A new poll finds the vast majority of U.S. adults are feeling some stress about the cost of groceries, as prices continue to rise and concerns about the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs remain widespread.
As much as I enjoy the “eat the rich” sentiment, it’s not really a fix to the issues.
The median net worth in the US is around $200,000.
If you took ALL the money in the US, from every single person and distributed it equally, it would only bring that number up to around $500,000.
Sure that’s a decent bump, but if you only targeted billionaires and high millionaires, it would be a hell of a lot less. The vast majority of that bump actually comes from random boomers having a million dollars each saved up.
The top .1% of US households hold over $20 trillion dollars in worth, and you’re talking about going after the million in retirement savings accounts that were built up to provide an income for the elderly (because social security alone isn’t enough, like it was supposed to be)? And 1M may not be enough if they live long enough or have serious medical issues because that’s another problem that we don’t dare fix with better distribution of resources.
$20 trillion divided by the US population is only $60,000 each, that’s well under a years worth of the median family income. As a one time transfer, that’s not doing almost anything to the economy long term.
The amount per year that these wealthy people generate is significantly less, so taxing them to prevent it in the future also wouldn’t really give other people that much money.
I’m wasn’t talking about going after anything, I was just pointing out that the rich don’t actually hold that much money in the grand scheme of things, and removing them won’t actually fix the issues we’re seeing.
That’s dividing by every woman, man, and child. It almost certainly wouldn’t be done that way. You absolutely wouldn’t give children $60,000 checks. And why are you comparing your $60k number to household incomes (which are pooled values)?
Even if it were done this way nominally, you’d have a household with two parents and two kids receiving $240k in a one-off payment, and then presumably you’d correct the tax structure so as to not wind up with the same equality gap so they’d pay less in taxes.
I don’t know what you think the average US household looks like, but nearly a quarter million dollar direct cash infusion would change a hell of a lot about most people’s lives.
EDIT: I think if we weren’t talking in complete hypotheticals here too, you’d do it by taxing the rich rather than eating them and directly redistributing their money. Even $10 trillion would be enough to fund a lot of government programs that could get to work fixing things for the people.
You could take out all the people under 18 and it ]would still only be $76,000.
Humans are terrible at understanding large numbers. 20 trillion sounds like a lot, but to 262 million people it’s STILL less than the median family income per year.
And that $20 trillion isn’t how much these rich people make per year, in fact, it’s not even really money. That’s almost all the value of the shares these people own in companies, which you can’t just convert to cash at the market value when you’re talking about that quantity. If you took all these shares and sold them off, you wouldn’t get that price, who’s going to be able to afford that? There isn’t enough available cash with other people for $20 trillion worth of shares all hitting the market at the same time to value them at $20 trillion.
If instead you gave each person you’re splitting it to part of the shares, they wouldn’t be able to eat them, they wouldn’t be able to live in them, and if they all decided to sell them off… same problem as before, significantly less value. They would all get bought up by the remaining wealthy people who actually have excess cash available, for much cheaper than they’re worth and then you have the same problem you had originally except now instead of the top 0.1% you’ve got the top 4% or something.
At the end of the day, there are far better options for improving the lives of people than just taking all the money from the 0.1% and giving it directly to everyone else. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care about these people at all, eat them if you want. Just don’t believe it’s going to make your life measurably better, because it won’t.
So now because I debunked your bad math, we’re going from “it’s not enough money to make a difference” to “it’s not liquid”.
I agree, it isn’t all liquid, and you can’t eat stock shares. But I’m sure you could do an awful lot to solve the “housing crisis” if you took over all of Blackrock’s real estate holdings and handed them out to people that were looking to live their lives in a house instead of trying to squeeze money out of a crisis for their own profit.
That’s just a first, easy example of good that could come out of a hypothetical redistribution of resources. There are countless others.
You didn’t de-bunk shit. It’s still not enough money to matter if you ignore children and it isn’t even money, both are valid criticisms of your idea.
Bringing up BlackRock is just stupid. Blackrock is an investment management Corp, they don’t just manage the wealth of a few billionaires. You can go buy into their products right now starting at around $100 for ETFs if you want, and there’s plenty of non-rich people who are part of that $11 billion that they manage. Suggesting you can just go take all their real estate holdings is the same as saying you’re going to go take the money of grandma and grandpa, and while I’m not saying that’s necessarily bad it’s not in line with your “eat the rich” proposal.
The housing crisis is NOT being caused by corporations buying up houses. The housing crisis is being caused by the fact that our system allows ANYONE to invest in houses at all. The vast majority of houses in the US are owned by the family that lives in them, and those people benefit from houses appreciating just as much as wealthy people do. Until we stop houses being an investment for EVERYONE (which does include corporations) the housing market will continue to get worse. If you block companies from owning homes, and even if you block people from owning more than one or two homes, you will still have house prices go up because people still want houses. If they continue to go up faster than wages increase, they will always become increasingly unaffordable.
