Surely the government can confiscate either the income or even the wealth of the wealthiest 0.1%. After all, in the US it's just 160 000 families or so that have an income of few million on average and basically pay at present roughly 1/5 of all the tax income. Of course, after this either 100% income confiscation or 100% wealth confiscation, likely those next in line would draw conclusions. And likely many that have an income or wealth above the median income level will note what is going to happen to them too.

Of course it's a disastrous tax policy, but who cares. The objective isn't to improve the economy or the government incomes, but please those who hate the rich.

Comes to my mind how a kulak was defined during the Russian revolution: the peasants with the most land picked from an arbitrary selected group was deemed kulaks, class enemies, that were then deported or killed.

Just fix the tax system so everyones paying the same percentage, make it so the system cannot be gamed so easily.
Our systems are purchasable, thats a big part of the problem and its a human problem, not a rich person problem per say.

If governments controlled disposable income of the .1 %, would poverty end? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

There isn't much chance that the government as it is now constituted would be able to seize the piles of the rich folk's wealth. Inconveniently, it isn't piled up in swimming pools full of gold coins. It's in the form of various equities, land, buildings, and so forth, so one could give shares of real assets, but one would have to convert the shares to cash, and in order to do that there would have to be buyers with cash to give, and so on and on. It gets very complicated.

But supposing it could be just cashed in and distributed? All households in the United States own a combined wealth of $94 Trillion. The top 1% control 90% of the 94 trillion. The bottom half of all households each own about $11,000 worth of wealth. If we divided all the wealth evenly, each household would get about $760,000. So, there you go.

Now, we don't know what would happen if this were actually carried out. How would 124 million households behave financially if their wealth was increased by many hundred percent? Would massive spending send us into an inflationary tizzy? It's likely that many of those households would opt to spend at least some of their $760,000. Some people would decide to buy cars, build houses, purchase education, drink much better liquor in better glasses, eat better food, wear better clothing and shoes, and so on.

A few hundred thousand uber rich people spend a lot on luxury goods, but there is only so much stuff even the richest pigs can buy. 124 million households holding a sudden large surplus of cash could, and probably would, buy much, much more stuff than a few hundred thousand overfed pigs. This sudden wave of consumption would quickly outstrip supplies, and market disruptions would occur around the world.

Giving a lot of money to the poor isn't a problem, per se. It's 124,000,000 householders' quite understandable desire to benefit from the cash right away that is the problem. Inflation could reduce the value of all that cash pretty fast.

So, some other method is needed.

One way of doing it is to nationalize equity, commercial land, and the assets that rich people hold. The wealth of the rich would become the collective property of the people, and the economy represented by all the equity, properties, buildings, factories, and so forth would go on as before, except that the profits would devolve to the people. The rich just wouldn't be rich any more.

$94 Trillion Dollars worth of assets would pay off the national de debt which is about $22 Trillion. Various entitlement funds could/should/would be fully funded. It would be a whole new ballgame.

Will this happen?

It has a snowball's chance on an unusually hot day in hell.

Why not?

Because it would take a revolution to accomplish this, and the government as now constituted would feel steeply inclined to protect the interests of the rich, and they would shoot you and me before they would shoot the rich folk. We would be dead and the rich would live on in plush comfort.

$94 Trillion Dollars worth of assets would pay off the national de debt which is about $22 Trillion. Various entitlement funds could/should/would be fully funded. It would be a whole new ballgame.

Will this happen?

It has a snowball's chance on an unusually hot day in hell. — Bitter Crank

I always enjoy your take on these issues. I like that you're willing to lay it out so flat without blushing. I have a somewhat less revolutionary, less ambitious, approach. All I want is that everyone has enough money to live a decent life. Worthwhile work with decent pay. Affordable, safe, clean housing. Affordable medical care. Affordable education. Protection from emergencies. A decent life in old age.

No even if they donated it to the poor it would like cause inflation making everyone worse off

Just fix the tax system so everyones paying the same percentage — DingoJones

Reforming the tax code would be highly appropriate, since earlier changes that contributed to the concentration of wealth.

Another thing that has helped the uber wealthy is that much of their income comes from manipulation of abstract assets, like currency and highly derivative instruments (like credit default swaps...). In the last 20 years, at least -- maybe longer -- this area of financial skullduggery has been unusually profitable, while serving no useful purpose, really.

