Current Events > Do you believe that if you took the money from all the billionaires in the u.s..

(+) Yeah! (+)

.....i've heard this being said many times, that if all the money was taken from the richest in the u.s that it would be enough to totally eliminate poverty in the u.s. Do you believe this?
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Do people still get to keep their current jobs to make more money in the same amounts they're used to?
Also, how much is that per capita?
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Easily for a while but poverty is a persistent issue that won't be solved by take all the money from those that best excelled at life.

Something might be a plausible bandaid but that doesn't make it good policy.
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Not quite an answer to the question, because some of the variables are different, but
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-22/world-inequality-grows-amid-glut-of-new-billionaires-oxfam-says

The global economy created a record number of billionaires last year, exacerbating inequality amid a weakening of workers rights and a corporate push to maximize shareholder returns, charity organization Oxfam International said in a new report.

The world now has 2,043 billionaires, after a new one emerged every two days in the past year, the nonprofit organization said in a report published Monday. The group of mostly men saw its wealth surge by $762 billion, which is enough money to end extreme poverty seven times over, according to Oxfam.

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Antifar posted...

Not quite an answer to the question, because some of the variables are different, but
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-22/world-inequality-grows-amid-glut-of-new-billionaires-oxfam-says

The global economy created a record number of billionaires last year, exacerbating inequality amid a weakening of workers rights and a corporate push to maximize shareholder returns, charity organization Oxfam International said in a new report.

The world now has 2,043 billionaires, after a new one emerged every two days in the past year, the nonprofit organization said in a report published Monday. The group of mostly men saw its wealth surge by $762 billion, which is enough money to end extreme poverty seven times over, according to Oxfam.

So if we completely divided all of the money billionaires have up we could put people only in regular poverty?
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If you donated the national defecit to the poor they'd all be able to afford yachts.
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it would be about $8,000 for every person in the US if we took all of every billionaires money and redistributed it
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No. As I keep having to say here: wealth is not cash. It is the sum value of your assets, and in most cases is based in property investments and intangibles that gain in value over time.

So even if you could come up with a feasible way to distribute that, all it means is a lot of poor people that now have partial (and by that I mean a minute fractional) ownership of a brand name, a patent, a piece of art, or a mansion and the land it's on. They still won't have money for groceries.
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A short term solution for a long term problem.

Most of the poor people would blow all the money away within weeks and everything go back to square one.

The intelligent hard-working people would start to build their wealth again, while the poor lazy people start complaining about a growing wealth gap. That's why wealth redistribution doesn't work.
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GreatEvilEmpire posted...

A short term solution for a long term problem.

Most of the poor people would blow all the money away within weeks and everything go back to square one.

The intelligent hard-working people would start to build their wealth again, while the poor lazy people start complaining about a growing wealth gap. That's why wealth redistribution doesn't work.

The intelligent, hard-working people may have been too crushed by having all of their money and property stolen to rebuild.
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No. It will get squandered like how lottery winners blow all their money.
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DragonGirlYuki posted...

No. It will get squandered like how lottery winners blow all their money.

I don't think that's a good comparison for a lot of reasons. the two main ones being that lotto players are self-selected and playing the lotto is something mostly stupid people do and in this case everyone would be getting a much smaller amount of money (meaning that relatives etc have less of a reason to come begging for money)
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GreatEvilEmpire posted...

Most of the poor people would blow all the money away within weeks and everything go back to square one.

But what if...that's not true?

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/25/240590433/what-happens-when-you-just-give-money-to-poor-people

The idea behind this is simple. Poor people know what they need, and if you give them money they can buy it.

But to some veterans of the charity world, giving cash is worrisome. When we first reported on this we spoke with Carol Bellamy, who used to run UNICEF, and who said people might spend the money on things like alcohol or gambling.

To see whether this was actually happening, researchers did an experiment. They surveyed people in Kenya who received money from GiveDirectly, and a similar group of people who didn't get money.

The results from the study are encouraging, says Johannes Haushofer, an economist at MIT's Poverty Action Lab who was one of the study's co-authors.

"We don't see people spending money on alcohol and tobacco," he says. "Instead we see them investing in their kids' education, we see them investing in health care. They buy more and better food."

