this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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Let's just take Jeff bezos.
His net worth rose about $70b last year.
There are about 250 million adults in the US. The US poverty rate is about 12.5%, that's about 31 million adults.
At a flat tax rate of 50%, that's about $1100 per person in poverty per year. That's just one billionaire.
To put in perspective, $2.25t / 3 years / 31 million adults in poverty is about $24,000 / year for each adult.
For an individual, the poverty line in the US is about $15,000.
If we focused on taxing billionaires the way we used to, we may not be able to fix everything, but we could certainly afford to bring every single person in the US out of poverty. Saying it's not a solution is not correct.
Edit: I'm not saying that it's simple and easy as that. I'm just saying that the math is there. If we gave people an amount of money per year based on their income, from money that is directly taken from billionaires at a high tax rate, we'd find that a lot of our social problems fix themselves.