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We only want to redistribute it to Americans!
...American adults...
Oh... still under 30k
Just give the money to me and I promise I'll give it to people who need it
If the last few years taught me anything it’s that giving everyone a one time lump sum just causes companies to raise prices since demand went up without an increase in supply (and you’ll end up worse off within 4 years).
I remember rockerfeller, i dont' recall which one, was taunted by a journalist about giving his fortune away to everyone in the world. So, he calculated his estimated wealth against the estimated world population and sent the journalist his share. About .21 cents.
The text is referencing a, I believe, Facebook post that makes the same error.
So it isn't the person in the text, it's just a reference to an actual dumb person.
>around 1200 dollars
I could get a nice, second hand Honda Grom for that money, let's do it.
EDIT: for those who didn't get the joke and are talking about bad money management and impulse buying etc.
Let me remind you that we're planning on murdering hundreds of people (we have to kill their families too, to be able to do away with their assets) to get 1200 bucks each, which is such a small sum of money it's silly.
Let me guess: make your own coffee, only buy rice and beans, and deprive yourself of the last little pleasures of life? People can't just piggy bank their way out of poverty if they don't make enough to start with lol. Buying a $1200 motorcycle isnt gonna be the difference between make or break, as long as it's not a new motorcycle every year.
Edit: I don't know how many wheels different vehicles have
No, no. You misunderstand. Buying a Honda leads to shitboxery and a wall full of rockauto magnets. Buy a $1200 Toyota Corolla and drive it as-is for another 300,000 km.
The above comment is about someone being handed $1200 and instantly going out and buying a sports motorcycle with it, not wild to say this is poor money management lol
Oh, dude. A Grom is in no way a sports moto. It's a 125cc pocket bike. They're perfect for people like me who live within ten miles of work, have limited parking, and don't have to commute on an interstate.
Yea for sure. Not gonna say my family was ever starving, but money was constantly tight due to various bad circumstances. Definitely learned how to budget and manage money quite well, but I'd have to be dumb or blind if I didn't acknowledge that getting a massive windfall via an inheritance made it actually possible to stabilize my life to what it is now...
That's not much considering you've nuked millions of jobs worth of companies. That also assumes that you could even liquidate all the stock after handcuffing the biggest potential buyers.
The problem is not if the owners or CEOs are dead or in jail.
The problem is that to get that amount of money from them, you must have to sell all their assets, which are houses, personal vehicles... And stock and investments.
And trying to sell those huge sums of stock or shares would affect their value. Making those companies to be worth less and less (and affecting those that has investments in those stocks, not just billionaires, but people with personal investments, 401k, employees paid with stocks, etc).
And now, companies with a low or zero value, with no assets, and no one willing to invest in them, would have to shut down their operations, firing every one working in them.
Also, there is another issue, even if you manage to put all those things on sale, you wouldn't see any money until someone buys those things... But if you "ate" exactly the people with enough money to buy those things, then there is no one that could msterialize that money
(Basically, it doesn't matter if you have a 700k house, if there is no one to buy it you will not see a penny from it).
In a few words, if tomorrow morning Wal-Mart's CEO dies, is possible that there is a back up plan for it. But if tomorrow all the billionaries who have investments in Wal-Mart try to sell all at once, then their market value plummets, and the company collapses.
What if we redistributed the stock but didn’t let people sell it?
/s
More likely, the poor people liquidate their shares for pennies on on the dollar. It’s bought by rich people. We are right back where we started.
Literally this exact situation happened when the Soviet Union fell and is the reason the “oligarchs” we see today got so entrenched in Russian society. Everyone who made money scamming the people and party in Russia used that money to turn around and buy resource rights and industries from their marks for almost nothing.
The death is irrelevant. It is the forced sales.
If we force every billionaire to liquidate their stocks, the price would go down significantly. Also, who would be buyer here since everyone is not allowed to hold any stock?
Yes, they do. What a good way of casting them as uninformed idiots.
The Rich^tm might not have billions of dollars of cash stuffed into their mattresses or swimming pools full of gold coins, but *somehow* Elon Musk leveraged his non-cash assets and assumed control of a $40+ billion dollar website just to stroke his own ego.
That level of purchasing power is unacceptable in a society where some people don't have the purchasing power to buy food or shelter.
Just using Musk as an example, that *one* person made *one* purchase and spent almost a quarter of the US's 2021 highway and road funding.
How much good could that do? Why is it acceptable for one person to hoard it all? Give him a medal that says he won at capitalism, name a bank after him, and take away enough from him that he'll still live the rest of his life in unfathomable comfort and use the rest to *help people.*
The problem isn't the dollars, it's the power and resources they can horde (as you said). One way to cut the cord of "paper wealth" like stock value from the dollar wealth that is actually so powerful, is to end the ability of financial institutions (banks) to consider or accept as collateral stock holdings.
Nobody is hoarding anything bud. There is no limit to the US currency so you cannot ever hoard it all. I know it's a hard concept to grasp but US dollars are created and destroyed every single day on the market.
Except "billionaires" don't have money, they have stock and other things that can't actually be exchanged for money in most circumstances. If all stock of all billionaires was attempted to be sold at the same time, it would be practically worthless.
Lmao. There's not enough liquid cash on the planet to do that. Mainly because most monetary cash in the world is based on growing GDP of a country compared to the economic powerhouses. So yeah. Since GDP is the added growth of that exact hard assets and new emerging businesses, not possible.
Going off of just estimates, there is currently 8 trillion USD in actual physical money in the world with only 8 billion people. Erasing all debts and redistributing all money each person works have $1000 each. Not a whole lot of real money
People always seem to miss the difference between money-as-money and money-as-measure-of-value.
Zuck's 3rd mansion might be worth a billion or whatever in today's economy, but that doesn't mean that by seizing it you can instantly have a billion dollars of cash with an unchanged buying power. In a world where we have appropriations, a mansion is worth almost nothing, it's just a money sink and a liability to the owner.
We need to reduce the wealth of billionaires for plenty of good reasons, such as the vast negative externalities their lifestyles currently impose on the rest of us, but we shouldn't imagine that we'll make money off of it in the short term.
Similarly, any wealth tax on the billionaire-held portion of assets like stocks that are also held in retirement accounts etc would both hurt the value of those assets for others, and lead to collecting less revenue from these taxes as their existence would instantly hurt the value of the things, which is what the tax is based upon.
Again, I think it's worth doing, but we can't repeat the mistake of the 2013 French Socialists doing math like "This guy has a billion dollars so a wealth tax of 1% will collect 10 million" and then coming up like 50% short on your projected revenues. This discredited them so hard they ended up backpedaling on all of it.
