I think the difference between what we are saying is that I would give the owner of the money the ability to decide where that money should be given rather than the government.
This is all well and good, and ideally, I'd love for it to be this way. History demonstrates though that these ultra-wealthy don't really do much for society with all that money. They sit on it, and then will it to their kids, who then sit on it and let it grow, and bang, you have a permanent landed gentry and now a ruling class, which is profoundly unAmerican. I'd rather have hospitals, roads, schools, no hunger, less homelessness, etc. I'd love to see billionaires taking care of these problems on their own, but instead they're buying yachts and going to Diddy's Freak Offs.
So, Donald Trump is a billionaire and the next President. You will have to agree that he has some sort of ability to get to where he was at. Is he a good person? Not hardly and I do not think he is a great role model.
Yes, that "ability" was having a rich dad. Everything else follows from that.
Just saying that a ultra rich stays rich through the government. Imposing more taxes would not change it.
Why not? What if we imposed a tax of 100% on anything over $200M at death? So if you have 1B, and you die, 800M goes to a pool of revenue for stuff like roads, bridge repair, energy initiatives, whatever. Sure, you'd have to find the leaks in this idea before you could implement it (like legislating against offshoring X% of your personal wealth in the Caymans, for example), but why wouldn't that change the way people at that level spend their money? I know, it sounds unsavory on the surface, and I know, conservatives will generally rail that "The government can do it to anyone then!" to which I say yes, they can, provided "anyone" has 250M in their bank account when they die. No one is saying YOUR business, my independent ironworker friend, will be "confiscated" or whatever other trigger words they'd use. I'm saying if your business is good enough to make you $250M, when you die, $200M goes wherever you willed it (though I have thoughts on this as well, different topic), and your community gets $50M to address issues within the community. Don't like that idea? Well, then I'd say when you are getting old, you decide "I'd like to fund a hospital wing and name it David Azz Children's Hospital with my $50m, so let me get on that before I'm dead." Or "I wonder how much of this extra $50M could be used to alleviate medical debt in my local community?" It should be a problem you HOPE you have.
Again, it's not a fully formed plan, it's just a framework, but I have yet to hear a moral argument against it that makes any sense. Most arguments are "WELL THOSE KIDS DIDN'T WELD ANY IRON! It's MY MONEY! DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO WITH IT!" That's a tantrum, and while it may be true, it's not a moral argument. Don't listen to the ultra wealthy when they say it's too difficult, nothing will change, that's how they lull you into inaction.
What do you mean by this statement? Are you saying we past the point of no return?
Once we decided corporations were people and allowed mega dollars into elections, we tempted fate, and now it's here. The billionaires are going to write laws that only help them, because that's how they became billionaires, it's all they know. It's a much taller hill to climb now, but I don't think America became America by a bunch of people at the bottom of a mountain thinking "That looks really hard to do, so I'm not gonna do it."
Important note here: make sure you really understand the difference between 1M and 1B. It's an evolutionary blind spot for us as people (there's no advantage to understanding this so we never do). I learned this through visualization or scale techniques, the one that really hit home for me was 1M seconds is about 11 days. 1B seconds is 32 YEARS. To scale it to our $200M number if dollars were seconds, that's about six years. $200B is not sixty years. It's SIX THOUSAND years. If they're inches, then $200M goes from Boston into the Pacific Ocean by about 300 miles. $200B converted this way goes from the earth to the moon.
THIRTEEN TIMES.