All I want is that everyone has enough money to live a decent life. Worthwhile work with decent pay. Affordable, safe, clean housing. Affordable medical care. Affordable education. Protection from emergencies. A decent life in old age. — T Clark

Those are admirable and attractive goals. I've always assumed that they are possible. Your goals are so desirable and presumably achievable, why have they not come to pass?

Concentration of wealth is clearly one reason. Maintaining the system of concentration deprives the many for the benefit of the few.

A question for which I do not have an answer: Is it possible for a few billion people to live well (per your aspirations) without a substantial number (a few billion, give or take) being forced to provide cheap goods and services? Like, I have numerous pieces of clothing, utensils, and so forth that are affordable because somebody else lives a meager existence.

For example, blueberries have been available all winter from near and far south of the border--all the way to Chile. The quality has been excellent, and the prices have been the same as they are when the berries come from the USA. How much are the farmworkers who produce blueberries getting per hour? Same with apples. The apples from Chile or New Zealand (bullet holes and all) are sometimes the same price as apples sold at the local farmers market or Washington state. They can't be making much in Chile or New Zealand.

I don't really feel like going into it right now but certainly, it's far, far, far less to resolve all poverty in America than just stealing all the .1% wealth. Such extremes aren't necessary, people just wrongly believe poverty is a character flaw and that redistribution isn't even fair but I believe things will change, eventually. It is more of a cultural problem than a logistical problem though.

Wow. No. Not even close. It's fun to do some back-of-the envelope calculations.

The US currently has 11 million millionaires according to this article. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/life/features/2018/03/24/heres-how-many-millionaires-there-are-in-the-us/33205747/

Suppose we go to each millionaire in the US and we tax them a flat one million dollars. Some of them, like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, won't even notice. Most of them probably only have a million or a little bit more, and those we'll strip down to the clothes on their back if we have to. If you have a net worth of a million or more we take a million. That's basically the life savings of all the middle-class couples from the heartland. They own a house, he's a teacher and she sells real estate, they put a couple of kids through college. We'll strip them bare, take the house and throw the kids out of school if they haven't finished yet.

How long could we run the government of that? Well the government spends about $4 trillion a year. Eleven million people times one million dollars is 11 trillion dollars.

So we can run the government for a little less than three years. Not bad, perhaps. But there aren't that many Bezos's and Gates's. You just wiped out the wealth of a lifetime for most of those 11 million people. And in three years when the government was broke again? All those people would be gone. You'd strip the country bare and be back to zero in three years.

That's the baseline for the discussion. There aren't enough millionaires to even strip naked to run the country for more than three years. And after that, there's no more money.

Billionaires? There are 540 of them in the US. Take a billion dollars from every billionaire. Again, Bezos and Gates won't be troubled much. But most billionaires only have that one billion. We'll strip them down to the clothes on their back.

That's 540 billion dollars. Enough money to run the country for about six weeks.

Moral of the story: There are not enough rich people to pay the government's $4T annual tab. The poor have no money. It's the working class, those people working hard all their lives to accumulate whatever they've got, who fund the government. After you soak the millionaires and billionaires you are into the everyday working stiffs. The guy who fixes your car and the guy who drives a bus.

Any redistributionist scheme to "soak the rich" must INEVITABLY, as a matter of simple arithmetic, very soon cut into you and your neighbor and everyone else who works for a living but hasn't accumulated much wealth. That's pretty much everyone.

I agree. The whole of economics is like that, pretty dubious. Its one of those phantoms of society that everyone plays along with because at this point people wouldnt really know what to do without it.

By now, it is an outrage that we have not devised a system where every citizen has sufficient of the necessities of life...without resorting to working for it.

Working should be reserved only for the most productive...which, these days, would most often be machines.

No one should have to "work for a living"...the necessities of life should be guaranteed for all. Work should be for the excesses (luxuries) of life...and jobs should be reserved only for people willing to do them at peak efficiency.

Food, clothing, shelter, transportation, communication, healthcare, education...and a modicum of recreation should be guaranteed for all.

Whatever it takes to achieve that end should be what we do. That does not mean that the rich should no longer be rich...or that they alone should bear the burden of providing.

Fact is, we have more than enough for everyone to have all those necessities. If we were to increase our productivity by limiting jobs only to people and machines that are highly productive...we would have even more.

The problem is distribution.

We can work that out...and we insult ourselves by not having already done so.

By now, it is an outrage that we have not devised a system where every citizen has sufficient of the necessities of life...without resorting to working for it.

