I think that, somewhere north of $1 ~ $5 million is life-changing on its own. There’s no need for someone to have tens of millions or hundreds of millions. Tens of millions is like, changing multiple lives in a family with how much that can stretch.
Whenever someone has billions to their name, it is boggling to think about. That it becomes just ‘fuck you’ money at that point because more often than not, not a lot of billionaires out there being charitable. When they know they’re set for a few lifetimes just by a single billion alone.
No single person should ever have that amount of gross wealth.
A house, a car, and enough to pay all the bills and still have some lifestyle, without the terror of knowing you are one job loss away from homelessness and starvation. Able to retire for 25 years before dying.
I think for us (a family not a single person) that really is a million in the bank and 200k per year. We don’t have that, nor do many others.
As a cap? I think nobody needs to accumulate more than 5 million in cash and other assets. Less if you live somewhere with reasonable pension and healthcare.
The problem with “wealth” or taxing it while someone is alive is that there’s a problem when it comes to businesses.
If you taxed Zuckerburg, Musk, or Bezos 90% of their wealth, they would lose control of their companies because that’s where most of their wealth exists as the stock they own in their company.
I’m a big fan of a limit on wealth transfer to your children though, cap that shit at 10 million and give the billionaires a reason to spend or give away all their money before they die. Spent money stimulates the economy.
If you taxed Zuckerburg, Musk, or Bezos 90% of their wealth, they would lose control of their companies
Not seeing the downside here.
And a lot of social good can come from this.
From which, taxing people on death or taxing them while living?
¿Por qué no los dos?
Hooray.jpg
Progressive income taxes until 100m, then 100% wealth taxes. Estate taxes of 50%. The kids will be fine as a 2 kid family would get 25 mil each.
So as the company you founded gets bigger, you’re forced to just give more and more of it away to the government until you don’t control it anymore?
I would much prefer to see a higher estate tax, 100% of all amounts over 10-20 million.
If you know you can’t keep it you’re far more likely to do something useful with it while you’re alive.
Good point, but easily resolved with share classes.
Estate taxes don’t help, for example we can’t afford to wait for Musk to die to rectify the political and institutional damage he has done and is doing.
You don’t need to prevent rich people to remove money from elections. There are laws that other countries have passed that effectively nuter their influence on that.
Yea, because you don’t have an economics degree.
Musk may be an asshole, and Tesla may be absolute shit, but SpaceX is a good company and would have never existed without Musk’s wealth from other ventures.
That process of making a fortune, then investing in other companies so that they can become successful is a critical factor for many organizations.
Google is another example, it took millions of dollars from a few wealthy investors before it blew up.
Great, they did it and were successful. Now they can fuck off and do something else with their money, hopefully not something so destructive to society.
How does that statement make any sense? If you tax them, they won’t have the money to fuck off with.
You have hurt yourself in your confusion.
Ah yes the famous 100% tax. /s
SpaceX is a good company
Wait, wut?
Google is another example
SpaceX has advanced what humanity can do in space by a significant amount. It achieved something no government was even considering attempting until they proved it possible.
Google has added some massive value to the world, making information more accessible and advancing hundreds of other services and companies. From Gmail to Waymo it too has advanced humanity significantly.
If that’s what you learned from your economics degree, you’re part of the problem. Spend a lot more time on business ethics, moral philosophy and humanities, maybe get some degrees in that too before you start feeling like you’re qualified deciding how the world ought to work.
Economics is about studying how it works, not forming opinions on how it should work.
If you want to discuss changing economic systems entirely, then discuss that, not ways to break the current one.
Our current economic system would not function with the changes proposed. All sorts of problems occur if you try to tax wealth when it’s created. Companies would receive no investment because anyone with money would have already hit the threshold and wouldn’t benefit from investing it. Not to mention that founders would be forced to walk away fairly early in the business even if they succeeded without investment.
Capitalism is inherently exploitative. You can’t have a profit as a company if you pay workers the same amount that you earn. If you pay workers out the entirety of the value and cut out the shareholders, you’ve just created socialism.
In my opinion, guided capitalism is the best system. Which means adding taxes and regulations to prevent the worst problems.
Like the fact that we already tax wealth somewhat when it’s sold off, and my proposal adjust inheritance taxes to 100% over a certain dollar value (10-20 million for example)
They’re in the trillions now. It’s like a disease.
likeDragon sickness
sounds too cool
canceris a better term is imowealth addiction
No they aren’t. Musk is only around 700-800B as of the end of 2025.
Oh, Ok. I was worried.
