In reality majority of billionaires are in industries and companies that does not even remotely have the same benefits or power.

Honestly, there isn't a clean solution to this problem- or at least none that doesn't come with unpredictable consequences. I think everyone can agree that companies growing too large inevitably become harmful for the society they're enabled by, but there are no previously established solution we can reach for... And every decision you can make will have trade-offs. Also, were pretty late game into free market capitalism. Any changes to the status quo will dis-/advantage someone, and they will utilize the tools available to them to stop you. So such deep cutting changes are beyond unlikely without first descending into complete chaos. Which would likely be worse for the majority of people...

I'll get hate from some corners on this, but I'm coming to see the wisdom in not significantly increasing the tax rate on the rich, but instead broadening the tax base. For example, count tricks like borrow, spend, die as cash; make stock buybacks illegal; treat compensation in the form of assets as cash income at the valuation price when the transfer happens; count inheritances above $X million as income, cash income.

Work hard, so that the government can redistribute your success?

Or you have the problem of businesses slowly losing their owners, who then stop caring about their clients or community.

What is the result of these taxes? Where does the money go? Does it lead to more economic activity or less?

If you're talking about the "Zucman tax" it explicitely targets the ultra-high-net-worth individuals because that's the population that manages to avoid income tax and thus pay a lower effective tax rate than the rest of the population.

source: https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/report-g20.pdf

Wealth taxation cannot redistribute the kind of wealth we care about most. At least not by itself.

You need someone to buy the stocks in exchange for labor. So you need to keep the stocks themselves valuable.

As an extreme example, if you'd just take away all the SpaceX and Tesla stock from all shareholders and redistribute them, they would probably be near worthless because you just demonstrated that their value is more or less random.

I think that wealth taxation will only work if you give ironclad guarantees that people that are merely rich or middle-class will never be subject to it. If you can show that a stock is more valuable to, say, a medical doctor, then to the CEO of a hyperscaler, you might have a working system.

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich...

I found this footnote particularly interesting:

It is worth noting that, per the Piketty, Saez, and Zucman data, the tax rates of the top 0.1 and 0.01 percent of taxpayers have dropped substantially since the 1950s. The average tax rate on the 0.1 percent highest-income Americans was 50.6 percent in the 1950s, compared to 39.8 percent today. The average tax rate on the top 0.01 percent was 55.3 percent in the 1950s, compared to 40.8 percent today.

Note that those percentages include Federal, state, and local taxes.

A rich person can afford to split their wealth 10-ways, meaning they get a 20% ROI every year.

9/10 workers don't get shit, while one does.

What we want instead is everyone benefiting.

If government subsidies are the only reason Tesla exists, why did Aptera (v1) and Fisker fail? If SpaceX only exists because of government subsidies, why are Boeing and Lockheed Martin (owners of ULA) worth so much less than SpaceX?

That probably seemed more coherent before you put it into words.

I mean, sure. The follow up thought is after that power has been taxed away then someone else is going to need to be taxed for the raw resources that are needed. If welfare checks start being paid out with intangible benefits it'll lead to loud complaints. That gets to the heart of the problem with taxing the people with truly enormous amounts of wealth, they mostly have power, which isn't much use to someone who needs food and shelter. The tax burden has fall somewhere in the logistics chain that produces the houses and the food (although maybe a long way upstream).

> Distributing from the person who owns the ice cream machine to the person buying ice cream puts the money in the hands of the person far more likely to spend it quickly

I'm not going to disagree with that, but I will point out that this is why they couldn't afford the ice cream machine in the first place. Consuming the seed corn is a road to eventually having no corn.

There is an economic optimum amount of ice cream production and there isn't any reason to believe it isn't being hit under the current system. It isn't obvious if the need is for more or less ice cream machines. Moving ownership of the machine around doesn't obviously change the amount of ice cream produced; and its owner isn't consuming the machine. But a wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy is pulling all those levers on the assumption that making random changes in ownership has to help. It probably won't.

The top 1% pay about 38%. The top 0.1% is simply not a lot of people and not helpful for thinking about how much you can juice them in absolute dollar amounts.

If we're talking globally, Asia ain't failing. They're big on producing lots of real stuff. Minted a lot of new billionaires.