Working should be reserved only for the most productive...which, these days, would most often be machines. — Frank Apisa

Some countries have a guaranteed minimum income, provided by the government whether or not the person works. The case has been made that it would be a good idea in the US, but it's a hard sale to make. It just rubs people the wrong way to give people money for doing nothing. I must admit I have some of those feelings myself.

On the other hand, I like to think of myself as a pragmatist. The case has been made that providing everyone with a guaranteed minimum income would actually be cheaper than the current welfare system. It would certainly be less complicated. If that's true, I would consider supporting the idea.

Some countries have a guaranteed minimum income, provided by the government whether or not the person works. The case has been made that it would be a good idea in the US, but it's a hard sale to make. It just rubs people the wrong way to give people money for doing nothing. I must admit I have some of those feelings myself.

On the other hand, I like to think of myself as a pragmatist. The case has been made that providing everyone with a guaranteed minimum income would actually be cheaper than the current welfare system. It would certainly be less complicated. If that's true, I would consider supporting the idea. — T Clark

Yeah, it would be a very hard sell.

BUT...I think it is doable.

Fact is, the people "not working" and "doing nothing"...would actually be doing something important,...namely, staying the hell out of the way.

Reluctant workers...lazy workers...inefficient workers...

...have a negative impact on productivity.

I've written on this extensively...and will probably write more here.

It is gonna be a tough sell!

Fact is, the people "not working" and "doing nothing"...would actually be doing something important,...namely, staying the hell out of the way.

Reluctant workers...lazy workers...inefficient workers...

...have a negative impact on productivity. — Frank Apisa

I guess I don't see productivity as a major social goal. Society is not a machine, it's a community. Productivity is a means to an end, but it's not that important itself.

Your analysis misses a major point: Were we to claw back many trillions of dollars from the richest 1% (whose total wealth, as I cited above, is very huge) and distribute it among the remaining 99% of the population, the government would have plenty of money to maintain its operations, and certain operations which take up the largest portion of the budget -- entitlement programs like interest on the debt, medicare, medicaid, social security, and so on would be fully funded and would also be less needed, because the population would no longer be in much need.

So, the government's requirements would be quite significantly reduced. The other major factor is that the trillions of dollars transferred to the 99% of the population would be in circulation and, and from the resulting massive stimulus, the government would have more than enough revenue from reduced taxes to operate.

But NEVER MIND. It isn't going to happen anyway.

What the mental exercise of redistribution of the top 1%'s wealth shows is that the poor get poorer BECAUSE the rich get richer. Extreme concentration of wealth impoverishes the nation.

Your analysis misses a major point: Were we to claw back many trillions of dollars from the richest 1% (whose total wealth, as I cited above, is very huge) and distribute it among the remaining 99% of the population, the government would have plenty of money to maintain its operations .., — Bitter Crank

Which part of my arithmetic do you dispute?

If you take a billion dollars from every billionaire in the country you can run the government for six weeks. Do you disagree with that analysis?

If you take a million dollars from every millionaire, you can run the country for a little less than three years ... after which you've wiped out the entire middle class. Do you dispute my numbers?

You say I missed something but you didn't say what I missed.

Flat 5% for everyone no matter who you are, what you do, or where you are. This would remove accountants from the chain, as a computerised system could do the job more fairly.

Also abolish physical cash, all electronic transactions through a central government department.

That would negate the unfair system we have suffered, We low value citizens have no hope and no chance to have an affordable life as we are being punished under the currant system.

It has to change, but wont. The powerful control the system and like it just the way it is, as it benefits them.

So unless you can can see a way to remove the obscenely wealthy and powerful. Things will carry on just the way they are.

Benefits for the lazy, bone idle, non working citizens. It’s coming quicker than you think, with more and more robotics tacking jobs, there will inevitably be more redundant people.
Governments are looking into this with the realisation that we will have more unemployment.
We have way too many people! Need to cull out a significant number so the remainder can enjoy the spoils. Yes its the wealthy getting top spots again. Watch out ( Poor ) people, your days are numbered.

If you take a billion dollars from every billionaire — fishfry

If you take a million dollars from every millionaire — fishfry

Ah, well... I was going to take a good deal more than 1 billion and 1 million from the B and M aires. I was going to take the lion's share -- that is, all of it. The B and M aires would get the same share that everybody else has. Secondly, I wouldn't just hand it to the government to cover their expenses. Giving the gov 94 trillion dollars would be a bad idea. The gov should earn their money the old fashioned way, by reasoned tax systems and even more reasoned spending systems. Giving 94 trillion to a bunch of corrupt politicians to allocate... well, you might as well burn it.