People used the money to buy cows and start businesses. Their kids went hungry less often.
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Paul Niehaus, one of GiveDirectly's founders, does think cash can have long-lasting effects. He points to a similar study in Uganda where the government gave people money and people's incomes went up and stayed up, even years later. People had used the money to start small businesses, like metal working or tailoring clothes.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/welfare-reform-direct-cash-poor/407236/

A 2013 survey by Sarah Bailey for the Canadian Foodgrains Bankinvolving Zimbabwe, Ecuador, Malawi, and Yemen, among other countriesfound that cash transfers usually led to far greater increases in a food consumption score of dietary diversity and food frequency than did similarly priced food delivery. In Malawi, the food consumption score increased by 50 percent for cash recipients compared to 20 percent for food recipients. This despite the fact that households in the countries surveyed only report spending between 45 and 90 percent of the cash they receive on food, with the rest going to expenses like debt repayment, household items, and school fees.
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In India, a pilot program between 2011 and 2012 transferred cashroughly $4 to $6 for adults, and half that amount per childonce a month to every household in select villages in the state of Madhya Pradesh. According to evaluations in 2014 by Indias Self Employed Womens Association, households in recipient villages proved more likely than those in non-recipient villages to have modern toilets and to use public taps or hand pumps for water rather than wells. They also used cooking fuels that produced less indoor air pollution, which is linked with poor respiratory health. Along with money spent on food, all this helps explain why children in transfer villages were healthier. ... As in Kenya, the cash transfers were associated with people working longer hours and making more money thanks to investments in assets including livestock.
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The United States, for its part, tried an unconditional cash-transfer program 40 years ago and found it worked, too. The negative income tax provided cash to low-income recipients across five states in four different experiments between 1968 and 1980. As in the developing world, the payments were associated with reduced child malnutrition, improved school attendance, and growth in household assets. The transfers also had significant effects on childrens test scores.

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Antifar posted...

But what if...that's not true?

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/25/240590433/what-happens-when-you-just-give-money-to-poor-people

This is the United States, not Africa. It only works in a society when people appreciate money, not in a society that likes to spend. In a consumerist society, most people would use that money to buy what they've been eyeing for months or years. That LV or Chanel bag is now finally a reality. That nice pair of Yeezy's is now within reach. And for some people... that's just enough to pay off their credit card debt.

People bad at managing money will always be bad a managing money. They spend every penny they earn, they rack up credit card debt and they will blow that money away.
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GreatEvilEmpire posted...

This is the United States, not Africa

This is the United States

Antifar posted...

The United States, for its part, tried an unconditional cash-transfer program 40 years ago and found it worked, too. The negative income tax provided cash to low-income recipients across five states in four different experiments between 1968 and 1980. As in the developing world, the payments were associated with reduced child malnutrition, improved school attendance, and growth in household assets. The transfers also had significant effects on childrens test scores.

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Antifar posted...

GreatEvilEmpire posted...

This is the United States, not Africa

This is the United States

Antifar posted...

The United States, for its part, tried an unconditional cash-transfer program 40 years ago and found it worked, too. The negative income tax provided cash to low-income recipients across five states in four different experiments between 1968 and 1980. As in the developing world, the payments were associated with reduced child malnutrition, improved school attendance, and growth in household assets. The transfers also had significant effects on childrens test scores.

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/average-credit_card_debt-1276.php
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UT1999 posted...

.....i've heard this being said many times, that if all the money was taken from the richest in the u.s that it would be enough to totally eliminate poverty in the u.s. Do you believe this?

it would eliminate poverty temporarily. This is not a lasting fix nor is it a good idea to just suddenly take all that money.
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You're deflecting now; credit card debt is not a reflection on whether unconditional cash payments would go towards needs rather than your choice examples of handbags and shoes.

Here's another more recent U.S. example:

https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effects-of-a-basic-income-supplied-by-government/

Costello wanted to find out about the need for mental health and psychiatric services for children in rural America, and in 1993 the researchers began studying 1,420 children, 350 of whom were members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. They divided the group into three age cohorts9-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and 13-year-oldsand gave their parents thick, detailed personality surveys called the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Assessment, which were completed every year until the kids turned 16 and then again every few years until they turned 30. Looking for indicators of behavioral or emotional troubles, the researchers asked questions about whether the children ever engaged in physical fights and whether they had trouble being away from home.

