Sure, a two cent tax on every dollar over $50,000,000 sounds like it's almost nothing when you put it that way, until you consider that if someone has $100.05 billion dollars, that's $2 billion in taxes, at which point it's confirmed to be almost nothing.
The part where a wealth tax (as opposed to an income tax) gets tricky is trying to figure out at what point someone who has stock holdings valued at so many tens of billions of dollars actually gets taxed but you know, I think we can afford a certain amount of arbitrariness.
Nobody ever actually has eighty billion US dollars even as 1s and 0s in a bank account. It's an abstraction representing the purchasing power if all their capital was liquid.
But all money is an abstraction.
But all money is an abstraction.
And I think there's a legitimate public interest in saying "If you accumulate this kind of capital somehow, you didn't do it alone, and the society that provided the infrastructure that enables it needs a share." and figure out how to make that work.
And he'll probably make it back anyway because money is the biggest lever in making money.
There's those factoids that go "Billions Georg makes exty thousand dollars every second so if he sees a $100 lying on the ground it's not worth his time to pick it up."
But it's not his time that makes him money.
It's his money.
But it's not his time that makes him money.
It's his money.
Elon Musk has time to build ipod submarines and demonstrate the depth and breadth of his knowledge of illegal sex tourism. The opportunity cost to pick up a bill he sees in the gutter is nothing.
The $100 means nothing to him, of course. If he deposited it in the bank he'd never notice it was there. If it fell out of his pocket he'd never miss it.
But he doesn't lose anything collecting it.
But he doesn't lose anything collecting it.
