Not a day goes by that I don't see a post on this and a number of other subreddits talking about how we should make billionaires pay their fair share and or even funnier that for ” every dollar over a billion we should take the rest of their money for the public good.
These statements show a complete misunderstanding of the monetary system, markets, economics and banking. I would agree entirely that these people need to pay their fair share and are not contributing to the degree that they're gaining but it's just not as simple as moat of you think
when they say someone is a billionaire that does NOT mean that they have a billion dollars just sitting in a bank account, it only means that they own a variety of assets between property and stock and cash holdings that add up to a billion dollars. Jeff Bezos value is based on his ownership of a large amount of Amazon stock and the value of that stock having risen exponentially since he started the company. His actual salary is 1.5 million /yr. This is important to realize because people talk about billionaires like there is some bank or safe somewhere that you could just go and take the cash. There is no cash and his value is only based on the current value of his stock. This means that just “taking” their profits over a billion $ is extremely hard to do. Bezos has not realized the value of his holdings yet because he has not yet cashed them out. If he sold the stock then you can and should tax the profits of that sale but if he doesn't sell it how do you get the money?
Some of you will say, Well you should tax the profits of the company… Amazon paid no taxes because they sank their profits back into the company. Bezos runs the company at a loss, constantly plugging the profits back into the business. It's not illegal and it's not cooking the books. The company makes no cash profits to be taxed.
If we want to Uber wealthy to pay their fair share we need to start with these facts and make have real policy ideas for how to prevent or discourage such massive hoarding of profits. In the case of Amazon we should be asking ourselves why our financial and tax systems encourage a man like bezos to treat his workers so poorly and pay them so little with no benefits when he clearly has the resources to make sure they are taken care of. We have a system that rewards shareholder value above all other things and that needs to change.