After paying off the national debt (20+ trillion) and setting aside a slug of money for climate change spending (14 trillion), 60 trillion would remain to be divided up among the 300 million people in the country. Each individual would have, in one form or another, a couple hundred thousand dollars to help take care of themselves.

Presumably people would keep on working (200,000 would be great in a bank or invested; as spending money, it wouldn't last all that long. I know people who could chew through a couple hundred thousand in quite short order. The GDP would be taxed progressively to prevent social-warping by extreme maldistribution of assets.

... bone idle.... ... redundant people...

Watch out ( Poor ) people, your days are numbered. — Nort Fragrant

I assume you live in the UK? Based on "bone idle" and "redundant". True? False.

When the lion and the lamb lay down together, we can be assured that the lion will sleep a lot better than the lamb. I was planning on the many poor people ganging up on the few uber rich people and financially skinning them alive--leaving them with the same share of wealth that everybody else gets. Back to lambs and lions. The few lions will be supervised by sharp horned ungulates with bad attitudes. The lambs will sleep well. The lions will sleep OK if they do what they are told. Otherwise, they will get gored by the sharp horned cud chewers.

I was going to take the lion's share — Bitter Crank

I would just like to see someone show me some numbers. So many dollars from this many people with such and so net worth and/or income.

The game is to feed the four trillion dollar annual expenditure of the government.

Bear in mind that we don't actually even collect the $4T in revenue now. We collect three and spend four. I hope nobody thinks that's sustainable.

But just show me some numbers. Bezos and Buffet and Gates have what, around $250B among them? An obscene amount of wealth, I might grant you that. But it's a quarter of a trillion; and you have to fund FOUR trillion per YEAR. So if you strip Bezos and Buffet and Gates to the clothes on their back, you can run the government for 1/8 of a year ... about six and a half weeks. After that, those three are dead broke and you still need a lot more revenue, every single year.

So just show me some numbers. Make some estimates. Show me a Wiki link that says there are X people with Y amount of money, and you are going to take it all, and tell me how long that runs a four trillion dollar a year government.

It's a simple exercise for anyone serious about confiscating wealth.

My point is that the question is not about the morality of "clawing back" money. The problem is that the rich literally don't have enough money. In the end you will soon be "clawing back" a coffee house waitress's tips.

Show me some numbers.

It’s simple,
I am I think sensible, I only spend what I have. I do not borrow, and have never had a credit card ( yes never ) I am on the low side of the equation and as thus have to budget very very carefully.
If I can not afford it I go without, Why do governments waist so much money on irrelevant stuff they can not afford?
Why are the Tax payers buying the politicians lunch. They can afford to buy there own. Cut out the waisted expenditure, tighten the belts and save.
All they need do is be sensible, yet No, they are greedy, and award obscene contracts to the connected families so the riches keep coming there way.
You can debate this till the cows come home, and it will not change.
Action is needed, and that needs to come from the younger generation.
Make Presidents accountable, and not let them hide, protected from blame.

I am I think sensible, I only spend what I have. I do not borrow, and have never had a credit card ( yes never ) I am on the low side of the equation and as thus have to budget very very carefully. — Nort Fragrant

@Bitter Crank has your last disposible nickel in his sights. He (and others sharing his opinion) claim he'll only soak the rich. But there aren't enough rich to soak. If someone lays out some numbers that refute my point I'll stand corrected.

Why do governments waist so much money on irrelevant stuff they can not afford? — Nort Fragrant

Cutting government spending is never on the agenda of the wealth confiscators. Have you noticed that?

Show me some numbers. — fishfry

I did, but here are some more:

The financial position of the United States includes assets of at least $269.6 trillion (1576% of GDP) and debts of $145.8 trillion (852% of GDP) to produce a net worth of at least $123.8 trillion (723% of GDP) as of Q1 2014. Wikipedia

"Wealth" is not the same as income. A man who outright owns a house worth $100,000, has no debts, no savings, and has an income of $30,000 per year is "worth" $100,000. If he had debts of $10,000, he would be worth $90,000. If he had paid off his debts and had $10,000 in savings, he'd be worth $110,000. His yearly income doesn't count as "wealth" unless part of it is saved.

That's how worth is calculated.

When we talk about the "wealth" of the USA or any country, we are taking about assets, not income. So, the net worth of the USA is $124 Trillion. No income is figured into that number.

What is all that debt? It's mortgages, credit card debt, student loans, business debt, and government debt (bonds--federal, state, county, city) and so on.