Just enough to escape capitalism. 5 million invested in stocks means you would never have to work again. Any more than that and you are part of the problem that everyone is trying to escape.
Honestly though, really we should all be working for an escape for our entire species, not individual escape pods.
I think it should be percentage based, not fiscally based. That way it can adapt and grow with the times. I also think all income should be taxed, as it stands only certain types of income are taxed, and at different rates. Not surprisingly your W-2 taxes (taxes taken out of your paycheck) are one of the highest tax rates you can have on income. I also think tax breaks shouldn’t be a thing at all either. If the government wants to promote something they can offer a rebate so there’s a cap on how much they promote it, and it’s not an endless give away. Finally, expenses are the cost of doing business, and you shouldn’t be able to hide income because you paid money to make money.
The fact that I can buy a property, get a tax break because I’m paying interest on a mortgage, rent the property out for more than my mortgage, claim that as a business, then claim the mortgage as an expense for said business, and end up not paying any taxes on charging someone else to pay for my mortgage, is insane.
In my ideal world there would be no tax breaks period, you pay what is owed end of story. Anything below the median income (50%) isn’t taxed, anything above the median is taxed at 1.5% for each percentage point above the median. If you are in the top 10% and make more than 90% of the nation, you get taxed at 60% above the median and can take home 40% of that additional income after the median. In the USA this would be ($251,036-$80,610) x .4 + $80,610 or $148,780.4. If you are in the top 1% ($731,492) that would be a take home of $253,093.73. If you’re Elon Musk (est $400,000,000,000 last year alone) that would be “only” $100,000,000,000. Keep in mind in 2024 he didn’t pay any taxes, and in 2021, he was the highest tax paying individual in US history at $11 billion. Yes he would still be ultra rich, but there would be $300 billion going to taxes last year alone, or roughly 7.5% of all tax income.
This means rich people can still enjoy their money, while still paying their fair share, and if you’re just trying to get by, don’t worry about it, we got you.
Enough they never have to worry about food or housing no matter how much they plan on working.
So little that they can never own something as expensive as a yacht or a company by themselves.
Agree. Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
Personally, every penny you have in money/assets/stocks over £1b is taxed at 100% in exchange you get a medal that says “I beat capitalism” and a statue.
While I agree, then you are giving the government massive power to decide how much you shouldn’t make.
And what happens with all the “tax” money? Straight into politician pockets.
I’m not bothered about the specifics, its the principal.
The money could all goto charity for all I care. Point is, no person on this planet should have that much wealth at the expense of others.
I agree.
But its still dangerous to give government that power. however, if you can actually elect the politicians, its fine. But we all know its rigged bullshit and votes dont actually matter anymore, if they ever did.
It’s gotta be less dangerous than letting individuals have it. I mean, look around.
Its a compromise. You can have 999 mil as long as you invest back 100% into society thereafter…though, no one ever needs 999 mil either.
Getting to direct where every dollar goes above a billion is a huge amount of power. A single person deciding how to spend millions or billions of dollars to do what they deem to be improving society? They may do some good things, but a democratic process would probably do better overall.
Exactly
as long as you invest back 100% into society
Taxes
Yeah but then they find ways to slurp up the tax money through bailouts and BS government contracts.
Yes, but we are talking tax policy, not how to solve human greed and corruption.
$5 million is the threshold where you start to not need to work full time if you’re not old age. Like, you can basically have 40 working years of your life back and not sacrifice on milestones like owing a home, having a family, security in your elder years, and a comfortable life…
A simple estimation based on investing that amount of money into a total world stock market index fund (e.g. VTWAX) would be your yearly expenses divided by 3.25% (pretty conservative rate). The idea is that you withdraw 3.25% of your wealth from the stock market every year, and you’ll be able to withdraw that much purchasing power every year forever due to compound interest pushing the number up as you withdraw. Realistically if you’re not withdrawing the full amount blindly during market downturns you can kick that number up to 4% or even more, but 3.25-3.5% is basically impossible to go broke with, and most likely will quickly increase your nest egg to double/triple/etc in most universes.
So, if my expenses were 50k/year in post-tax money, I would need to invest ~1.5 million in order to withdraw 50k of “free” money per year forever, inflation-adjusted. You can do the rest of the math on how many post-tax expenses a normal person/family has and will quickly reach the conclusion that hey, a billion dollars is kinda fucking crazy.
