Spain and Brazil push global action to tax the super-rich and curb inequality

I hope this works. The only way to save the economy and the society is by taxing the rich.

Think about it for a minute. The rich people hoard all the resources, financial assets, means of production and in the competition for resources they will (and are doing so) displace everyone else in the economy (and really from society also).

This means that those who are displaced have no means to participate in the economy. And not only that but also they will be pushed to the fringes of the society and exists in slum conditions. This will stiff the economy and hollow it out.

Let's say for arguments sake that the government taxes X hundred of millions of $ from the bezos/musks/gates/etc. and put that into the economy by

  - indirectly or directly hiring people
  - building infrastructure
  - providing services for the citizens (education, health care etc)
  - providing benefits to those who need. 

All that money will immediately go back into the economy stimulating all kinds of economic activity. And essentially two weeks later that same X hundred million is back in the bank account of bezos/musk/gates and it can be taxed again!

By letting the uber rich hoard the wealth that wealth is essentially away from the economy providing very little economic activity.

In economy this is known as the "high propensity to spend". The "poor" (i.e. working/middle class people) have high propensity to spend, the rich have low propensity to spend.

Tax the wealth, not the work!

This has been done before and it can be done again!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

Really rich people don't have a lot of money, they have a lot of assets that are considered to be worth a lot of money, typically companies. Companies are work. If you make the big owners ask for higher dividends, you tax the work indirectly.

You could of course tax the non-work wealth. Most of that is home ownership, few home owners consider themselves rich.

The modesty of the landlord knows no bounds

Yeah, well. The richest person in the city where I live is rich because many thousand well-paid jobs are counted as part of her wealth. I've heard that she's not a nice person, but that hardly matters: If you want to extract money from that fortune, the money has to be squeezed from the many thousand jobs, because most of it is those jobs. (It's also the buildings it happens in, and the machines they use, but the largest part if the workforce.)

Respectfully, I don't buy the power-not-actual-wealth argument.

If someone has wealth in non-liquid forms, they still have wealth.

Addressing inequality is going to mean governments and tax authorities take a broader view of wealth and methods to tax it.

There needs to be a new consensus that if wealth exceeds a certain level, it will be aggressively traced and progressively taxed.

Whether that wealth is in the form of currency, equity, corporate ownership, political power, or any of the other forms.

Because of the pyramidal distribution, it'd absolutely be feasible to say "If you have a net worth about USD$1b, you have a dedicated tax authority team who combs over your assets and calculate the minimum you should owe, using generally accepted accounting standards. Your choice how you choose to pay that."

And if they don't want to -- fine, your ability to travel in the first world is recinced. Have fun being rich, but you're not going to do it in Monaco.

The wealth isn't particularly illiquid. That's not the problem I raise.

The problem I raise is that it largely is someone's jobs. If you want to tax the companies' overall value, part of the income from the work the companies do is going to go to the taxman. That money isn't gathering in a pile, unspent, today. So some employees are going to get fired or a pay cut, as a compensating cost-cutting measure. Which is fine so long as you understand that that's where the money is coming from. But you don't, right?

I'd argue you're looking at it incompletely. If wealth is accreting in individuals, then those individuals need to be taxed more than they currently are.

Society shouldn't care if Bezos' wealth is increasing because the value of Amazon is increasing or because he struck gold on his property: the issue is that he and others own an outsized share of global wealth.

The answer is increasing how progressive tax rates are, especially at the ultra high-end.

If Bezos or other post-unicorn founders have to decrease their ownership stakes in "their" companies to pay their tax bills, that doesn't decrease the competitiveness of the businesses.

It just decreases their ownership.

Pretending that decreasing the wealth of the rich is incompatible with efficient business is a red herring used to justify individual control. Businesses can still run and people can be employed: individuals just won't have as much exclusive control over them.

And before the 'Think of small founders!' fig leave gets trotted out to cover obscene wealth, we're talking about T500-scale companies that are well past that size, and whose market distortion arguably threatens small founders much more. (Remember 'Be the next ____' instead of 'Be bought by the current ____'?)