What are all those assets? It's houses, farms, urban land (often worth a very very great deal of $$$), its cars, boats, jewels, factories, stock in businesses, airplanes (one 747 is worth around 380,000,000), ships, railroads, warehouses, stores, cash, port facilities, airports, buses, subways, food in warehouses, your stash of weed, forests--just about everything that can be bought and sold.

As I mentioned, "income" is not counted as an asset. The personal income received in the United states per year is currently about $16 Trillion. The median income (half of the people make more, half of the people make less) is 31,100 (2016) per year. 10% of earners had incomes exceeding $100,000 a year. 10% is about 20,755,000 wage earners. This 10% earns about $2 Trillion a year. wikipedia

But this is where it gets complicated. A "wage" is earned, based on hours worked at a certain rate. There are other forms of income that are not wages. If Jack has $1,000,000 in investments that yield 5%, he receives $50,000 in unearned income. Jack's $50k isn't counted in the $2 Trillion of wage income. This is where the major income disparity comes in. The wealthiest 1% of the population may be employed, and may collect a paycheck. It is probably a big paycheck. But the 1%'s real source of income is "unearned" -- that is, it derives from the wealth they have accumulated.

It is from unearned income that the rich get richer, not by getting raises from the boss. They, after all, usually ARE the boss.

When we say that the richest .1%, 1%, 5%, or 10% own more wealth than everybody else, we are saying that they own most of the fixed assets--not that they receive 80% or 90% of the earned income. What they receive is UNEARNED income, which is derived from assets, not from work performed.

Why isn't income counted as wealth? One reason is that it is, for most people, in their possession for a very short period of time. Most people do, and must, spend most of their income to support whatever lifestyle they maintain. It just doesn't stay around long enough to be counted as an asset.

So, Brother Fishfry, you are as capable as I am of Googling income and wealth stats. Have at it.

Bitter Crank has your last disposible nickel in his sights. He (and others sharing his opinion) claim he'll only soak the rich. But there aren't enough rich to soak. If someone lays out some numbers that refute my point I'll stand corrected. — fishfry

A technical issue: If you want to put a participant in blue, you have to do it this way: @ " bitter Crank " (but with no spaces around the @ or the ")

I commend you for your financial prudence. Keep it up.

I do not have your last nickel in my expropriating sights. It is not necessary for you to glue it to the gun you keep under your pillow to protect it from socialists. What I have been trying to get through Fishfry's highly resistant and pre-cast concrete skull is that there are enough rich to soak, and that the rich I plan on soaking have more than enough money to solve our problems.

The reason why economists are disturbed about highly uneven distributions of wealth is that the rich have under their control such a large share of resources that funds for productive investment and public and social infrastructure is not available. The rich don't build schools with their wealth. They don't build bridges, subways, hospitals, and the like. (They might make a donation here and there to a school or a hospital, if they can get their name on the building.)

It's not just in the United States. The same disproportion of wealth distribution exists in many countries and globally as well. Oxfam International estimates that the richest people in the world (most of whom are not American) have more wealth than half of the world's population of 3 billion.

It didn't happen over night, and by and large the rich are not "criminals" in the ordinary sense of the word. They just followed the money, and the rich tend to get richer. That's because they started with a lot of money to invest, and they could hire experts to help them. People like you and me tend to get poorer as time goes on. We are lucky to have a pot to piss in; we don't have much money at all to invest, and if we wanted to invest $2,000, we wouldn't be able to afford professional advice on how to turn that $2,000 into $6,000 in a day or two of clever manipulation.

The game is to feed the four trillion dollar annual expenditure of the government. — fishfry

One of the reasons we have a deficit is that a few years ago (and 3 decades ago) we lowered the tax on the wealthiest Americans. Lower taxes on the wealthiest people is one of the reasons income distribution is so disproportionate.

The largest area of the Federal Budget is Mandated Spending--entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the like. that's $2.841 trillion in FY 2020. Is this money wasted?

Hardly. Every dollar of mandated spending is injected back into the economy in the form of social security checks, and payments to care providers at various levels. Social security checks are mostly spent at the neighborhood or county level. People use it to buy what they need. Medicare and medicaid dollars are spent at local medical facilities. (Pharmaceutical companies are ripping the government off, because of Republic sponsored legislation which prevents medicare from negotiating the price of drugs!)

A secondary benefit of Medicaid, especially, is that it maintains the health of the poorest population. From a public health standpoint, this is highly desirable. Better to nip communicable disease in the bud.