This right here is why everything is so fucked up.
but 3.25-3.5% is basically impossible to go broke with,
Historically it has not been enough to draw down funds that are invested in a broad American stock market index like the S&P500. But that doesn’t make it impossible. A 20-30 year run that looks like the Nikkei 225 between 1990 and 2020 could wipe out portfolios on a 3% withdrawal rate. Even a 2% withdrawal rate would’ve run out of money in 32 years.
I’m kinda bearish about the continued dominance of the “invest in publicly traded large cap American equities” strategy over the coming decades, so I’m a bit more conservative in my savings rate, and what securities/assets I’m actually invested in, including soft assets like my own earning ability if I were to bail on this country and move somewhere else (fluency in another language, job skill sets that translate outside of the US borders, relationships/network with people who don’t rely on the US).
And I know that’s not the central point you’re making. But there are plenty of people who might not feel secure with $1.5 million or even $3 million or $6 million in investible wealth, especially if it’s tied up in one particular asset or asset class, or otherwise less liquid than publicly traded securities.
I did say VTWAX (i.e total “world”), which diversifies out of a lot of problems like the Nikkei 225 and the potential collapse of America, but yes the math is not 100% gospel because at the end of the day anything can happen. Oftentimes, when calculating for a decades-long downfall of the entire world economy, the real answer is that if that happens everything is super fucked no matter what you planned for. All we can do is run simulations on historical data and get statistical significance for numbers we’re pretty comfortable with. If someone is actually pulling the trigger (i.e. retiring) for real on these numbers, I’d strongly suggest they get more familiar with why these numbers are what they are and are prepared to spend less when needed in a rare edge case scenario.
And as you said, for this thread in particular it’s just an estimation to ballpark how much capital realistically translates into what sort of wealth for someone’s life. IMO it’s very useful to be able to estimate how a layman’s capital generation/retirement works because most people just give up on finances immediately and have no concept of what wealth even means. Does someone ever really need 20 million dollars? I’d wager most people just aren’t sure. Now we know which people we can eat.
VTWAX is still like 65% US equities. It hasn’t diversified out of U.S. exposure (and frankly, international stocks aren’t protected from U.S. economic crises). A lot of people think about full blown collapse and crisis, but wouldn’t know what to do about lethargy and stagnation for decades, but still roughly the same economic and financial paradigm.
I think U.S. equities are overpriced right now, especially when looking at market cap weighted indexes (because the U.S. tech bubble seems to represent a much higher percentage of any given index). And I’m concerned that the correction will just be decades of tepid growth or even stagnation where decades of investment won’t actually earn a good return. Not that I’m investing in something else, other than maybe the soft skills I’ve described in my earlier comment.
This is a difficult question because we don’t have an agreed upon baseline of what “living” looks like worldwide.
Some countries may say, “living a long life.” Other countries may say, “And a roof over your head.” And Other countries may say, “That and a yearly vacation.”
Also, it’s sad to say that million dollars isn’t even “dick around” money anymore. My wife’s retired grandparents retired on a million at age 70. They’re living okay, very modestly at age 90. Medicine is fucking expensive, hip surgeries, paying for physical therapy, etc. No brand new cars or fancy trips. Just coupon clipping and finding lunch deals.
Read Jack Spirko’s book, Laws of Life: Ditch the System Design Your Life. You’ll thank me later.
When you say “make”, do you mean extract?
I’ve heard Wall St destroy over 7 times as much wealth as they “make” from us.
I’ve also heard salaries over $£€70,000 no longer increase happiness. (Though, that was a few years ago… so, adjust for devaluation.).
More than what should a UBI be set to, if all the emancipatory technologies ceased being suppressed, and instead were proliferated to the benefit of each and all… would we even need money any more?
I’ve also heard salaries over $£€70,000 no longer increase happiness.
No, that study was debunked. Turns out that some subset of unhappy people will remain unhappy even if you give them all the money in the world, so looking purely at the least happy people in America, you’ll notice that their happiness stops going up at $75,000 in 2010 dollars. But if you focus on people who are already on the happier side of the spectrum, more money keeps buying them more happiness, even if the slope of that relationship tapers a bit.
Side note, the way the two sides reconciled their methodologies, that produced different results, was a really interesting way to perform science, and should be followed in the future whenever there are well respected studies that contradict each other.
Given “Listen to those who seek the truth. Run from those who claim to have found it.”
*runs*
CENTER FOR BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE & PUBLIC POLICY
*runs harder*
In America midwest, 100k is plenty to own a couple acres and a few cars and buy most things you want and travel.
On the coasts, about $250k yr to live like this, maybe 350k.
own a couple acres and a few cars
On the flip side, plenty of us don’t want to own acres or cars. None of that sounds appealing to me.