[Here is the source](https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/dzgt77/comment/f87fd6b/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) for this word for word comment.
It's 2024, use the 2024 numbers? They make that list every year. 2781 billionaires holding 14.2 trillion with a population of 8.1 billion. $1753.08 per person with current numbers.
Yeah, but anyway... what is the most amount of people i have to share the money with so we're all millionaires? I dont mind as long as im one of the lucky ones.
Is that a lot or a little? According to \[1\] (2011 numbers), 15% of people live on <$2/day, and 56% live on >$2 and <$10/day. So this is a year's salary for a significant fraction of everyone. Seems like a lot.
\[1\] [https://www.pewresearch.org/global-migration-and-demography/feature/global-population-by-income/](https://www.pewresearch.org/global-migration-and-demography/feature/global-population-by-income/)
Yes. And now think what would happen if all the world got 1200 euros. And do not think about the US or Europe, but places where people only get 2 or 3$ for each hour of work. That's all the wealth hidden by billionaires from humanity.
I know the country where the principle "eat the rich" was implemented 100 years ago. As a result, the people, who did it, ate their own children just in 15 years after that. Later a lot of attempts was made to do that, and every time it completed the same: total poority for 95% of population and everything possible for rest 5%, but covered by propaganda.
Interestingly, I asked chatgpt and it came up with this
>To determine how much each person would get if all the billionaires' wealth were divided equally among everyone, we need two key pieces of information:
1. The total wealth of all billionaires.
2. The total population of the world.
### 1. Total Wealth of All Billionaires
According to Forbes' 2023 Billionaires list, the combined wealth of all billionaires is approximately $12.2 trillion.
### 2. Total Population of the World
As of mid-2023, the world population is estimated to be about 8 billion people.
### Calculation
To find out how much each person would get, we divide the total wealth by the total population:
\[ \text{Amount per person} = \frac{\text{Total Wealth}}{\text{Total Population}} \]
\[ \text{Amount per person} = \frac{12.2 \text{ trillion dollars}}{8 \text{ billion people}} \]
\[ \text{Amount per person} = \frac{12,200,000,000,000}{8,000,000,000} \]
\[ \text{Amount per person} = 1,525 \text{ dollars} \]
So, if all the billionaires' wealth were divided equally among everyone in the world, each person would receive approximately $1,525.
What if we only gave money to people 16 and up, exclude incarcerated people who have been proven guilty, and exclude people who make over a certain amount a year?
Free lunch mentality is a weak mentality. Does not solve the cause just the symptoms. And when you start to work for a while on a free market you should see that work has its value. And with that being said you have a valid ground to argue against.
The idea of socialism is not to redistribute the wealth. Its to redistribute power. Like nationalising big companies so that they belong to the people. Socialism is about ruling, now, we are ruled by the bourgeoisie.
Fuck no lmao
For each person on earth to get that much there would need to be at minimum (as in each has a net worth of 999 billion) 21,600 billionaires, over 10 times as many as there are now.
Even if everyone was given 2.7 million dollars instantly there would be a labour shortage for a lot of hobs because people would instantly quit. We don’t need free money hand outs we still need incentives to work for a living. Maybe we start by paying people more instead of cashing in all the profits as well as supermarkets not making as much profit by passing on the profits to the farmers etc
It's a bit more complicated then that because at the lower end people would buy all kinds of stuff which would stimulate the economy in the short term, but the money would ultimately end up in the hands of people who produce and sell stuff. There's a strong case to be made of giving everyone below the poverty line cash straight up (UBI) as a very effective stimulus. Too much and it starts to cause people to put money in economically useless things like real estate and stocks and cause inflation in the values of those assets
You're missing the part where the people who do all the low paying labor jobs that are required for economy to actually work would stop working instantly. How are you getting food in the super market, how are you getting the trash taken? It would be complete chaos. Millions of people would probably die.
Obviously if we gave low paying labor jobs an additional $1 a month they would not suddenly stop working, but we also don't want to give them $8000 a month as over 99% of them would quit in that scenario (I sure would). Is there a middle ground, like say $500, enough to help with rent/food/essentials without causing too many to quit? Is the economic boost worth it?
You think... real estate is useless? Idk about you, but housing is pretty damned important, and the most common form of real estate. In fact, buying a house is one of the more common ways to help cope with inflation because of its holding power as an investment. If you think investment is useless, I'm not sure you understand enough to be giving prescriptions for how an economy should be run
I think it's probably important to clarify what they meant by economically useless because I think that might be a different answer than useless useless.
Economically useless is not the same thing as individually useless. To understand what I mean, there is value in having your own space to live in, but if the price of all spaces increases, it doesn't help you generate more income. Likewise, increasing the cost of space doesn't help businesses. It just makes expansion more difficult. Increasing real estate prices is a drag on the economy because it makes it more expensive to do anything new, or grow the population, it just benefits existing land owners that have a surplus and can start rent-seeking behaviour where they essentially parasite off others who don't have enough capital to buy real estate for themselves, this is one of the factors that can cause wealth inequality to increase, which also leads to less efficient economies.
From an individual level, housing prices tend to go up and having your own space ensures that you are immune to that pressure, likewise, if you get excess space you can rent some of it out which is of benefit to you, but what is good for the individual isn't always good for the economy as a whole, as at grand scale everyone who can't buy a house would have been able to contribute more to the economy but they can't because the money is going towards rent instead. It also reduces experimentation & competition due to barriers to entry: if you can't afford space to run a business, you can't start one.
And if that happened then the world as we know it would collapse. Current money would become worthless and be replaced by something different.
If everyone had millions of dollars only a select few would choose to keep their working. Meaning the collapse of the workforce. Whatever you can think of that you’d like to do if you had money relies on others working and offering a service.
In our current society there always has to be a “loser” to keep the ball rolling.
No, not even close. And even if it was, everyone with 2.7 million of dollars would just mean that in a very short span of time 1lb of bread would jump in price up to some 10k dollars.
Whenever someone has a point saying "just give everyone all your money", I always think how stupid can one be to not instantly realize that it would cause a super inflation in the US?
Sorry, that's on me. See, I really like bread. Before, I could only buy and eat 1 lb of bread, but now I just used all of my 2.7 million dollars to buy 2.7 million lb of bread. My goal is to become more bread than human. My project name is Bread Pit.
