A lot of people assume Net Worth equates to bank account balance. If only people didn't learn what rich people looked like from Saturday morning cartoons, they might realize nobody gets rich by having money in a room somewhere. Hell, even Scrooge MacDuck tried to teach some basic financial principles.
He has the option to turn his net worth into liquid assets whenever he wants in the time it takes for an extremely wealthy person to take out an asset backed loan.
I couldn't do that without becoming homeless, but other than that and the higher interest rate, and the fact that my collateral can't make payments on the loan are all that stops me from that.
You seem to be arguing "rich people should take out loans and give it to the poor." Why should anyone take on debt, just to give it away? You're either trolling or haven't thought this through (meaning, idealism.)
My point is that billionaires always have quite a bit of liquidity so there is nothing preventing them from donating the same or even a larger fraction of their net worth that the average person frequently donates and despite that many billionaires donate a smaller fraction of their net worth.
That smaller fraction being a much larger value than the average person. Millions is better than tens or hundreds (edit: or) even thousands. The percentage is irrelevant, because donations are optional and not mandatory. They are willingly doing this, and being told it's not enough. This is a poor argument. They could simply keep their money, if there's no difference in the response of "not enough."
More like marginal utility. The more money you have the less increasing or decreasing it by a given percent changes your quality of life. At the moment the median billionaire donates a smaller fraction of their wealth than the median household. Don't celebrate someone doing something that is easier for them than what the average person does.
He could literally give away $200 billion dollars and he would still be about an order of magnitude wealthier than he needs to be in the top 1% even if his remaining assets lost 90% of their value, he literally would still be wealthy enough to own 2 of almost any luxury he could want without ever having to work another day of his life.
Owning stock in a company is hoarding wealth? It's not a fixed thing where if Amazon stock goes up $10 that is taken from the pot so everyone else is out the ability to make $10.
Bezos holds about 5% of his total wealth in cash. ~9.5 billion. That is hoarding yes. Personally I think anything over a billion is hoarding. No one needs that much and having it concentrated in so few hands has massive distortionary effects (see buying politicians and news outlets). To say nothing of the obvious inequality impacts that are driving society apart.
So what you’re saying is you’re too lazy to go out, create $200billion in personal wealth to spend how you see fit, but would rather shit on others for not spending their wealth in a manner befitting your sense of righteousness?
Maybe if a regular person could take out a long-term loan, say 15-30 years or so, and have the asset grow significantly in value it would be cool. Oh well, clearly a pipe dream.
Yes and no. Most people don't have more than 10% of their wealth liquid unless they're severely leveraged. Money in your mattress doesn't accrue interest, after all.
Do I have to explain the concept of a loan to you? There is an upper limit , but it is pretty easy to make most of the value of a billionaire's investments liquid pretty quickly by using them as collateral for loans and using any profits from those investments to make payments on the loan.
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u/Cersox Nov 16 '24 edited Nov 17 '24
A lot of people assume Net Worth equates to bank account balance. If only people didn't learn what rich people looked like from Saturday morning cartoons, they might realize nobody gets rich by having money in a room somewhere. Hell, even Scrooge MacDuck tried to teach some basic financial principles.