To fix this, houses MUST lose money. You must never make money off simply living somewhere because the value of the land went up around you as the population grew and new amenities attract more people.
You can go buy into their products right now starting at around $100 for ETFs if you want, and there’s plenty of non-rich people who are part of that $11 billion that they manage.
Who cares? So some people have their share price drop a bit for retirement savings or something enabling many others to live a much better life. Any restructuring of the economy is going to make some people unhappy.
Suggesting you can just go take all their real estate holdings is the same as saying you’re going to go take the money of grandma and grandpa
Nope, it’s saying I’m going to take assets from an asset holding company and give them to people that can actually use the assets. But nice try at misdirection.
The housing crisis is NOT being caused by corporations buying up houses.
Didn’t say it was, but it certainly is exacerbated by them.
The housing crisis is being caused by the fact that our system allows ANYONE to invest in houses at all.
LOL, alright. So we cannot take Blackrock’s real estate holdings in even a hypothetical situation and redistribute them, but there would be no problem just completely obliterating the concept of private ownership of real estate? I guess no grandma or grandpa has a reverse mortgage they’re using, or we went from giving a shit about their hypothetical, minor stakeholdings in a hedge fund being affected in one paragraph to completely forgetting they exist at all in the next.
You jump to so many conclusions it’s like watching someone’s mind do parkour.
I didn’t say we shouldn’t make some people unhappy restructuring the economy. In fact, I’m totally on-board with doing just that. My focus in this has always been that the issue isn’t just the top 0.1%, or even the top 10%, the biggest problem with the housing market is the 100 million±ish home owners, ALL of them (including me)
I also didn’t say eliminate private ownership of real estate. People own cars and they depreciate. You just need to remove the part of housing that appreciates from the equation via government regulation. Buildings depreciate it’s the land values that are the problem. It could be solved as simply as a 100% capital gains tax on land value (not property value, because that includes buildings) or introduce a land value tax value so high that you can pay for a universal basic income, making it impossible to profit from simply owning land. Both of these would crash the economy if done overnight, so they would need to be introduced over time, but they would both end up with housing prices being entirely based on their value as living spaces, rather than as economic vehicles to invest in.
Your ideas of grabbing everything from Blackrock helps… who? the 60-70k people who would get one of Blackrock’s homes? How would you even figure out who to give them to, a lottery for poor people? What about the other 100 million people who are struggling with housing costs? You could grab every house owned by a corporation and it wouldn’t even come close addressing the scale of the issue.
As much as I enjoy the “eat the rich” sentiment, it’s not really a fix to the issues.
The median net worth in the US is around $200,000.
If you took ALL the money in the US, from every single person and distributed it equally, it would only bring that number up to around $500,000.
Sure that’s a decent bump, but if you only targeted billionaires and high millionaires, it would be a hell of a lot less. The vast majority of that bump actually comes from random boomers having a million dollars each saved up.
The top .1% of US households hold over $20 trillion dollars in worth, and you’re talking about going after the million in retirement savings accounts that were built up to provide an income for the elderly (because social security alone isn’t enough, like it was supposed to be)? And 1M may not be enough if they live long enough or have serious medical issues because that’s another problem that we don’t dare fix with better distribution of resources.
$20 trillion divided by the US population is only $60,000 each, that’s well under a years worth of the median family income. As a one time transfer, that’s not doing almost anything to the economy long term.
The amount per year that these wealthy people generate is significantly less, so taxing them to prevent it in the future also wouldn’t really give other people that much money.
I’m wasn’t talking about going after anything, I was just pointing out that the rich don’t actually hold that much money in the grand scheme of things, and removing them won’t actually fix the issues we’re seeing.
That’s dividing by every woman, man, and child. It almost certainly wouldn’t be done that way. You absolutely wouldn’t give children $60,000 checks. And why are you comparing your $60k number to household incomes (which are pooled values)?
Even if it were done this way nominally, you’d have a household with two parents and two kids receiving $240k in a one-off payment, and then presumably you’d correct the tax structure so as to not wind up with the same equality gap so they’d pay less in taxes.
I don’t know what you think the average US household looks like, but nearly a quarter million dollar direct cash infusion would change a hell of a lot about most people’s lives.
EDIT: I think if we weren’t talking in complete hypotheticals here too, you’d do it by taxing the rich rather than eating them and directly redistributing their money. Even $10 trillion would be enough to fund a lot of government programs that could get to work fixing things for the people.
You could take out all the people under 18 and it ]would still only be $76,000.
Humans are terrible at understanding large numbers. 20 trillion sounds like a lot, but to 262 million people it’s STILL less than the median family income per year.