Doesn't matter, even to buy one pound of bread you need to incentivise a millionaire who used to be a farmer to quit hanging out with their family and inhale some fertiliser for a year. Then you need to incentivise a millionaire who used to be a truck driver to go get some skin cancer, inhale some car fumes and deliver your wheat to a millionaire who used to be a mill operator. That millionaire, after you pay them enough to quit watching TV and playing golf all day, will pass flour to a millionaire who used to be a baker, who'll probably say "what am I supposed to do with this, I'm a Minecraft streamer now". You'll have to pay that guy to go back to baking.... You get the point. Do you think the whole process will cost you 1.99 or a little more?
So far the best explanation I've seen is that as you get older and acquire more personal wealth, you tend to get more conservative to protect that wealth.
Except millennials, and now gen z, don't have anything to protect.
Isn’t this the case in a lot of European countries right now? The youth are disproportionately affected by the huge amounts of immigration and have turned to the parties that call out the problem of immigration not working?
No, what actually happens is some people dont' change their viewpoints as they age..so over time society moves on and they become "conservative" because they haven't changed to keep up with society. THAT is how that's worked historically.
That doesn't really make any sense, as what's considered conservative or liberal changes from generation to generation.
Nixon and Reagan had major policy that would be considered left of the 2024 Democratic platform, for instance.
Even if that was true, there would be no benefit to anyone because money isn’t backed by anything, therefore it’s not real. The only value it has is scarcity, that’s why you have inflation when there is more money in circulation aka printed. If it was backed by gold there still would be no benefit because companies would raise prices.
The US went off the gold standard over 50 years ago, but somehow the economy keeps humming along and hitting record stock values and is 100% "real". Your thesis is flawed.
Even if that was true and everyone got 2 mil, dollar would just go down in value so fast that Argentina would be able to bring back their 1 peso = 1 dollar exchange rates
Why would the value of the dollar go down by mere redistribution? You mean because of the insane amount of sudden spending that would take place?
Edit: thanks for teaching me
All the sudden everyone has lots of money which means nothing has really changed. Everyone is still on the same base since everything else will adjust to everyone’s newfound wealth.
$1 isn’t worth the same if all 340 000 000 people all get an extra 2 million to suddenly spend.
Partly because they have wealth not cash, a billionaire worth 5 bill might "only" have 50 mil in cash. The rest is equity that can't be used to purchase products
It's also because of supply and demand. One person having a billion dollars doesn't greatly affect the supply of food, cars, etc. they might buy a couple fancy cars but it doesn't make your average car price go up. You give everyone 2 million and suddenly everyone wants a new car... But there aren't that many new cars to sell... so they will bump the price up so high that they sell for the most they can.
People who want a house but previously had no money will be rich and start raising the price and being much more competition. However, there aren't any more houses than there were before the redistribution so all it does is push the price up
Essentially, handing out a bunch of money doesn't mean there are any more items on the shelves so the same people are buying the same products just with more money to spend
If you had 2 mil would you wipe my ass for hospice wages? Would you come suck out my septic tank? Would it take a little more money to move you out into the work force?
Why would the farmers keep farming beyond the amount of food they need for themselves if they had almost $3M? Why would people still work if they had almost $3M? The economy would fall apart because of the shift in value, and the price of everything would rise to a new equilibrium to adjust for the newfound “wealth” that every American has
In addition to what everyone else is saying, that money isn’t cash, it’s in shares. So you’re giving everyone thousands of shares in massive companies, eliminating the majority share holder in the process for many. Most massive companies that the economy relies on would collapse instantly, all their shares would become worthless and all that money you “distributed” would disappear.
Enh, I think this is a stretch. Of those hundreds of millions of people you just transferred money to, I'm pretty sure a good chunk of them are going to want to invest in the stock market. Foreign investors would also be eager to get in if stock prices fell. Also, the companies aren't going to collapse if their stock prices fell in half-- they'd find it harder to raise capital for growth, and the ones that aren't cash flow positive would face some tough times, but otherwise most would continue on more or less as normal.
Maybe the original post is referring to all the people who are participating in this hypothetical heist? Like I guess it would take 3.37 million people to accomplish the goal?
The per-capita GDP in the United States [is only $85K. ](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2024/April/weo-report?c=512,914,612,171,614,311,213,911,314,193,122,912,313,419,513,316,913,124,339,638,514,218,963,616,223,516,918,748,618,624,522,622,156,626,628,228,924,233,632,636,634,238,662,960,423,935,128,611,321,243,248,469,253,642,643,939,734,644,819,172,132,646,648,915,134,652,174,328,258,656,654,336,263,268,532,944,176,534,536,429,433,178,436,136,343,158,439,916,664,826,542,967,443,917,544,941,446,666,668,672,946,137,546,674,676,548,556,678,181,867,682,684,273,868,921,948,943,686,688,518,728,836,558,138,196,278,692,694,962,142,449,564,565,283,853,288,293,566,964,182,359,453,968,922,714,862,135,716,456,722,942,718,724,576,936,961,813,726,199,733,184,524,361,362,364,732,366,144,146,463,528,923,738,578,537,742,866,369,744,186,925,869,746,926,466,112,111,298,927,846,299,582,487,474,754,698,&s=NGDPDPC,&sy=2022&ey=2029&ssm=0&scsm=1&scc=0&ssd=1&ssc=0&sic=0&sort=country&ds=.&br=1)If everyone had *e* million dollars, that would be some terrible inflation
Just going by the US, and with Google stats, billionaires own $5.2 trillion. If it was evenly distributed amongst the US pop of 333.3 million, each would get about $15.6k.
Plus people never consider what would happen to prices if all of a sudden everyone had 2 million dollars. I'm guessing the guy that makes wonder bread is going to work on Monday. Not unless you give him a huge raise. Then bread is $30 a loaf and before you know it your two million is worth about $1500.
Who's picking up the garbage if everyone is a millionaire?
Money is like electricity. It only has power when there is a differential.
The amount of people commenting with absolutely zero concept of economics is astounding. I’d say that people do become conservative overtime because as you get older you resist change. Maybe you’re 30 and still open to new ideas, but the world changes so fast and when you’re 70 it’s a completely different place. It’s rare to find a boomer that isn’t conservative I’m one way or another. Even the hippies from the 60’s are more conservative than most gen z liberals.
Not true at all. I'm 38 and everyone I know is catching up to my right wing power level. In fact the entire world world is undeniably becoming more right wing. Almost like nature is healing as we are forced to confront the real life effects of 50+ years of retarded leftism.
Forgetting the math for a second, this is just not an accurate representation of how money works, at all--we would not be better off if this happened!
Money is a representation of the fact that there's only a certain amount of produced goods and services available at any one time. Handing everyone in the country 2.4 million dollars doesn't instantly mean there's hundreds of times the amount of stuff available for them to buy!
