Shares / stocks aren't worth 1 bean until you sell them and are able to convince someone to grow the bean.

To feed people you need actual beans not shares in server farms or mega yachts .

Selling shares in server farms does not automatically increase the yield of bean farms - or even switch livestock pasture into arable. Even the mega yachts would need a serious refit to become workable fishing vessels - probably not sustainable for 216 years though.

You could probably end "AI" poverty or something else pointless like that.

The idea of taxing the rich is more about being able to convince normal people to spend more time doing useful stuff (like public service) instead of billionaire service. The $ values are next to meaningless for measuring that.

I'd prefer to measure human hours (+land + other basic resources) spent serving luxuries to billionaires - on a current time basis. Then ask what else could practically be done with those hours or resources.

Well yes, but unless you dismantle things it'll probably backfire. A ton of that wealth is in owning companies, and if that ownership transfered to the state, it would need to be liquidated by selling it to... someone. Which would tank stocks, which would then tank 401ks and IRAs and a lot of other retirement funds, etc.. It would get messy and a ton of non-billionares would be impacted.

Now you can argue that you then use your newfound government cash to pay a new universal social security, and that's possible but you'd need to design all that ahead of time. Plus if your goal is to not impact people with less than a billion... well, no dice. It's hard to target just the billionaires, basically.

Still, if we could at least start the process that'd be lovely. Dismantling the whole system is more effective and way better, but my money would be on gradual socialist improvements paid via higher taxes and not a system overhaul. As it is, we're going backwards, though, so meh.

Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Thanks for listening.

The worst part is most of that money would end up right where it started.

It'd be complicated to extract this from companies they own without destroying the companies. It could maybe work by force emmiting stock and the payments for it going directly to the government, so the company doesn't owe debt. The stock price will drop, so it will be affordable for workers to buy it and the former owner would basically be disowned at least partially.

This would solve world hunger forever. Money wouldn't be syphoned anymore.

That's not how money works.

Explained something like this to a friend back in the day. He said the government could easily give us each $1M. And he was right!

Me: "You know I have a small lawn service, right? Charge $20 per lawn? What would you have to pay me if I had a million in the bank? I probably wouldn't consider anything less than $10,000 for a job."

Mike: "Yeah, but you could still eat at McDonalds for $5."

Me: "Who would work there?!"

Yes, we need to start extracting the wealth back downwards, but we can't just flood the streets with dollars.