Like most parasites, they have an important place in the ecosystem.
Ticks for instance are a source of food for several species.
I respect some of what they do but they should be taxed more and the top ones a lot more.
Medium rare with a little bit of butter and thyme.
Wealth tax that goes directly to funding a billionaire audit program. It should create a self-perpetuating cycle that means IRS audits for all of them every year.
Yes this could fix it. But we’re here because of the exact same reason that if that law was magically on the books, it’d be rewritten or repealed almost instantly.
They’re a cancer on society.
In the words of the next post on my feed: Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew
Bill-ion-aires!
Billionaires shouldn’t exist; no one needs that much money. They should be taxed until there are no more billionaires.
I don’t have an opinion on billionaires specifically. I don’t care if they take home a billion dollars. What I do care about is the ratio of top earner income with median income. It should never exceed 10-30%
Should, and reality are a couple orders of magnitude separated.
I’m hungry.
They need to regularly take a shit, like everybody else. They just use more expensive toilet paper I suppose.
Except at their offices where they but the thinnest 1 ply air they possibly can.
Haha, those silly billionaires are just like me! Haven’t we all bought an election or two?
Honestly, I try not to think about them. It’s an inherently selfish and self-serving class and they’ve got enough money to pay people to think about them, so I’m not going to do it for free.
Forbes did the math once and determined that Smaug, a dragon embodied by greed and selfishness, is worth $62 billion. There are 17 people richer than him.
Smaug was shot in the heart and it was a morally good act.
Fyi that math was heavily contested, i agree with the sentiment but a literal mountain full of gold, assuming the market wouldnt crash, would make him the richest person on the planet.
We don’t actually know the size of the hoard, though. We know it’s big enough for him to sleep in it, and we know the Arkenstone was worth one share of it, but we don’t have specific numbers (at least, none I can see). Any valuation has to be an estimation, and any estimation will be contested.
Also, the value of gold today is 75 times that of what it was in the 1930s, which makes it even harder to put a price on Smaug’s hoard.
Regardless of the specific number, there is a certain level of wealth and greed that makes it morally good to shoot someone through the heart. Smaug is not the only one to have hit that threshold.
Bard the Bowman was to blame. He gave love a bad name.
I’d be willing to bet that Smaug caused less death and destruction than many (if not most) billionaires
We should probably deal with them sooner rather than later
Tax them.
A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.
This is exactly how I have always thought about it too. Pure greed. My father ran a company for 35 years and for 3 of those years he took either no payout or a very small payout so that he didn’t have to let anyone go. I asked him why he didn’t just downsize and he said that other people needed the money more than us. That’s how shit needs to be run. People centric not profit driven.
Unfortunately it is in human nature to compare oneself to other people, and becoming big in other people’s eyes is easiest when other people around you are already smaller than you.
This becomes truly predatory when you become the person deciding on other’s situation.
Do you know a single business where an employee makes more money than his boss? Because I sure know lots of businesses where employees posses much more knowledge or skill than their supervisor, yet none of them surpass them in earnings.
Though I have known business owners who have made less than their employees at times, it’s always been small 2-10 person businesses, and in a hard time when the owner was trying to weather the hard times with their own equity (ie paying the company to keep people employed). But that’s only a small amount of time, and never a business that the majority of people in the county knew the name.
As for businesses with shareholders. Hell no. Never would happen.
Even if they earned it ethically, they literally can’t spend this much money. They can’t spend the money fast enough.
They hold on to this much money to keep score.