We should all figure out what is actually important to us, and where that stuff tends to be cheaper, relative to what we can earn in that place.
I like a variety of nice restaurants, a good butcher shop, good bakeries, a good coffee shop/roaster, farmers markets, and other specialty food sellers within walking (or at least biking) distance of my home. I like the option of seeing live music and standup comedians, preferably also within walking distance of my home. I like having multiple playgrounds and parks and libraries and even museums within walking distance of my home. I like that my kids can walk to and from most of these places, too.
So I pay a shitload to live in a place like that. It comes with tradeoffs: it costs more, we have less space, we can only have one car in our household. But that stuff isn’t important to me (we have money to spare, we don’t like too much space, we hate driving).
Most importantly, though, the thing I like about living in a high salary, high cost of living city is that when set aside 10% of your income for savings and 10% of your income for travel, those are types of things where a dollar is a dollar, so that 10% of a larger number goes further. Someone who lives in a big house on a big plot of land in the Midwest still has to pay the exact same amount that I would when they’re getting a hotel room in London or an Airbnb at a ski town in Colorado.
Thats good! I wish I could be more minimalist but im not. Im a maximalist for sure lol.
Most things about living in town just require spending money all the time (not that im not spending it other places but still)
Like fancy eateries or bars etc, just drains money away so fast and you dont actually “get” anything out of it. (Except experience, which my memory is so bad ill forget it anyway)
Good point on the high salary area however one could argue there’s actually more opportunity here where I could buy land to rent out, or buy a house to flip etc. Big money makers. But I am too lazy to want to do that right now haha. And while trips are fun and i like to do them sometimes, having my own big garage is more fun and more useful to me. Plus I love driving (more sport type driving events, but I go for cruises on open roads a lot too). I feel like a trapped animal in cities, not for me.
Thats good! I wish I could be more minimalist but im not. Im a maximalist for sure lol.
I think you’re misunderstanding my point. Mine isn’t minimalism. I’m not denying myself anything that I want. Or even owning less stuff or spending less money. Mine is just steering things into what I like rather than what I don’t care all that much about.
And for my preferences, that maximum for my own happiness is going to come from living in a dense city with a lot going on.
I’d rather we were each and all free to have spaceships.
Much more ecologically savvy than petroleum powered cars and all the road infrastructure they require.
Spaceships for everybody.
Spaceships that are zero-point energy powered, capable of zero-inertia propulsion, sustaining human life indefinitely, printing another of itself instantly, and safe enough for a 2 year old to fly home. I hear these exist, and have for decades before we saw the TR-3B (in 2014 or earlier), and at least as early as a decade after the foo-fighters and the bell (“die glocke”) during WW2.
Or even just the aeros of the mid 1800s, like Charles Dellschau drew from what he saw at the Sonora Aero Club in 1850… that’d be better, for a start, even if they’ve not been made spaceworthy yet, at least they’d be clean powered, energy efficient, and spare our landscape being cut up by roads (freeing up even more acres for each our farm holdings individual and communal), freeing us to travel where there’s far more room (in the sky), no traffic, and cant crash by driver error or strike wildlife, the em-inertial field just slipstreaming us past anything, and able to stop instantly, with the internal inertial reference frame separated.
Lets wind back this over 175 year lost progress for the common people.
It’d even be a nice start if more people merely started looking into this, beyond their circular-reasoned unwittingly conditioned-presumption that it’s not possible or true.
But the yachts. How would you get yachts with a mere $1M - $5M? And jets?
Let me put it this way.
It’s possible to become a millionaire through a combination of hardwork, brains, luck and timing.
It’s impossible to become a billionaire after that without exploiting others, whether that is workers, employees, investors…whoever.
In other words, it’s possible to be an honest millionaire, but not an honest billionaire.
So the amount of wealth a person is entitled to is the amount that they can earn with their own labour without exploiting others in order to do so.
So if you own a furniture store, and you pay your employees a living wage, give benefits, etc… and after that you’re successful enough to be a millionaire…great. You deserve it. If you’re an employer and you own a furniture store, and in order to become a millionaire you have to pay your workers minimum wage and rely on unfair labour practices to inflate your profits…you don’t deserve it.
I use the furniture store example because I worked for just such a guy. Family run business. Paid us all well enough. Gave us benefits. Made sure we were taken care of. Treated us like family. And he was financially very successful while managing to do so. Could he have made even MORE if he had taken it from wages and benefits…sure. But that wasn’t the type of person he was.