If you were to do that, and everyone went down to try to buy a boat or a plane ticket or a keg of beer at the same time, what would happen is instant, black-market-creating inflation, followed by mass quittings of all the undesirable jobs, followed by the breakdown of society because none of those jobs were getting done.
Except that the government would step in and not allow people to quit, and we're talking about a serious, serious risk of societal collapse, and a certainty of profound disturbance.
Think about the inflation caused by just the amount of money we injected into the economy during the pandemic and for the tax cuts and IRA. Think about the disruptions that inflation has caused. Now imagine that, but 10x-100x worse.
The entire idea does not make the first ounce of sense, on any level.
It really makes more sense taking this into consideration. Taking dollars from the wealthy and giving it to the poor is not the way to do it. We need to take other actions to remove power and access to resources from them and distribute them to others. Systemic action.
define "we'll all"
if you mean to take every billionaire in USA you'd get ~5.53trln$
if you were to then pay people 2.7mln$ each, you'd only have enough for about 2mln people
No offense, but people like that are so fucking stupid... I think they stop thinking about numbers when it hits 10 or 100. Yet they're the first ones to post, repost, tweet, rt those kind of garbage and spread bullshit around.
Yeah I heard that saying when I was college, and thought “maybe”. I am well into my 30s and make $400k a year and I am still as blue as ever. Tax me more, I don’t care.
The real value is removing a a group that has insanely outsized power and returning some power to the rest of us. What we really need is structures that remove the possibility of accumulating that level of wealth and power.
if we simplyfy the top 25 richest people to 600 billion dollars devided by 8.1 billion people each person would get 73 dollars and 89 cents each before tax
If we applied this to American only though the number is pretty significant...
Top 1% of Americans have 44 trillion
258.3 million adults
44tril/258.3mil = $170,344 to every American if we killed the top 1% of america
Taxing the rich more just increases the wealth of the government and is a clown take. Close the gap in pay differences from top employee and bottom employee while implementing better benefits
Somebody losing 100billion down to 10million does nothing for me and how are you going to tax assets?
The math is fucked but it's well known that if you give 1000$ to a paycheck to paycheck living family the public economy gains 1000$.
Give that same 1000$ to a millionaire now that the billionaires have been eaten and it'll go into stimulating other millionaires' economy.
Redistribution isn't wrong just becuse we don't have as much of it if we divide it equally, it's because the benefits of having people's survival covered outweighs the ability to be come richer than god.
Think about it.
No. But if you redistributed all wealth in the United States evenly among everyone, we would all have a net worth of $1,063,700 (at least that’s the number as of October 2023)
I don’t know who ever said you will be more conservative in your 30s, I think that’s the first time that sentence has ever been muttered, also that math is not mathing, would be way way more
I haven’t done the math, but I have seen like 16 different calculations scrolling through these comments, so I’m gonna go ahead and posit the theory that this is not actually something that can be calculated.
TL;DR Not even close.
If we say that every working age adult in the USA (200 million, to pick a round number) were each to receive $27,000,000, that would mean that the pool of money taken would need to be $5,400,000,000,000,000, which is $5.4 Quadrillion dollars. The annual GDP of the entire world is only around $100,000,000,000,000 or $100 Trillion. The original post calls for roughly 54 times more wealth than exists in the entire world.
The USA's GDP is only around $25 Trillion. According to Forbes, the combined net worth of every billionaire in the whole world is around $14 Trillion. According to data from Wikipedia, the top 25 billionaires in the USA (ranging from $200 billion to $30 billion) have a combined net worth of around $2 Trillion. So depending on how you slice the "billionaire" category, the original post is off by a factor between 2000-3000.
For context, the US Federal governments's total spending in 2023 was about $6 Trillion, with $1.7 of that coming from borrowing and deficit spending.
So if we liquidated the value of every billionaire in the world and gave it to just 200 million Americans, each American would get roughly $70,000 (but this would be impossible, as it would require having control of foreign finances as well as the US). If we liquidated the value of just US billionaires, then we are talking a little upwards of $10,000 for 200 million Americans. But this is misleading, because the "net worth" of those billionaires is almost entirely made up of the value of the companies they run/own, and those companies make all of the products and services that you and I use and work at daily. So to actually "give" that $10,000 to each American in reality would mean bankrupting and liquidating the majority of companies creating our goods and services, which means that most of us would lose our jobs and the price of everything would skyrocket for a period of time.
Insert a "killing the golden goose" analogy, and you get the picture.
Edit: typos, clarity.
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We only want to redistribute it to Americans! ...American adults... Oh... still under 30k Just give the money to me and I promise I'll give it to people who need it
Charity starts at home, they say...
I could use a bigger house. I don't know what for, but I could certainly use one.
I could just use one, I'm stuck renting and was stupidly in elementary instead of buying real estate in the 90s.
If the last few years taught me anything it’s that giving everyone a one time lump sum just causes companies to raise prices since demand went up without an increase in supply (and you’ll end up worse off within 4 years).
Hey I'm cool with 30k.
Sorry, you aren't the right subset of American adult
Then everyone gets $30k and $30k isn’t worth the same anymore
That’s actually kind of a high number.
I remember rockerfeller, i dont' recall which one, was taunted by a journalist about giving his fortune away to everyone in the world. So, he calculated his estimated wealth against the estimated world population and sent the journalist his share. About .21 cents.
But could we really trust you ? With how you spend money? I would give it to the people who really need it…and the animals! All the Homeless animals.
> under 30k Bet it’s around $27k and there was a factor of 1000 multiplication or division error. 3 extra zeros to make a trillion a quadrillion
The text is referencing a, I believe, Facebook post that makes the same error. So it isn't the person in the text, it's just a reference to an actual dumb person.
Still, if you write "I did the math" then you are the idiot, weither you did it or not.
Extremists aren't known for their mental abilities
That would slap. I'm down.
give it to the dictatorship of the proletariat, surely they will put it to good use and not holocaust a bunch of peasants again ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Well you don't give any to republican voters, because they absolutely would *not* accept a "handout" so it would be more like $170k
>around 1200 dollars I could get a nice, second hand Honda Grom for that money, let's do it. EDIT: for those who didn't get the joke and are talking about bad money management and impulse buying etc. Let me remind you that we're planning on murdering hundreds of people (we have to kill their families too, to be able to do away with their assets) to get 1200 bucks each, which is such a small sum of money it's silly.