And that $20 trillion isn’t how much these rich people make per year, in fact, it’s not even really money. That’s almost all the value of the shares these people own in companies, which you can’t just convert to cash at the market value when you’re talking about that quantity. If you took all these shares and sold them off, you wouldn’t get that price, who’s going to be able to afford that? There isn’t enough available cash with other people for $20 trillion worth of shares all hitting the market at the same time to value them at $20 trillion.
If instead you gave each person you’re splitting it to part of the shares, they wouldn’t be able to eat them, they wouldn’t be able to live in them, and if they all decided to sell them off… same problem as before, significantly less value. They would all get bought up by the remaining wealthy people who actually have excess cash available, for much cheaper than they’re worth and then you have the same problem you had originally except now instead of the top 0.1% you’ve got the top 4% or something.
At the end of the day, there are far better options for improving the lives of people than just taking all the money from the 0.1% and giving it directly to everyone else. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care about these people at all, eat them if you want. Just don’t believe it’s going to make your life measurably better, because it won’t.
So now because I debunked your bad math, we’re going from “it’s not enough money to make a difference” to “it’s not liquid”.
I agree, it isn’t all liquid, and you can’t eat stock shares. But I’m sure you could do an awful lot to solve the “housing crisis” if you took over all of Blackrock’s real estate holdings and handed them out to people that were looking to live their lives in a house instead of trying to squeeze money out of a crisis for their own profit.
That’s just a first, easy example of good that could come out of a hypothetical redistribution of resources. There are countless others.
You didn’t de-bunk shit. It’s still not enough money to matter if you ignore children and it isn’t even money, both are valid criticisms of your idea.
Bringing up BlackRock is just stupid. Blackrock is an investment management Corp, they don’t just manage the wealth of a few billionaires. You can go buy into their products right now starting at around $100 for ETFs if you want, and there’s plenty of non-rich people who are part of that $11 billion that they manage. Suggesting you can just go take all their real estate holdings is the same as saying you’re going to go take the money of grandma and grandpa, and while I’m not saying that’s necessarily bad it’s not in line with your “eat the rich” proposal.
The housing crisis is NOT being caused by corporations buying up houses. The housing crisis is being caused by the fact that our system allows ANYONE to invest in houses at all. The vast majority of houses in the US are owned by the family that lives in them, and those people benefit from houses appreciating just as much as wealthy people do. Until we stop houses being an investment for EVERYONE (which does include corporations) the housing market will continue to get worse. If you block companies from owning homes, and even if you block people from owning more than one or two homes, you will still have house prices go up because people still want houses. If they continue to go up faster than wages increase, they will always become increasingly unaffordable.
To fix this, houses MUST lose money. You must never make money off simply living somewhere because the value of the land went up around you as the population grew and new amenities attract more people.
Who cares? So some people have their share price drop a bit for retirement savings or something enabling many others to live a much better life. Any restructuring of the economy is going to make some people unhappy.
Nope, it’s saying I’m going to take assets from an asset holding company and give them to people that can actually use the assets. But nice try at misdirection.
Didn’t say it was, but it certainly is exacerbated by them.
LOL, alright. So we cannot take Blackrock’s real estate holdings in even a hypothetical situation and redistribute them, but there would be no problem just completely obliterating the concept of private ownership of real estate? I guess no grandma or grandpa has a reverse mortgage they’re using, or we went from giving a shit about their hypothetical, minor stakeholdings in a hedge fund being affected in one paragraph to completely forgetting they exist at all in the next.
Are you a random argument generator or something?
You jump to so many conclusions it’s like watching someone’s mind do parkour.
I didn’t say we shouldn’t make some people unhappy restructuring the economy. In fact, I’m totally on-board with doing just that. My focus in this has always been that the issue isn’t just the top 0.1%, or even the top 10%, the biggest problem with the housing market is the 100 million±ish home owners, ALL of them (including me)
I also didn’t say eliminate private ownership of real estate. People own cars and they depreciate. You just need to remove the part of housing that appreciates from the equation via government regulation. Buildings depreciate it’s the land values that are the problem. It could be solved as simply as a 100% capital gains tax on land value (not property value, because that includes buildings) or introduce a land value tax value so high that you can pay for a universal basic income, making it impossible to profit from simply owning land. Both of these would crash the economy if done overnight, so they would need to be introduced over time, but they would both end up with housing prices being entirely based on their value as living spaces, rather than as economic vehicles to invest in.
Your ideas of grabbing everything from Blackrock helps… who? the 60-70k people who would get one of Blackrock’s homes? How would you even figure out who to give them to, a lottery for poor people? What about the other 100 million people who are struggling with housing costs? You could grab every house owned by a corporation and it wouldn’t even come close addressing the scale of the issue.
https://luckboxmagazine.com/topics/is-blackrock-really-buying-up-homes/ - Source for 60-70k single family homes owned by Blackrock