this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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It's not particularly difficult to fix the economy.
Make a law. This law will require the head of the IRS go to the richest person in the country, and give them the option of writing a check large enough that they are knocked out of the top 1%, or playing a round of Russian Roulette.
Repeat every month, and the problems of wealth disparity will be solved in about a year.
Then it just becomes a game of "how well can you hide your money?"
That's exactly the point.
It is much harder to "hide" wealth in the form of the highly regulated financial assets that are creating the wealth disparity problems. It is much easier to "hide" wealth in largely unregulated tangible assets, like yachts, private jets, and other things that workers produce. When they buy that jet, they pay the salary of an airplane builder. When they buy that yacht, they pay the salary of a shipbuilder.
The problem isn't solved by taking away their riches. The problem is solved when those riches are spent. If they don't want to do the spending, the government is perfectly capable of spending it for them.
Usually those rich guys don't have that money sitting around - it is invested somewhere. It also often only exists as shares - that are some kind of imaginary money that doesn't really exists.
They can't spent that money without destroying what gives its value.
You are describing "securities". Financial assets. Those financial assets (when held by the ultra-rich) are the problem. Those financial assets are transferring real wealth from the general economy to the people holding them.
I addressed financial assets.
Now, the nice thing about shares is that they don't have to be held by any particular person. The value of those shares doesn't change when they are transferred to someone else.
We could, if we wanted to, establish a tax on registered securities. We could have the SEC automatically transfer 2% of the shares in Elon's portfolio from his ownership directly to the IRS. We could do that every year if we wanted to.
IRS liquidators could then sell off those shares, slowly over time, so that their sold shares are never more than 1% of the total traded volume.