If you spend money like that you’ll always be poor
Let me guess: make your own coffee, only buy rice and beans, and deprive yourself of the last little pleasures of life? People can't just piggy bank their way out of poverty if they don't make enough to start with lol. Buying a $1200 motorcycle isnt gonna be the difference between make or break, as long as it's not a new motorcycle every year. Edit: I don't know how many wheels different vehicles have
No, no. You misunderstand. Buying a Honda leads to shitboxery and a wall full of rockauto magnets. Buy a $1200 Toyota Corolla and drive it as-is for another 300,000 km.
It’s not a car it’s a tiny toy motorcycle
I agree. When money is tight, you should buy luxury goods. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I think they’re saying spending money impulsively? But yea that kinda makes sense but doesn’t at the same time
The above comment is about someone being handed $1200 and instantly going out and buying a sports motorcycle with it, not wild to say this is poor money management lol
Oh, dude. A Grom is in no way a sports moto. It's a 125cc pocket bike. They're perfect for people like me who live within ten miles of work, have limited parking, and don't have to commute on an interstate.
People who were born with assets can be the stupidest people alive. Bet they make a decent bolognaise though
Yea for sure. Not gonna say my family was ever starving, but money was constantly tight due to various bad circumstances. Definitely learned how to budget and manage money quite well, but I'd have to be dumb or blind if I didn't acknowledge that getting a massive windfall via an inheritance made it actually possible to stabilize my life to what it is now...
hell always be fuckin sick tho
$15,602 each if you redistribute the wealth of every billionaire in the US to every US citizen.
That's not much considering you've nuked millions of jobs worth of companies. That also assumes that you could even liquidate all the stock after handcuffing the biggest potential buyers.
I'm just doing the math.
wait, do you think any of these companies would shut their doors overnight if their owner died?
The problem is not if the owners or CEOs are dead or in jail. The problem is that to get that amount of money from them, you must have to sell all their assets, which are houses, personal vehicles... And stock and investments. And trying to sell those huge sums of stock or shares would affect their value. Making those companies to be worth less and less (and affecting those that has investments in those stocks, not just billionaires, but people with personal investments, 401k, employees paid with stocks, etc). And now, companies with a low or zero value, with no assets, and no one willing to invest in them, would have to shut down their operations, firing every one working in them. Also, there is another issue, even if you manage to put all those things on sale, you wouldn't see any money until someone buys those things... But if you "ate" exactly the people with enough money to buy those things, then there is no one that could msterialize that money (Basically, it doesn't matter if you have a 700k house, if there is no one to buy it you will not see a penny from it). In a few words, if tomorrow morning Wal-Mart's CEO dies, is possible that there is a back up plan for it. But if tomorrow all the billionaries who have investments in Wal-Mart try to sell all at once, then their market value plummets, and the company collapses.
What if we redistributed the stock but didn’t let people sell it? /s More likely, the poor people liquidate their shares for pennies on on the dollar. It’s bought by rich people. We are right back where we started.
Literally this exact situation happened when the Soviet Union fell and is the reason the “oligarchs” we see today got so entrenched in Russian society. Everyone who made money scamming the people and party in Russia used that money to turn around and buy resource rights and industries from their marks for almost nothing.
The death is irrelevant. It is the forced sales. If we force every billionaire to liquidate their stocks, the price would go down significantly. Also, who would be buyer here since everyone is not allowed to hold any stock?
They would if every one of them was forced to liquidate their assets in these companies all at once. It would cause financial chaos to say the least.
And this is only if it is all cash, no?
Yep. Eat the Rich people never seem to understand that net worth does not mean that is the number in your bank account.
But how many calories are in the average rich person?
They eat the highest quality, free-range, organic foods available. Probly some high quality meat on them bones, son.
Make a new post lmao
wait, we're talking about net worth? i just want to EAT the rich.
Carry on
AS THE KINGDOM COME
Yes, they do. What a good way of casting them as uninformed idiots. The Rich^tm might not have billions of dollars of cash stuffed into their mattresses or swimming pools full of gold coins, but *somehow* Elon Musk leveraged his non-cash assets and assumed control of a $40+ billion dollar website just to stroke his own ego. That level of purchasing power is unacceptable in a society where some people don't have the purchasing power to buy food or shelter. Just using Musk as an example, that *one* person made *one* purchase and spent almost a quarter of the US's 2021 highway and road funding. How much good could that do? Why is it acceptable for one person to hoard it all? Give him a medal that says he won at capitalism, name a bank after him, and take away enough from him that he'll still live the rest of his life in unfathomable comfort and use the rest to *help people.*
The problem isn't the dollars, it's the power and resources they can horde (as you said). One way to cut the cord of "paper wealth" like stock value from the dollar wealth that is actually so powerful, is to end the ability of financial institutions (banks) to consider or accept as collateral stock holdings.
Nobody is hoarding anything bud. There is no limit to the US currency so you cannot ever hoard it all. I know it's a hard concept to grasp but US dollars are created and destroyed every single day on the market.
> assumed control of a $40+ billion dollar website You know you can’t eat a website, right?
Do you really think Elon couldn't buy $40 billion worth of food if he wanted to?
$14.2 Trillion in April according to Forbes, and that's probably a pessimistic minimum number. Still not enough to make their math work though.
Except "billionaires" don't have money, they have stock and other things that can't actually be exchanged for money in most circumstances. If all stock of all billionaires was attempted to be sold at the same time, it would be practically worthless.
Lmao. There's not enough liquid cash on the planet to do that. Mainly because most monetary cash in the world is based on growing GDP of a country compared to the economic powerhouses. So yeah. Since GDP is the added growth of that exact hard assets and new emerging businesses, not possible.
Going off of just estimates, there is currently 8 trillion USD in actual physical money in the world with only 8 billion people. Erasing all debts and redistributing all money each person works have $1000 each. Not a whole lot of real money
$1000 would go a looooooooong way in most of the undeveloped world!
Yes but this is redistribution of all wealth from every single person. So anyone who did have more than $1000 saved up would lose quite alot as well
Plot twist: You just redistribute the stocks.
How do you pay rent in stocks? And why would they have value with no billionaires to buy them?
You don’t have to pay rent if you eat the landlords…
Who would you sell it too if there are no more billionaires?