To me, THAT example is capitalism working as it should in it’s purest form. Corporatization is just a bastardization of the concept created by venture capitalists and shareholders.
How about them trillionaires?
They’d make for some mighty fine eatin’.
I hear they make fine wines, but, I’m not so sure about eating:
PS, I’m T-Total, so, I want nothing from them,
…other than that they’d cease keeping everybody down and cease manufacturing wars, etc etc etc.
It’s impossible to become a billionaire after that without exploiting others, whether that is workers, employees, investors…whoever.
People say this, but I don’t think it’s true.
If I simply ask for people to give me money if they like me, and I get 1 million people to give me a dollar each, then I become a millionaire. Nobody’s being taken advantage of, everyone is voluntarily doing this.
Getting to a billion is a lot harder but not impossible. If I ask and 10 million people give me $100 each over the course of 10 years, I might make a billion dollars that way.
So who can do this kind of “ask people for money” at these scales? Anyone who provides a service where the marginal cost of each additional recipient of that service doesn’t cost anything. A musician playing music in a subway station performs basically the same amount of work whether 10 people walk by or 1000 people walk by in the time that he performs. And if you’re a recording artist, you might release a song that literally over a billion people enjoy.
Yes, sports leagues and movie studios and record labels and Ticketmaster and book publishers and live venues and broadcasters and tech platforms are often exploitative in many ways, but authors, musicians, artists, filmmakers, comedians, and other creators can and do sometimes do things that make the world better by billions of dollars worth of happiness, while taking a cut worth hundreds of millions, or even billions.
Ultimately, we do things that produce value in some way or another. Sometimes we get to keep the fruits of our labor, and sometimes we get to profit from that value created. Often, as in the world of intellectual property, the value is very far removed from the actual cost to produce, including the cost in terms of human labor. When that happens, sometimes the excess value is worth billions. Even without a big team creating that value.
I see what you’re saying. But to me it’s very much a “You can’t swim in the sewer without getting covered in shit” morality-play.
The very act of providing a service that earns more than a billion dollars by necessity requires the cooperation of a number of different entities. As you described, Ticket Master, Publishers, Distributors, etc… So while they themselves might not be directly exploiting people, they have to interact and make use of partners that do if they want to play in that billionaire paddling pool.
To me, exploitation by association is still exploitation.
But that’s me. Everyone is welcome to their own opinion.
To me, exploitation by association is still exploitation.
But by this telling, the billionaire isn’t any less moral than the person who buys the tickets. If simply transacting with this system is unethical, then the billionaires aren’t any worse than the millionaires, or even the people barely subsisting on what they have.
In my eyes, there’s a huge difference between the person who actively exploits others, and one who incidentally interacts with a person who exploits others. Especially if choosing to opt out wouldn’t actually reduce the exploitation happening. There are still degrees to things, so it’s entirely possible for the billionaire artist to be ethically superior to the millionaire venue operator, even when they both rely on the other.
Not to mention, there’s a difference in kind when talking about exploitation in terms of a team effort where not enough of the fruits of the labor get shared fairly with all team members (positive sum interactions) versus when one actively takes from another, and that victim is worse off from the transaction.
I totally agree. And id like to ask, what sort of system benefits this?
Regulation is what government does and kills small business while large corps either pay em off to get by or they submit to regulation and lose a few billion but doesn’t affect em.
Socialism is viewed here as government ownership of everything, no more individualism, and Americans fear government above all else (ironically blindly trusting corporations with all their money and data).
Cant we outlaw corporations and continue as we are? Sure would be nice.
Cant we outlaw corporations and continue as we are? Sure would be nice.
I think the world would do better if all of us shrank a bit to be more mindful of a community economy.
If my neighbour down the street woodworks in his spare time and makes bespoke tables and chairs, I’ll do everything I can to go buy from him rather than a corporation (for example)
Growing up on an Acreage, it was more common for us to buy a half a side of beef or pork from the farmer next door than to go to the grocery store. Same for vegetables from farmer’s markets or similar community markets.
It’s less about criminalizing corporations and more about refusing to reward them for making their profits off the backs of poverty wages and government subsidies…
I agree.
People are SO against doing that though, almost vehemently so. 1000 people will go to scamazon to buy some junk before 1 person goes 2 blocks to get it from a local store. People are so lazy they dont want to get up to put in a dvd (yes im old, but this is something I heard a friend actually say not long ago)
Not to mention everything made local costs 4x more by default.
There’s really not much sense of community anymore in America.
