this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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One of the best conceptualizations of how much money the richest people have is to imagine stacking US dollars, but horizontally instead of vertically. Imagine there was a game where you could walk next to this stack and, when you stopped walking, you'd win all the money you walked past.
In just a few seconds you'd have earned over $10,000, a large sum for most people, but nobody would stop walking then. After just a minute you'd have $1,000,000, a life changing amount of money! What if you kept walking? What if you wanted to be in the top 100 richest in the world?
You'd die from exhaustion well before getting anywhere near the wealth of the top 100. It took only 1 minute to get a life changing amount of money, but it would take more than 4 days of continuous walking to make the $19,500,000,000 needed to crack the top 100.
I got this from this Tom Scott video where he drives for an hour on the highway in order to pass $1 billion.
No need to rely on imagination. Here’s Wealth, Shown to scale.
A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is 31.5 years.
But also, billionaires don’t have billions of dollars sitting in the bank. While I don’t think any individual should be that wealthy, it’s important to understand what wealth actually means. My own wealth is much more than just the money I can scrape together for next week.
No, but some have billions of dollars in the stock market which they can use as a 'bank' anytime they want to buy something. Conveniently for them, all of that stock is unable to be taxed until it's cashed out. Though, why would they ever cash out when they have the free money glitch using it as collateral? If they had it in the bank, then at least the interest could be taxed, I guess.
Most of my wealth is on the stock market as well but I've already paid income tax on the money I've invested and when I decide to cash it all out I need to pay income tax on the profit too. I don't see why someone should be taxed for having invested on the stock market.
Unless you are a billionaire, or close to one, you aren't doing what I was referring to.
Billionaires commonly use their stock as collateral to get low interest loans. Then they use these loans to buy investments with better returns than the low interests loans that they took out. They leverage this additional capital from the investment to take out an another lower interest loan to pay off the original loan.
They get to rinse and repeat this, unless the economy takes a huge nosedive. In that case, the amount of loans they have exceed the gains they are making and they actually have to liquidate assets and actually have to pay a lot of tax. The thing is, this doesn't really happen often.
Unless they get real unlucky, most of them eventually die and pass down these investments to an heir before the economy ever nosedives. The heir can cash out without paying capital gains tax, because they get a fresh starting point at whatever the accumulated wealth was.
Basically, the capitalist class gets to avoid ever paying capital gains tax, and that sucks. This is just one of the ways they avoid paying anything back to the working class, there are plenty of others. They also use lots of legal loopholes to avoid estate tax, but that is another topic.
In the bank, yes the interest is taxed. Investments attract tax on dividends, since it's impractical to tax unrealised capital gains
Okay, I hear you, but I can totally keep up 4 days of walking. Just wanted to say.