Another area of "mandatory spending", not quite mandated, is payments on the debt. This year the payment on the national debt is 389 billion in fiscal year 2019. In 2028 the interest on the debt will be $914 billion.

The national debt has been risen and fallen for our entire history, but it is at a historical high. However, I don't know whether the chart represents constant dollars. It's worth noting that we eventually paid off WWII debt around the middle of the 1960s, thanks to the post WWII boom. Our present high debt is a result of the class war, not a hot war. It's the tax laws passed to please the rich at the expense of the poor that causes the current high level of debt.

A technical issue: If you want to put a participant in blue, you have to do it this way: " bitter Crank " (but with no spaces around the @ or the ") — Bitter Crank

Ah, thank you.

When we talk about the "wealth" of the USA or any country, we are taking about assets, not income. — Bitter Crank

Surely nothing I said could have given the impression I'm unclear on that distinction. After all I did give the example of confiscating the entire net worth of Bezos, Gates, and Buffet, which I gave as $250B. Bezos has about $140B but he's going to lose half of it to his soon-to-be ex-wife. Gates and Buffet are around $60B or so each. So I'm in the ballpark.

So it's clear that I know the difference between net worth and income; and that my examples are all relative to net worth. A million from each millionaire, a billion from each billionaire. Everything they own from Bezos, Buffet, and Gates. By the way my earlier estimate was wrong. $250B is 1/4 trillion, hence only 1/16 of the $4T it takes to run the government for a year. We could strip those three guys down to their shorts and run the government for three and a half weeks. Not that it wouldn't be fun anyway.

One of the reasons we have a deficit is that a few years ago (and 3 decades ago) we lowered the tax on the wealthiest Americans. — Bitter Crank

Yeah yeah. I'll perfectly well stipulate to everything you say. But you are not answering my question. Tomorrow morning you are declared Grand Commissar of the New American People's Republic. You have to make a decree. We will take X dollars from each person with Y net worth. I want to know your numbers. I showed that a million from each millionaire runs the government for less than three years. A billion from each billionaire, about six and a half weeks.

Show me your numbers. I claim that if you say explicitly which people you're going to take money from, and exactly how much, you will find that within a few years you'll be completely out of money to run the government without digging deeply into the pockets of the working class. That is my claim. Go ahead and prove me wrong with hard numbers. How much are you taking, and from whom?

What I have been trying to get through Fishfry's highly resistant and pre-cast concrete skull — Bitter Crank

I'm perfectly civil to everyone I interact with on this site. I request the same from you. Nor would your remark be warranted even if put politely. I know the numbers AND the narrative. You could recite the World Almanac and you would still be avoiding my simple and direct question. How much, and from whom?

That is my claim. Go ahead and prove me wrong with hard numbers. How much are you taking, and from whom? — fishfry

I already told you: all of it. The multi-millionaires and billionaires will be financially cleaned out. You can find your own list of very wealthy people.

It isn't necessary to make me Grand Commissar of the New American People's Republic. Commissar is sufficient. And it won't be a republic any more, it will be an industrial democracy. The workers will be in charge of the means of production and distribution (and of course they will also be the consumers). It will be up to them to decide what to do.

Since you are getting testy about my civility in referencing your cranium... What have you got against pre-cast concrete? It's splendid material. If I had really meant to impugn your intelligence, I would have said something cruder and crueler. But I wasn't impugning your intelligence or knowledge, and I didn't wish to do so. So I beg pardon for my fault, for my most grievous fault.

I've cited the amount of wealth that the richest portion of the United States owns. Several million people compose that class. I don't plan on looking for a list of them all. Neither do you. I told you what I would do with it -- distribute it to The People.

This is all fantasy anyway. I even pointed out that we have no idea what the upshot of distributing $94 trillion dollars to the 124 million households would be. My guess is that it would be economically catastrophic. It would be catastrophic NOT because it had been taken away from the rich. It would be ruinous if 124 million households started spending it all at once (or even somewhat slowly). The tri$$ions would have to be IV dripped very slowly. Just as you can't restore a starving person by feeding them a huge meal, you can't undo poverty and economic insufficiency by dumping tons of money on the economy all at once.

Oh, look: There's my exit ramp.

The workers will be in charge of the means of production — Bitter Crank

distribute it to The People. — Bitter Crank

Are you an authentic old-time Marxist? Karl, I mean, not Groucho.

Are you an authentic old-time Marxist? Karl — fishfry

Workers of the world unite. You have a world to gain and nothing to lose but your chains.

Yes.