While i agree with the overall sentiment of your comment, the whole thing about “Jeff Bezos worth $50bil instead of $100bil” ticked me off a bit. Mostly because it reeks of lack of knowledge and substance.
How do you propose making it happen? Note that by saying this, i dont mean “how do you convince him to do it”. I mean, what would be the process for doing that, assuming everyone is already on board with it.
99% (or close to it) of those billions of Jeff Bezos’ worth are in Amazon stock. How do you propose making his net worth only $50bil and making use of the rest? Making him give up half of the ownership in the company by giving his shares to the government, thus making the government a major shareholder in the company?
This is a genuine question, because i do not see how else shares can be feasibly taxed until the moment they are sold. And there is no way Jeff would be able to sell half of them, i bet there are rules that don’t even allow major shareholders cash out like that, since it would crash the value of Amazon overnight. And by the time he is done selling, he would have made way less than that, as the value of shares will be continuously dropping as he sells. Not even the mentioning the whole aspect of forcing someone to sell their shares and, thus, giving up their ownership in the company.
Making Jeff Bezos' net worth suddenly belong to other people would be a massive event, and if done clumsily would undermine the foundations of property and ownership, which so many things depend on. Even those aren't fundamental truths, but people really care about them. Not likely to happen without a catastrophe (e.g. WW3).
On the other hand, making it so someone like Jeff Bezos could never accrue $100bil in the first place is a lot more plausible.
> i do not see how else shares can be feasibly taxed until the moment they are sold.
Oh, that's just a matter of assigning a notional value through some accounting estimation process. The value might be wrong but that's ok, overpaid tax would be returned if a lower value was discovered at the next sale.
But why sell the shares anyway. If you're going to transfer $50bil (currently in shares) to lots of poor people, transfer the shares. I expect people would find a way to trade their microshares afterwards to get the things they need. Amazon would probably be happy to run the microshare-trading service for a small commission :-)
How do you propose making it happen? Note that by saying this, i dont mean “how do you convince him to do it”. I mean, what would be the process for doing that, assuming everyone is already on board with it.
99% (or close to it) of those billions of Jeff Bezos’ worth are in Amazon stock. How do you propose making his net worth only $50bil and making use of the rest? Making him give up half of the ownership in the company by giving his shares to the government, thus making the government a major shareholder in the company?
This is a genuine question, because i do not see how else shares can be feasibly taxed until the moment they are sold. And there is no way Jeff would be able to sell half of them, i bet there are rules that don’t even allow major shareholders cash out like that, since it would crash the value of Amazon overnight. And by the time he is done selling, he would have made way less than that, as the value of shares will be continuously dropping as he sells. Not even the mentioning the whole aspect of forcing someone to sell their shares and, thus, giving up their ownership in the company.