Quite the opposite, that wealth would be available for society to put it to use in productive application.

Building high speed rail, hospitals and schools. Paying teachers more, universal healthcare, better roads and airports and less free pipes.

Those are all fantastic things that benefit everyone while also creating jobs and spreading the wealth around.

Even Bill Gates has said his taxes should be higher [1]

https://www.investopedia.com/news/bill-gates-says-he-should-...

Your assume that it is currently productive, and afterwards it will become unproductive. That may be true, or may not be.

Higher progressive tax rates.

Closing up loopholes on realizing wealth like by taking loans continuously using your unsold stocks as collateral.

We don't even have to immediately jump to more extreme ideas like a straight wealth tax. We could try doing _anything_ instead of just shrugging our shoulders as we watch people like Musk and other oligarchs take us down the path Russia went in the 90s.

The vast majority of that 1 trillion is being applied to productive means.

The wealth is generally applied to productive means, it isn't being hoarded or consumed.

> Or you can spend it on elections.

Many people spend a portion of their wealth in elections. Even middle class voters.

Productive means! is that what you want them to do or $100M wedding to show off their wealth? Or may be productivity is a giant boat to party on? Or $Trillions invested in gold?

The zillionaires buy thinktanks to push their agenda by claiming this nonsense. Infinite wealth = erosion of democracy when few people try to change the world to their liking.

If you merely want to afford a good life, you don’t need excess wealth.

If you want to ensure you have maximum power and control over others, there is likely no limit to the wealth you will be satisfied with.

Imagine for instance if you were a massive deca-billionaire, you could just pick a random person off the street and make them a multi-millionaire with the same ease that someone fills up their gas tank. In a society where money runs through everything, this is a god like power.

> It is a purposeful safeguard against autocracy and more pedestrian corruption

I get how inefficiency is a safeguard against autocracy. But how is it a safeguard against pedestrian corruption? Seems like inefficiency is a perfect cover to spin up a 501(c)3, bid on some social contracts and underdeliver. In our city, an audit was performed and homeless services contracts underdelivered by at least 60%. There's good evidence that medicare fraud nationwide is rampant.

How do you combat a culture where people can scam the government under the cover of inefficiency?

We have a class of people voting to get anything that reduces the taxes on their ultra wealth and then a class voting to get anything that keeps the free money from the government flowing. Not a surprise it's not working out.

The vast majority of tax take by the us government is tax on income (person invoke tax and payroll tax), not wealth, thus the wealthy can’t be paying the vast majority of tax

There is a fundamental issue when 50% of consumer spending is being done by 10% of the population.

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/09/17/top-10-of-earne...

This is the root cause as to why fast food and other companies do not care to keep raising prices, and why fundamentally, even things that "rich people" can enjoy are getting worse, be it media or video games or anything else.

A destruction of the middle class results in a worse society for all, not just the people that earn less, that's not a hard concept to grasp but whatever... I don't think many people will want to change their ways until it is too late.

The wealthy pay more than their share of taxes, if you define "their share" as a percentage of income, but they do not pay the majority of taxes, let alone the vast majority.

The top 1% (which includes a lot of people we'd consider to be merely quite well off rather than wealthy) paid 23.9% of all taxes and 25.5% of federal taxes in 2024. That's while making 20.1% of all income, so it's not a massively unfair burden on them.

https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/

Even if you only look at federal income tax, which is more progressive than other American taxes and thus exaggerates how much the wealthy pay, the top 1% pays 40.4% of the taxes.

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

Healthcare.gov was widely discussed in the tech community at the time. People were constantly incredulous at how bad it was and how much it cost. Maybe you forgot, or weren't there, or expect people to still be talking about it over a decade later.

In any case, that's not where the money goes. That kind of waste is almost incomprehensibly large to an individual, but it's insignificant in the federal budget. Social Security was $1.6 trillion last year. Medicare was another trillion, Medicaid was two thirds of a trillion. Nearly all of that spending is paid out to recipients/providers. Overhead is low single-digit percentages of the total. Defense is another trillion. Interest on the debt is another trillion. You could wave a magic wand and make every single project similar to Healthcare.gov free and it wouldn't make a noticeable difference in federal spending.

During what people like you would generally refer to as the "golden age of the US" during the 50s -> 80s, the progressive tax on the wealthiest was around 91%. And they still managed to be insanely wealthy, and the country had lots of burgeoning social programs that benefitted from it.

Why exactly do you feel the need to defend the right to hoard money? What does that extra money do? Buy you a yacht? Buy you a media empire to control propaganda? Buy you a private island for your wealthy friends to "party" on? A measuring stick to satisfy your own incomplete metric of self worth?

What exactly do you need all that money for?

The CEO of XYZ corp might pay more than a worker on food stamps. But they benefit massively by the food stamp program allowing them to pay workers unlivable wages and allowing them to keep margins higher. On net they are benefitting more as an individual than they are paying into the system.

America has some of the lowest tax rates for the ultra wealthy. And since I can tell you're in the "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" mindset. The delta between you and "them" is not even close. Even with a tech job even with options and bonuses. 50 million dollars a year is a nearly absurd amount of money.

I support Elizabeth Warren's "2 cent" tax on income above 50 million dollars.

> if we don't have a better way to spend it.

I agree that DOGE was disastrous and ended up costing us money. A pound foolish and a penny wise is not the way to run the government.

"The wealthy pay the vast majority of taxes in the US by almost every metric."

In a progressive tax system that's the way it is supposed to work. People pay what they can afford to is kind of the point.

Anything less than a progressive tax system means the poor pay more and the rich pay less. Is that what we're advocating for?

I think you're missing the mark by putting the blame on morals while ignoring actions such as Reagan dismantling unions and removing accountability from news reporting (IIRC, there used to be a law that news networks have to present a balanced view on any topic). Super PACs were not possible until 2010.

You cannot morally impose the wealthy to support the rest. It has to come through legislation and organization of labor.

How do you obtain a phone number or a mail address? Almost impossible. And most paper mail gets read by someone's assistant and never passed through.

The people who hoard ALL the opportunities are incapable of allocating them efficiently due to complete saturation of their bandwidth. Literally, if you are someone who are in a position to provide opportunities, you are saturated and unreachable.

These people turn down more life-changing opportunities in an hour than I get in a lifetime. And when I say 'turn down', I mean 'ignore'; because these people don't even have the time to say 'No' to an opportunity I would kill for! They don't even have the time to click on the email or perhaps even read the subject line!

the thing is the trends to inequality have been happening for much, much longer than that. This shit that is happening in this administration is a blip, some of them (Iran, Tariffs) will probably regress. Imo, it's not even clear that Tariffs are bad; it's entirely possible that people will simply buy less cheap 差不多 shit from china that goes straight to landfills because it doesn't work or doesn't last. Domestication of manufacture could create income-inequality-lowering opportunities in the low end of income bands, and also cause people to, let's say, spend 2x more on a product that lasts 5x as long. That would be a net INCREASE in wealth, which is not captured by any of the retarded metrics that economists and policymakers obsess over.

3 million out of 300,000,000, sounds like one percent.