor can prove the difference.
(2023 through 2024)
The IRS repeatedly provided relief and from penalties due to underpayment.
(2025)
Under Trump (2025), the IRS has shrunk. In theory, the IRA should have led to increased taxes. In practice, corporations were able to stall until they had an administration that gutted the IRS’ ability to collect.
Your headline of “we passed a law that says they’ll pay” doesn’t match the reality of “but not this year because they say it’s too complicated, we don’t have enough staff to audit them, and they have more accountants than we have people who specialize in legally hiding their assets and cooking the numbers.”
For every legal loophole that is closed, the ultra-wealthy find or create two more.
Meanwhile, programs designed to serve the needs of the working class are pushed back with “how are you going to pay for it?”
Answer: With the money that billionaires and corporations should be paying, but aren’t.
It would be convenient for you, if I were to suggest that, or any other argument you try to put in my mouth.
Once in a blue moon, a law will get passed (as you’ve demonstrated), that they will then ignore, delay, defang, or lobby into irrelevance (as I’ve demonstrated).
What I am saying (and have been since the beginning) is that the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.