Costello and her team also recorded household data like parents occupations, history of domestic violence, and, crucially, income. When the study began, about 67 percent of the American Indian kids were living below the poverty line. It wasnt until after the casino opened that Costello began to notice that household income among the Cherokee families was going up. It was subtle at first, but the trend turned sharply upward as time went on, eventually lifting 14 percent of the Cherokee children in the study above the poverty line. Household income for those families who were not Cherokee, meanwhile, grew at a slower rate.
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Before the casino opened, Costello found that poor children scored twice as high as those who were not poor for symptoms of psychiatric disorders. But after the casino opened, the children whose families income rose above the poverty rate showed a 40 percent decrease in behavioral problems. Just four years after the casino opened, they were, behaviorally at least, no different from the kids who had never been poor at all. By the time the youngest cohort of children was at least 21, she found something else: The younger the Cherokee children were when the casino opened, the better they fared compared to the older Cherokee children and to rural whites. This was true for emotional and behavioral problems as well as drug and alcohol addiction.

Other researchers have used Costellos data to look at different effects of the casino payments. One fear about basic income is that people will be content living on their subsidies and stop working. But a 2010 analysis of the data, led by Randall Akee, who researches public policy at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs, found no impact on overall labor participation.
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Akee also looked at the effects of the money on education and found that more money in the household meant children stayed in school longer. The impact on crime was just as profound: A $4,000 increase in household income reduced the poorest kids chances of committing a minor crime by 22 percent.

All of this amounted to substantial financial benefits for the community as a whole. This translates to fewer kids in jail, fewer kids in in-patient care, Costello says. Then there are the other costs you cant calculate. The cost of people not killing themselves? Thats a hard one.

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also, most poor people don't have credit card debt because they do not have credit cards

it isn't until $50k/year that you start to see the majority of people having at least one credit card -- for people making less than $30k, only like 25% have one
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$8000 would be what gets distributed if you take money from all the world's billionaires and divide it between everyone (even people above the poverty line) in the US.

This article from 2016 claims that all of the United State's billionaires' combined is 2.4 trillion (another article claimed that this list is missing some people, but this is the most complete list I could find and I didn't feel like spending any more time searching).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2016/03/01/the-full-list-of-every-american-billionaire-2016/#e7d333137acb

And according to this report, in 2016 there were 40.6 million people in poverty.

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2017/demo/p60-259.html

If you were to take the money from every US billionaire, you could give every US citizen below the poverty line $60,000.

Another fun fact: cencus.gov claims there are 20 different factors that come into play when determining whether or not someone should be considered poverty. See here:

https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty/guidance/poverty-measures.html
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Antifar posted...

You're deflecting now; credit card debt is not a reflection on whether unconditional cash payments would go towards needs rather than your choice examples of handbags and shoes.

Here's another more recent U.S. example:

I'm not deflecting. You need to understand the broad definition of 'poor'. If you give money people with no money, yes they would appreciate it learn to manage it well. If you give money to 'poor' people who are poor because of bad management or laziness, then they will always be poor despite getting $8000.

Maybe we need a specific definition of being 'poor', cause I can bet that most people on this board would claim to be poor.
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TheAnthraxBunny posted...

If you were to take the money from every US billionaire, you could give every US citizen below the poverty line $60,000.

And the people who has just has enough to be not consider below the poverty line are now the poorest people. And at the end of the day, no one will be happy.
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TheAnthraxBunny posted...

$8000 would be what gets distributed if you take money from all the world's billionaires and divide it between everyone (even people above the poverty line) in the US.

no, just US billionaires

like you said, 2.4 trillion divided by roughly 300 million

that's about 8k

you're right that that is the whole US and not just poor people though
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GreatEvilEmpire posted...

TheAnthraxBunny posted...

If you were to take the money from every US billionaire, you could give every US citizen below the poverty line $60,000.

And the people who has just has enough to be not consider below the poverty line are now the poorest people. And at the end of the day, no one will be happy.

Oh, I know. I just wanted to look into it for fun.
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