Not promoting violence in any way. Just kind of a thought exercise.
What happens to their money when we kill them? We would need to seize the money and fairly distribute it
None, because their corporations exist as separate legal entities that own their own assets, and their personal wealth would go to their next of kin.
The way to get the wealth out of the hands of the wealthy is to tax them, or to remove the legal system that would keep their wealth in their family when they die.
He said he wasn’t promoting violence. Let’s infer that “kill” should be considered metaphorical, and asset forfeiture is more to OP’s point. Civil or criminal forfeiture means - hippity hoppity, it’s all now state property.
The government could operate them as arms length state agencies, or break the monopolies and sell fragmented assets back into public hands. The latter is more likely. The 1% can either be jailed or returned to commoner life without their assets.
The assets themselves would lose some of their nominal value because they are currently configured for maximum wealth. Anti-trust breakups would devalue the assets moderately because the configuration would be suboptimal for profit, and presumably re-optimized for public good.
As to debt and taxes, the asset seizure and sale would only put a small dent in it. The profound change would be the lack of lobbyists and campaign funding to bend and torture tax codes to serve the 1%. A fair system would be amazing and enduring here.
He said he wasn’t promoting violence. Let’s infer that “kill” should be considered metaphorical
I choose to interpret it as “if the vast majority of the 0.1% died mysteriously over the course of a week or two”.
Perhaps from a heart attack from the shock of state forfeiture and the promise of an ordinary life, at best. Perhaps by their own hand from the prospect.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Well… some would go directly to next of kin, some would be claimed by banks to repay the loans they live on, and most would end up in the private “charitable” foundations they use to evade taxes (which are themselves usually operated by some blend of next of kin and their ideological proteges). There’s a complex web of ways they avoid that money falling into public hands, but the general answer “None” is correct.
I think in this scenario we’re gutting these corporations and changing our laws to make sure this level of corruption and monopolization never happens again
To be clear, the billionaires are not the 1%.
There are only ~900 billionaires in the US. That’s the top 0.000003%Your well paid doctors, lawers, engineers, etc. are in the 1% and still firmly part of the consumer class.
This.
Earning a million dollars a year or a hundred thousand is the difference between 45 million in a career, or 4.5. Either way, it takes 22 lifetimes earning an average of one million per year to become a billionaire, or 220 when earning one hundred thousand.
And there are people who are multi-billionaires, even centi-billionaires.
To look at a doctor or lawyer and be upset because they have $50 million in assets is not wrong, but billionaires are a thousand times worse. focus your rage.
I had a saved post from Reddit once about someone who broke down the differences between incomes based on their experience with connections they had in their work, and somewhere in the high hundreds of millions wealth becomes not about money, but about power and influence. Things like bills and budgets aren’t a thing. Whereas the multimillionaire may have their houses, cars, boats, whatever, but they’re still having to make sure they can afford the lifestyle. And some don’t, and are probably in debt but don’t show it.
Good news! You get all of it!
Bad news. Now you can’t exist.
It wouldn’t. The wealth the billionaires have is imaginary, not a checking account with lots of zeros. It’s in assets that people speculate is worth a specific amount.
That’s why it’s always estimated net worth. To get the wealth from their assets you’d have to find enough people to buy them.
“Imaginary” is one way to put it.
I like to think of it as a number reflecting how much of our labour they have reserved for themselves. When that wealth “disappears”, it basically means that we get that labour back for ourselves. So in a way, it actually gets split evenly amongst all of us.
You might see it that way, but it’s not the way it works. A company’s valuation isn’t directly tied to labor output, and the wealth doesn’t just disappear. It’s not something that can be redistributed without nationalizing a publicly traded company (there are pros and cons to this).
i think this is a poor understanding of how it works in practice, but in theory this is nearly correct
It’s not a poor understanding, just simplified.
The major problem is that banks will give them loans using speculative assets as collateral. Easy fix is to both tax the collateral as a realized gain, and the loan as income.
But their wealth is mostly in non-liquid assets, not a bank account.
None. The money billionaires have (there are no good ones) would be spread to their descendants according to their wills not governments
We can and should change that
1 thousand seconds is 16 minutes, 40 seconds. 1 million seconds is 11.5 days. 1 billion seconds is 31.7 years. 1 trillion seconds is 31,700 years.
Musk is projected to be the first trillionaire sometime this year. That’s the separation. And more than half of the 1% in the US are “just” six figure jobs, not millionaires, if you are talking income and not total assets.
0.1% doesn’t flow off the tongue as well though.
Some back of the napkin math says about $50 trillion dollars in value for the top 1% in the US. That would pay off the whole US Debt of $40 Trillion, with about $10 trillion left over.
However, there’s a caveat here. Given that’s about 3.5 million people (1% of the US population) that only works out to about $14 million dollars each.
While that’s a lot of money, it’s not really an egregious amount of money. If you limited the 1% to keeping say $10,000,000 each (get rid of the obscenely rich) you would only have about $15 trillion dollars, which doesn’t even pay off half the debt.
Edit: Ignore this, I misread your question. I think you’re asking if we seized ALL the wealth from the 1%, not just their share of national debt.
U.S. federal debt is essentially all in the form of Treasury securities (a.k.a. “Treasuries”). So I think you’re asking how much debt the U.S. could eliminate by basically seizing all the Treasuries from its wealthiest investors and destroying them. I can’t find any data on much debt is owned solely by billionaires, however there are several web sites that give detailed breakdowns on Treasury ownership, like https://www.us-debt-clock.com/blog/who-owns-us-debt-breakdown. That site reports that individual investors own $6.7 trillion (18.6%) of U.S. debt. Although we don’t know how much of that is owned by billionaires, it does provide an upper-bound on how much they possibly could own. If we assume billionaires hold about half of that $6.7 trillion, then they account for about 9% of the total national debt. The U.S. spends about $900 billion annually on interest on it’s debt right now, so eliminating 9% of that would come out to about an $80 billion savings, which is a little over 1% of the annual federal budget of $7 trillion in 2025. If that was redistributed equally to all of the ~150 million U.S. taxpayers, then everyone would get about $500.
This is all based on a lot of guesswork and rough estimates, so take it with a grain of salt.
YES