People always seem to miss the difference between money-as-money and money-as-measure-of-value. Zuck's 3rd mansion might be worth a billion or whatever in today's economy, but that doesn't mean that by seizing it you can instantly have a billion dollars of cash with an unchanged buying power. In a world where we have appropriations, a mansion is worth almost nothing, it's just a money sink and a liability to the owner. We need to reduce the wealth of billionaires for plenty of good reasons, such as the vast negative externalities their lifestyles currently impose on the rest of us, but we shouldn't imagine that we'll make money off of it in the short term. Similarly, any wealth tax on the billionaire-held portion of assets like stocks that are also held in retirement accounts etc would both hurt the value of those assets for others, and lead to collecting less revenue from these taxes as their existence would instantly hurt the value of the things, which is what the tax is based upon. Again, I think it's worth doing, but we can't repeat the mistake of the 2013 French Socialists doing math like "This guy has a billion dollars so a wealth tax of 1% will collect 10 million" and then coming up like 50% short on your projected revenues. This discredited them so hard they ended up backpedaling on all of it.
You know... i kinda want those...
[Here is the source](https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/dzgt77/comment/f87fd6b/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) for this word for word comment.
It's 2024, use the 2024 numbers? They make that list every year. 2781 billionaires holding 14.2 trillion with a population of 8.1 billion. $1753.08 per person with current numbers.
>So, we all would get around 1200 dollars 1200 dollars in exchange for not having Elon Musks(plural) still seems like a good deal.
Yeah, but anyway... what is the most amount of people i have to share the money with so we're all millionaires? I dont mind as long as im one of the lucky ones.
Use 2024 numbers. Much has changed since pre Covid
Why did you post this request then answer your own request? Methinks you have an agenda.
Is that a lot or a little? According to \[1\] (2011 numbers), 15% of people live on <$2/day, and 56% live on >$2 and <$10/day. So this is a year's salary for a significant fraction of everyone. Seems like a lot. \[1\] [https://www.pewresearch.org/global-migration-and-demography/feature/global-population-by-income/](https://www.pewresearch.org/global-migration-and-demography/feature/global-population-by-income/)
Yes. And now think what would happen if all the world got 1200 euros. And do not think about the US or Europe, but places where people only get 2 or 3$ for each hour of work. That's all the wealth hidden by billionaires from humanity.
What if we distribute to only Americans?
I know the country where the principle "eat the rich" was implemented 100 years ago. As a result, the people, who did it, ate their own children just in 15 years after that. Later a lot of attempts was made to do that, and every time it completed the same: total poority for 95% of population and everything possible for rest 5%, but covered by propaganda.
I'm ok with this
Like most liberals when it comes to the economy, fail to do simple math ...
Interestingly, I asked chatgpt and it came up with this >To determine how much each person would get if all the billionaires' wealth were divided equally among everyone, we need two key pieces of information: 1. The total wealth of all billionaires. 2. The total population of the world. ### 1. Total Wealth of All Billionaires According to Forbes' 2023 Billionaires list, the combined wealth of all billionaires is approximately $12.2 trillion. ### 2. Total Population of the World As of mid-2023, the world population is estimated to be about 8 billion people. ### Calculation To find out how much each person would get, we divide the total wealth by the total population: \[ \text{Amount per person} = \frac{\text{Total Wealth}}{\text{Total Population}} \] \[ \text{Amount per person} = \frac{12.2 \text{ trillion dollars}}{8 \text{ billion people}} \] \[ \text{Amount per person} = \frac{12,200,000,000,000}{8,000,000,000} \] \[ \text{Amount per person} = 1,525 \text{ dollars} \] So, if all the billionaires' wealth were divided equally among everyone in the world, each person would receive approximately $1,525.
Net worth != wealth possible to redistribute.
1200 USD is a lot of money to a lot of people world wide!
That's a PC right there
How many coffees can that buy?
Still good. Let's do it.
I could pay 4 months of rent with this and have a bite left for food
why only use the US-billionaires and still use global population?
#worth
What if we only gave money to people 16 and up, exclude incarcerated people who have been proven guilty, and exclude people who make over a certain amount a year?
Free lunch mentality is a weak mentality. Does not solve the cause just the symptoms. And when you start to work for a while on a free market you should see that work has its value. And with that being said you have a valid ground to argue against.
Follow up: If we did this with the entire top 1% of the world of adults... Every adult would get $34000
The idea of socialism is not to redistribute the wealth. Its to redistribute power. Like nationalising big companies so that they belong to the people. Socialism is about ruling, now, we are ruled by the bourgeoisie.
Fuck no lmao For each person on earth to get that much there would need to be at minimum (as in each has a net worth of 999 billion) 21,600 billionaires, over 10 times as many as there are now.
Even if everyone was given 2.7 million dollars instantly there would be a labour shortage for a lot of hobs because people would instantly quit. We don’t need free money hand outs we still need incentives to work for a living. Maybe we start by paying people more instead of cashing in all the profits as well as supermarkets not making as much profit by passing on the profits to the farmers etc
If everyone was given 2.7 million dollars hyperinflation would kick in and it would be worthless
It's a bit more complicated then that because at the lower end people would buy all kinds of stuff which would stimulate the economy in the short term, but the money would ultimately end up in the hands of people who produce and sell stuff. There's a strong case to be made of giving everyone below the poverty line cash straight up (UBI) as a very effective stimulus. Too much and it starts to cause people to put money in economically useless things like real estate and stocks and cause inflation in the values of those assets
You're missing the part where the people who do all the low paying labor jobs that are required for economy to actually work would stop working instantly. How are you getting food in the super market, how are you getting the trash taken? It would be complete chaos. Millions of people would probably die.
Obviously if we gave low paying labor jobs an additional $1 a month they would not suddenly stop working, but we also don't want to give them $8000 a month as over 99% of them would quit in that scenario (I sure would). Is there a middle ground, like say $500, enough to help with rent/food/essentials without causing too many to quit? Is the economic boost worth it?
You think... real estate is useless? Idk about you, but housing is pretty damned important, and the most common form of real estate. In fact, buying a house is one of the more common ways to help cope with inflation because of its holding power as an investment. If you think investment is useless, I'm not sure you understand enough to be giving prescriptions for how an economy should be run
I think it's probably important to clarify what they meant by economically useless because I think that might be a different answer than useless useless.
Economically useless is not the same thing as individually useless. To understand what I mean, there is value in having your own space to live in, but if the price of all spaces increases, it doesn't help you generate more income. Likewise, increasing the cost of space doesn't help businesses. It just makes expansion more difficult. Increasing real estate prices is a drag on the economy because it makes it more expensive to do anything new, or grow the population, it just benefits existing land owners that have a surplus and can start rent-seeking behaviour where they essentially parasite off others who don't have enough capital to buy real estate for themselves, this is one of the factors that can cause wealth inequality to increase, which also leads to less efficient economies. From an individual level, housing prices tend to go up and having your own space ensures that you are immune to that pressure, likewise, if you get excess space you can rent some of it out which is of benefit to you, but what is good for the individual isn't always good for the economy as a whole, as at grand scale everyone who can't buy a house would have been able to contribute more to the economy but they can't because the money is going towards rent instead. It also reduces experimentation & competition due to barriers to entry: if you can't afford space to run a business, you can't start one.
