‘A System Rigged’: Untaxed Wealth of Richest 0.1% Is More Than Assets of World’s Poorest Half
Posted by nnomadic@reddit | anime_titties | View on Reddit | 22 comments
cudanny@reddit
It's kinda mad how much wealth we have as a society and how much of it serves so little of us. I'm not suggesting we should all be communists but human greed holding us back at this point surely.
SurturOfMuspelheim@reddit
"I'm not saying we should fix the problem but man this problem sucks"
Liberalism.
cudanny@reddit
I just think the solution isn't the complete opposite, there's ground in the middle surely
SurturOfMuspelheim@reddit
Middle ground between what? Equality for all and liberation of the working class and... Death and destruction, wage slavery and owning nothing, dying because you can't afford healthcare and everything else that sucks about Capitalism?
Turioturen@reddit
Is something that does not happen when communism is done, what happens is a massive political class that controls everything and normal people still do not get what they produce, it goes to the politicians.
SurturOfMuspelheim@reddit
First of all, you're not even critiquing communism. You're mistaking it for socialism.
Now that that is out of the way, you're completely wrong, and every example shows this.
Nearly every good statistic has gone up in every country that has tried socialism. Those that have had issues have had those issues due to reasons like foreign invasion, infiltration and sanctions, Cuba being the biggest example of those hostilities having a massive effect.
This is just another one or those things people hear about socialism and have some random single out of context example as proof.
YachtswithPyramids@reddit
So why aren't you suggesting it. Are you afraid of "opinions"
Low_Patience2519@reddit
I'm a physicist. This obsecene wealth inequality is inevitable unless we change the way distribution possessions. Any system in which the assets that you have influence how many gains you'll make, even if it's in a probabilistic way (if you want to factor luck/skill or whatever) leads to absurd inequalities: formally, to log or log-normal distributions, which basically means you can have a person with 100,000,000 times more than the median, there is simply no scale. It's called multiplicative growth. So...if you don't redistribute means of production or apply drastic changes in taxation, I'm afraid it's impossible to end wealth inequality as it is.
TheBeardPlays@reddit
So Marx was right after all. Interesting.
Wyrmnax@reddit
Dont bring entropy in my fing economics....
BendicantMias@reddit
Tbf the idea of breaking economics' rigidity by bringing in insights from other fields isn't new. The most well known is psychology and sociology, which birth behavioral economics. But there's also other instances of it, such as complex systems theory being used and thus birthing complexity economics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_economics
just_anotjer_anon@reddit
Our economic game is built on conservative ideas. Every country is built on dynasties being allowed.
People don't become über wealthy in one generation, they've all inherited wealth and ballooned it. 100% inheritance tax on everything above a threshold like 300k€ would work wonders, company ownership being divided among employees of the company on death would certainly democratise companies and make them less greedy as a result
mrgoobster@reddit
Even a much lower flat tax, were it properly enforced, would solve the problem gradually. Rich people tend to make terrible financial decisions, so if the system is not outrageously unfair (in their favor), they tend to become poor again in a generation or two.
ElendX@reddit
Rich people, maybe, wealthy people have an accountant to handle this risk.
mrgoobster@reddit
That's why I said, 'flat tax'. In the context of taxation, 'flat' means a single rate for all incomes, no loopholes or exceptions.
Bashin-kun@reddit
per the article, tax needs to be fully enforceable first. no point making more taxes when the uber rich are gonna hide it away somewhere else anyways.
keepthepace@reddit
The contrary to it is called redistribution and the philosophy that pushes that forward is called socialism and that's a very reasonable stance to have.
saracenraider@reddit
This is something that always confuses me - if we suddenly confiscated all of this wealth and distributed it amongst the poorest half, would it actually make much of a difference? Supply wouldn’t change, so the price of goods and services would simply go up. The current equilibrium of the economy seems to factor in that a huge amount of ‘wealth’ will just sit permanently unused in bank accounts or shares etc, and if that changed then everything else would change too and pricing would adjust accordingly.
Of course, I’m not for one second using this train of thought to advocate that it’s good so much wealth is locked up by the ultra wealthy, it’s just something I’ve never got my head around.
falooda1@reddit
Well it's an extractionist capitalist economy. There's not enough supply because it's not profitable enough.
Many people earn wages that are less than the profit that companies want in order to do something
So that land stays as speculation instead of being used for agriculture at a less than ideal margin.
BendicantMias@reddit
Notably neither of those amounts are anywhere near the total being just squirelled away by the wealthy from taxation, they're much much less...
frankgetsu@reddit
The numbers are genuinely staggering. 3% of global GDP just sitting there untaxed while people struggle to afford rent. The system isnt broken, its working exactly as designed for the people at the top. Redistributing overnight would cause chaos but closing loopholes and taxing unrealized gains on the ultrawealthy wouldnt crash the economy. Its just political will thats missing. Nobody with that much power wants to vote themselves out of it.
BendicantMias@reddit
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/02/global-super-rich-hidden-355trn-from-tax-officials-oxfam