LogFAQs > #942268851

adjl posted...

The concept seems nice enough, but in practice, it'd be too easy to get around to make any real difference. Cap it at $1 billion, and you just get multibillionaires paying some random people $10,000 a year each to hold on to $500 million for them until they want to access it, or continuing to hide it in offshore tax havens like they currently do to avoid paying taxes on it, or even just giving it away to friends and family members instead of letting it be taxed away and used for public benefit. It wouldn't be impossible to make it work, but it's going to entail outfoxing a whole lot of very highly-paid accountants and lawyers, and the sheer cost of the audits required to enforce it long-term could very well outweigh the potential benefits.

Rather than a hard cap, if you want to cut down on wealth disparity, minimum wage should instead be defined as a percentage of the highest wage (including bonuses) in the company. If a CEO wants to make more money, they must first pay all of their bottom-rung staff more money as well (and, by extension, everyone else in between). Growth remains possible, just not to the explosive, exploitative degree that's currently standard, and that growth benefits everybody that contributes to it.

This is always the response to such ideas, but I think it fundamentally misrepresents the issue. The vast majority of people saying such things do feel that, for the most part, the financial elite have earned the privilege to live the rest of their lives in complete luxury. Nobody's saying they don't deserve to be rich. The problem is that they've often hoarded enough money to live thousands of such lives, more money than can ever possibly be justified as useful or meaningful for a single person, and their removal of that money from the economy is very bad for it.

My thoughts exactly.

Hell, the elite rich buy entire apartment buildings or apartment floors and never live there, with the sole purpose being to hide money in investments to avoid taxes. They do this with land, too. Invest and just let the money sit so it goes unnoticed.

The root of the problem is that people who have millions upon trillions of money that they're never going to spend in its entirety. They eventually usually just pass it along to their kids and the kids spend it or add to it and the money just stays within the family tree or in offshore accounts to hide from government.

But hey, that's capitalism for you. And anyone who voices otherwise is a dirty socialist commie. /s (but not really /s)