
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett Are Richer Than Poorest Half of US - pmoriarty
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/08/bill-gates-jeff-bezos-warren-buffett-wealthier-than-poorest-half-of-us
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aidenn0
If your net worth is positive, you are richer than the poorest 10% of the US.

[edit] A different source suggests the net worth of the bottom 25% of the US
is about zero, so you're even higher!

Also, these numbers are for households, and I wouldn't be surprised if poorer
families averaged larger households, so in terms of per-capita wealth it's
probably even higher.

~~~
votepaunchy
You don’t even need a positive net worth. The poorest American is richer than
the aggregate negative net worth of the referenced ~25% of the population.

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imgabe
Ok? Their wealth is mostly in stock of companies they founded. When they sell
it, they'll pay taxes on the gains. When they receive dividends, they'll pay
taxes on that too.

If the implication is that some of that wealth should be redistributed, how
would that work? Should the government confiscate shares of stock? Then do
what with them?

~~~
keithnz
Redistribution is done via tax rather than confiscating stock. The popular
idea is some kind of wealth tax. Often goes hand in hand with UBI.

~~~
imgabe
The wealth is in the form of stock. If they hold the stock, and they're not
selling it, where does the tax come in? They would have to sell the stock in
order to pay the tax, paying capital gains tax in the process? Bezos doesn't
have $95 billion sitting in a savings account.

Let's pretend it's land instead of stock. If I own a parcel of land with $10
million, but don't have much cash, and the government wants to tax me 10% of
my wealth, where do I get the money to pay the tax? I'm forced to sell off
part of the land? What, every year? Until I don't own anything anymore?

~~~
alex_young
They could sell some of the stock to pay for that the same way their employees
do when their stock grants mature couldn't they?

~~~
imgabe
So you're forced to slowly give up more and more of your company? What if
you're trying to keep a certain percentage to maintain control?

~~~
s17n
You can't. The whole point of a wealth tax is to prevent people/families from
staying wealthy forever.

~~~
vixen99
The acquisition of wealth is not a zero sum game so why would you want
people/families to get poorer ('stop them from staying wealthy forever'). How
about getting people to climb up rather than forcing some down?

Your idea of the 'point of a wealth tax' is a curious one. I am not aware
anyone has suggested this aside from failed communist regimes where
remarkably, some families at the apex who make/made the rules
continue/continued to live rather well.

~~~
s17n
The current conversation about a wealth tax was jumpstarted by Thomas Piketty,
who argues that the natural tendency of a capitalist economy is to make the
rich get richer and the poor to get poorer (relative to each other - in
absolute terms everybody should be getting richer). Basically the point of the
wealth tax is to provide a counterweight to that tendency.

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techer
I think this should be less about their massive wealth - rather the relative
poverty and insecurity of most people who live paycheck to paycheck..

Is it a zero sum game?

~~~
influx
No, the economy is NOT NOT NOT NOT a zero-sum game.

[http://www.asktheharvardmba.com/2008/05/03/is-global-
economi...](http://www.asktheharvardmba.com/2008/05/03/is-global-economics-a-
zero-sum-game/)

~~~
porfirium
>World economics are definitely NOT a zero-sum game. Were that truly the case,
you’d still be sitting around your cave with your buddies Thak and Grunt,
snacking on beetles and grubs. Clearly, the world economy is larger today than
it was 25 years ago.

This guy forgot the small detail that when we were neanderthals we yet had to
explore the world.

~~~
vixen99
Why would that be important?

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aidenn0
A trick I use for trying to fathom such large amounts of money would be
"Assuming a conservative rate of return, how much money can my wealth
generate?"

e.g. at 3%, Gates would generate ~$200M per _month_ in returns. The bottom of
the forbes 400 (~$2B) still pulls in $5M per month. If you just barely qualify
for the "1-percenter" title, you "only" get $25k per month.

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dcgudeman
And none of them were born particularly rich or privileged. Nice to see hard
work and wise choices can elevate one to such great heights.

~~~
dogma1138
There is an international law firm called KL&Gates the Gates in it is Bill’s
dad you want might to google them.

~~~
eesmith
And some quotes from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett)
:

> In 1942, his father was elected to the first of four terms in the United
> States Congress

> Buffett's interest in the stock market and investing dated to schoolboy days
> he spent in the customers' lounge of a regional stock brokerage near his
> father's own brokerage office.

(His father brokerage company was Buffett-Falk & Co.)

> In high school, he invested in a business owned by his father and bought a
> 40-acre farm worked by a tenant farmer. He bought the land when he was 14
> years old with $1,200 of his savings.

Neither of my parents were in Congress, nor started and ran a brokerage
office, nor owned a business - much less a business that others could invest
in.

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dhoulb
I mean, two of them have pledged to give away their wealth, and the other is
actively seeking ideas to do so.

If they’re giving it away anyway, what’s the problem?

I guess if you’re in that lower 50% of the US, it might sorta suck that Gates
is sorting out renewable energy and malaria and not just directly giving you
money? But it’s possibly a little repugnant to complain about it?

(Although I fully acknowledge it isn’t ACTUALLY poorer folk complaining about
it, it’s moderately well off journalists fake-complaining about it to rile up
other moderately well off folks on the internet.)

~~~
eesmith
I do not like how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's funding of alternate
education models has given undue weight to the views of just one person. I
think it is undemocratic.

Quoting [http://curmudgucation.blogspot.se/2017/10/gates-shifts-
gears...](http://curmudgucation.blogspot.se/2017/10/gates-shifts-gears-again-
and-claims-to.html) concerning the Foundation's recent decision to spend an
additional $1.7 Billion on education:

> So there's a slight shift of direction, but one thing stays the same-- the
> Gates conviction that he can serve as an unelected, unexperienced tsar of
> American education, reworking education to his will by sheer force of money.
> After seventeen years, he still hasn't noticed that he isn't helping.

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russellbeattie
60% of the country has less than $1000 in savings [1]. Thus _I_ am richer than
60% of the U.S. and I'm pretty broke.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/pf/americans-lack-of-
savings...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/pf/americans-lack-of-
savings/index.html)

~~~
shaunlgs
The article is talking about cumulative of those poorer 50%, heck I, living in
a third world country am richer than 60% of Americans too.

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everdev
When politicians talk about "the elite" are they talking about these handful
of insanely wealthy people?

~~~
harry8
No, usually rather more. (Obviously depends on who is talking, the same word
is used with different meanings by different people, sometimes deliberately to
confuse the issue).

Both Donand Trump and Hilary Clinton are deeply entrenched in "The Elite"

If you think of that class of people who have a massively outsized say in how
power is exercised by virtue of their connections or wealth or lobbying might
or anything that isn't a large number of citizens electing them in a fair
contest. That class of people is "the elite."

Absolutely this includes idiotic hollywood celebrities and politicians in
gerrymandered electorates - unless of course they really are puppets on
strings.

