wonderingwanderer

Even worse than that, with just $100 million in a risk-free CD making 3% APY, one receives $3 million per year from interest alone.

Nevermind how to spend a billion dollars in one lifetime, how do you spend three million dollars in one year?

Any wealth above $100 million should be taxed at the end of each fiscal year. Nobody could reasonably need more than that. Of course, it would be complicated by carving out exceptions for real assets. Anyone with that much money would just buy a new yacht every September to avoid it, but that should still be taxed as capital gains.

it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions.

Most conservative americans seem to believe “freedom” includes permitting the wealthy to rig the game in their own favor. They don’t seem to consider the ways in which that infringes on everyone else’s freedom.

That’s why “anarcho-captialism” and even “libertarian-capitalism” are both farces. There’s no room for liberty under plutocracy. Only the financial oligarchs have any degree of freedom in those systems, which is no better or different than an aristocracy, just without the overt nepotism (the nepotism becomes covert instead, by mislabelling generational wealth as a “meritocracy”).

Meanwhile had that billion dollars been distributed to the worker class through fair wages or even to the consumers through fair prices it would have contributed to the economy and the well-being of everyone.

I agree, but too many people only measure the success of an economy by top-down metrics such as GDP, gross revenue, stock market growth, etc. They ignore factors such as cost of living, wage stagnation, median income, RIFs, and the job market in general, social mobility, cost of healthcare and education, etc., leading to such buffoonery as claiming “unemployment is good for the economy” and “deflation is bad for the economy.”

And then they come back with stupid arguments like “econ 101, bro.” Classical economic theories are a soft science at best, arguably even a pseudoscience, and yet finance bros treat it like it’s a hard science. They cite them like scripture, or like laws of physics, but they’re not nearly so immutable or infallible. Especially when they focus solely on supply-side and neoliberal economics, which were clearly developed with an agenda.

Even Adam Smith gets quoted out of context, while ignoring the fact that he was opposed to many of the ideas his work is often used to rationalize.

If only the POTUS would wait to hear from his intelligence officials before making public comments based on the word of an evil, lying, psychopathic dictator…