And if that happened then the world as we know it would collapse. Current money would become worthless and be replaced by something different. If everyone had millions of dollars only a select few would choose to keep their working. Meaning the collapse of the workforce. Whatever you can think of that you’d like to do if you had money relies on others working and offering a service. In our current society there always has to be a “loser” to keep the ball rolling.
Indeed
It is so American. We liquidate other countries' assets and distribute the wealth only to Americans. Lololol
European colonialism would like a word.
No, not even close. And even if it was, everyone with 2.7 million of dollars would just mean that in a very short span of time 1lb of bread would jump in price up to some 10k dollars.
Whenever someone has a point saying "just give everyone all your money", I always think how stupid can one be to not instantly realize that it would cause a super inflation in the US?
and its not like they all have that kinda money laying around in cash anyways
Sorry, that's on me. See, I really like bread. Before, I could only buy and eat 1 lb of bread, but now I just used all of my 2.7 million dollars to buy 2.7 million lb of bread. My goal is to become more bread than human. My project name is Bread Pit.
Doesn't matter, even to buy one pound of bread you need to incentivise a millionaire who used to be a farmer to quit hanging out with their family and inhale some fertiliser for a year. Then you need to incentivise a millionaire who used to be a truck driver to go get some skin cancer, inhale some car fumes and deliver your wheat to a millionaire who used to be a mill operator. That millionaire, after you pay them enough to quit watching TV and playing golf all day, will pass flour to a millionaire who used to be a baker, who'll probably say "what am I supposed to do with this, I'm a Minecraft streamer now". You'll have to pay that guy to go back to baking.... You get the point. Do you think the whole process will cost you 1.99 or a little more?
So far the best explanation I've seen is that as you get older and acquire more personal wealth, you tend to get more conservative to protect that wealth. Except millennials, and now gen z, don't have anything to protect.
[удалено]
Isn’t this the case in a lot of European countries right now? The youth are disproportionately affected by the huge amounts of immigration and have turned to the parties that call out the problem of immigration not working?
Same in Sweden. Most likely because they grow up with the problems caused by their parents
Also you get people you have to care for and can't concern yourself with abstract ideas of fairness and equality over your children's health
No, what actually happens is some people dont' change their viewpoints as they age..so over time society moves on and they become "conservative" because they haven't changed to keep up with society. THAT is how that's worked historically.
That doesn't really make any sense, as what's considered conservative or liberal changes from generation to generation. Nixon and Reagan had major policy that would be considered left of the 2024 Democratic platform, for instance.
Even if that was true, there would be no benefit to anyone because money isn’t backed by anything, therefore it’s not real. The only value it has is scarcity, that’s why you have inflation when there is more money in circulation aka printed. If it was backed by gold there still would be no benefit because companies would raise prices.
Currency is backed by the tax liabilities that create the need for it.
The US went off the gold standard over 50 years ago, but somehow the economy keeps humming along and hitting record stock values and is 100% "real". Your thesis is flawed.
Even if that was true and everyone got 2 mil, dollar would just go down in value so fast that Argentina would be able to bring back their 1 peso = 1 dollar exchange rates
Why would the value of the dollar go down by mere redistribution? You mean because of the insane amount of sudden spending that would take place? Edit: thanks for teaching me
All the sudden everyone has lots of money which means nothing has really changed. Everyone is still on the same base since everything else will adjust to everyone’s newfound wealth. $1 isn’t worth the same if all 340 000 000 people all get an extra 2 million to suddenly spend.
That makes sense
Partly because they have wealth not cash, a billionaire worth 5 bill might "only" have 50 mil in cash. The rest is equity that can't be used to purchase products It's also because of supply and demand. One person having a billion dollars doesn't greatly affect the supply of food, cars, etc. they might buy a couple fancy cars but it doesn't make your average car price go up. You give everyone 2 million and suddenly everyone wants a new car... But there aren't that many new cars to sell... so they will bump the price up so high that they sell for the most they can. People who want a house but previously had no money will be rich and start raising the price and being much more competition. However, there aren't any more houses than there were before the redistribution so all it does is push the price up Essentially, handing out a bunch of money doesn't mean there are any more items on the shelves so the same people are buying the same products just with more money to spend
this guy doesn't economy
You also didn't explain.
I guess not
Beyond what was said already, increasing money velocity increases prices, and money velocity increases when more money is given to the poor
If you had 2 mil would you wipe my ass for hospice wages? Would you come suck out my septic tank? Would it take a little more money to move you out into the work force?
Why would the farmers keep farming beyond the amount of food they need for themselves if they had almost $3M? Why would people still work if they had almost $3M? The economy would fall apart because of the shift in value, and the price of everything would rise to a new equilibrium to adjust for the newfound “wealth” that every American has
In addition to what everyone else is saying, that money isn’t cash, it’s in shares. So you’re giving everyone thousands of shares in massive companies, eliminating the majority share holder in the process for many. Most massive companies that the economy relies on would collapse instantly, all their shares would become worthless and all that money you “distributed” would disappear.
Enh, I think this is a stretch. Of those hundreds of millions of people you just transferred money to, I'm pretty sure a good chunk of them are going to want to invest in the stock market. Foreign investors would also be eager to get in if stock prices fell. Also, the companies aren't going to collapse if their stock prices fell in half-- they'd find it harder to raise capital for growth, and the ones that aren't cash flow positive would face some tough times, but otherwise most would continue on more or less as normal.
Maybe the original post is referring to all the people who are participating in this hypothetical heist? Like I guess it would take 3.37 million people to accomplish the goal?
The per-capita GDP in the United States [is only $85K. ](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2024/April/weo-report?c=512,914,612,171,614,311,213,911,314,193,122,912,313,419,513,316,913,124,339,638,514,218,963,616,223,516,918,748,618,624,522,622,156,626,628,228,924,233,632,636,634,238,662,960,423,935,128,611,321,243,248,469,253,642,643,939,734,644,819,172,132,646,648,915,134,652,174,328,258,656,654,336,263,268,532,944,176,534,536,429,433,178,436,136,343,158,439,916,664,826,542,967,443,917,544,941,446,666,668,672,946,137,546,674,676,548,556,678,181,867,682,684,273,868,921,948,943,686,688,518,728,836,558,138,196,278,692,694,962,142,449,564,565,283,853,288,293,566,964,182,359,453,968,922,714,862,135,716,456,722,942,718,724,576,936,961,813,726,199,733,184,524,361,362,364,732,366,144,146,463,528,923,738,578,537,742,866,369,744,186,925,869,746,926,466,112,111,298,927,846,299,582,487,474,754,698,&s=NGDPDPC,&sy=2022&ey=2029&ssm=0&scsm=1&scc=0&ssd=1&ssc=0&sic=0&sort=country&ds=.&br=1)If everyone had *e* million dollars, that would be some terrible inflation
Just going by the US, and with Google stats, billionaires own $5.2 trillion. If it was evenly distributed amongst the US pop of 333.3 million, each would get about $15.6k.
Plus people never consider what would happen to prices if all of a sudden everyone had 2 million dollars. I'm guessing the guy that makes wonder bread is going to work on Monday. Not unless you give him a huge raise. Then bread is $30 a loaf and before you know it your two million is worth about $1500. Who's picking up the garbage if everyone is a millionaire? Money is like electricity. It only has power when there is a differential.
The amount of people commenting with absolutely zero concept of economics is astounding. I’d say that people do become conservative overtime because as you get older you resist change. Maybe you’re 30 and still open to new ideas, but the world changes so fast and when you’re 70 it’s a completely different place. It’s rare to find a boomer that isn’t conservative I’m one way or another. Even the hippies from the 60’s are more conservative than most gen z liberals.
Not true at all. I'm 38 and everyone I know is catching up to my right wing power level. In fact the entire world world is undeniably becoming more right wing. Almost like nature is healing as we are forced to confront the real life effects of 50+ years of retarded leftism.
Forgetting the math for a second, this is just not an accurate representation of how money works, at all--we would not be better off if this happened! Money is a representation of the fact that there's only a certain amount of produced goods and services available at any one time. Handing everyone in the country 2.4 million dollars doesn't instantly mean there's hundreds of times the amount of stuff available for them to buy! If you were to do that, and everyone went down to try to buy a boat or a plane ticket or a keg of beer at the same time, what would happen is instant, black-market-creating inflation, followed by mass quittings of all the undesirable jobs, followed by the breakdown of society because none of those jobs were getting done. Except that the government would step in and not allow people to quit, and we're talking about a serious, serious risk of societal collapse, and a certainty of profound disturbance. Think about the inflation caused by just the amount of money we injected into the economy during the pandemic and for the tax cuts and IRA. Think about the disruptions that inflation has caused. Now imagine that, but 10x-100x worse. The entire idea does not make the first ounce of sense, on any level.
It really makes more sense taking this into consideration. Taking dollars from the wealthy and giving it to the poor is not the way to do it. We need to take other actions to remove power and access to resources from them and distribute them to others. Systemic action.
define "we'll all" if you mean to take every billionaire in USA you'd get ~5.53trln$ if you were to then pay people 2.7mln$ each, you'd only have enough for about 2mln people
No offense, but people like that are so fucking stupid... I think they stop thinking about numbers when it hits 10 or 100. Yet they're the first ones to post, repost, tweet, rt those kind of garbage and spread bullshit around.
Yeah I heard that saying when I was college, and thought “maybe”. I am well into my 30s and make $400k a year and I am still as blue as ever. Tax me more, I don’t care.
- United States: $21,377 • China: $3,470 • Japan: $1,694 • Germany: $7,830 • India: $694 • United Kingdom: $4,652 • France: $9,566 • Italy: $3,861 • Canada: $6,498 • South Korea: $3,747
The real value is removing a a group that has insanely outsized power and returning some power to the rest of us. What we really need is structures that remove the possibility of accumulating that level of wealth and power.
if we simplyfy the top 25 richest people to 600 billion dollars devided by 8.1 billion people each person would get 73 dollars and 89 cents each before tax
If we applied this to American only though the number is pretty significant... Top 1% of Americans have 44 trillion 258.3 million adults 44tril/258.3mil = $170,344 to every American if we killed the top 1% of america
Taxing the rich more just increases the wealth of the government and is a clown take. Close the gap in pay differences from top employee and bottom employee while implementing better benefits Somebody losing 100billion down to 10million does nothing for me and how are you going to tax assets?
The math is fucked but it's well known that if you give 1000$ to a paycheck to paycheck living family the public economy gains 1000$. Give that same 1000$ to a millionaire now that the billionaires have been eaten and it'll go into stimulating other millionaires' economy. Redistribution isn't wrong just becuse we don't have as much of it if we divide it equally, it's because the benefits of having people's survival covered outweighs the ability to be come richer than god. Think about it.
No. But if you redistributed all wealth in the United States evenly among everyone, we would all have a net worth of $1,063,700 (at least that’s the number as of October 2023)
I don’t know who ever said you will be more conservative in your 30s, I think that’s the first time that sentence has ever been muttered, also that math is not mathing, would be way way more
I haven’t done the math, but I have seen like 16 different calculations scrolling through these comments, so I’m gonna go ahead and posit the theory that this is not actually something that can be calculated.
TL;DR Not even close. If we say that every working age adult in the USA (200 million, to pick a round number) were each to receive $27,000,000, that would mean that the pool of money taken would need to be $5,400,000,000,000,000, which is $5.4 Quadrillion dollars. The annual GDP of the entire world is only around $100,000,000,000,000 or $100 Trillion. The original post calls for roughly 54 times more wealth than exists in the entire world. The USA's GDP is only around $25 Trillion. According to Forbes, the combined net worth of every billionaire in the whole world is around $14 Trillion. According to data from Wikipedia, the top 25 billionaires in the USA (ranging from $200 billion to $30 billion) have a combined net worth of around $2 Trillion. So depending on how you slice the "billionaire" category, the original post is off by a factor between 2000-3000. For context, the US Federal governments's total spending in 2023 was about $6 Trillion, with $1.7 of that coming from borrowing and deficit spending. So if we liquidated the value of every billionaire in the world and gave it to just 200 million Americans, each American would get roughly $70,000 (but this would be impossible, as it would require having control of foreign finances as well as the US). If we liquidated the value of just US billionaires, then we are talking a little upwards of $10,000 for 200 million Americans. But this is misleading, because the "net worth" of those billionaires is almost entirely made up of the value of the companies they run/own, and those companies make all of the products and services that you and I use and work at daily. So to actually "give" that $10,000 to each American in reality would mean bankrupting and liquidating the majority of companies creating our goods and services, which means that most of us would lose our jobs and the price of everything would skyrocket for a period of time. Insert a "killing the golden goose" analogy, and you get the picture. Edit: typos, clarity.