@futurebird There's a big gap between 750,000 and 75,000,000. 750,000 is a well-off retirement fund plus paid for home; well out of the reach of most I admit, but not obscene. 75,000,000 is well into the obscene realm. 7,500,000 is much closer to the boundary.
I guess I could have set the poll to the "check more than one option setting" and have done something like this... it gives more options... but they also aren't really that different.
Sort of like encoding the value in a kind of janky binary... We really need more poll options.
Check the boxes so that the sum is close to your boundary number:
@futurebird Still a huge gap there, and 55,000,000 is on the far side of it! 20,000,000 is probably what I would say is the boundary, and that is still closer to 5,000,000 than 50,000,000.
To allow for yacht ownership ( yes, repulsive) I think it would be hard to argue against a 95 percent marginal tax rate for every dollar above $500 million.
@futurebird I would have gone for something in between. 750K and 75 million… that is a big gap. 750K is not that much, especially in California (real estate).
@futurebird I'd say 7,500,000; "owning a house" is not obscene; 10x is. Like, that's enough money to live on the interest forever. There is no amount of money that actually makes life easier past that. I might go lower, but if we're talking orders of magnitude, millions.
@futurebird My boundary is ( median_household_income * 5 ) / 0.025
Which is about $15M in 2022.
A person with that much can spend 5x as much as the median household, every year, without ever working. They can pay their fiduciary 0.5% (AKA median income) to manage it, and also take out 2.5% every year. Most years, the principal will keep up with inflation, and even grow a little.
@futurebird If you got a job as an engineer in 1990 with a decent retirement plan, put your 401k into a tech-stock mutual fund, bought a house near a big city, and didn’t have a major health crisis, you’d have $10M now. So someone with $75M is lucky, but not obscene.
@futurebird ~$30,000,000. I don’t think in terms of “obscene wealth” so much as “more than you could need”. For income the threshold for that might be something like 5 times the cost of living for an individual—more than enough to support a family. For wealth that would be the amount you need to have invested to expect to reach the income threshold from investment income alone. If it were up to me, I’d set the thresholds a bit generously, and tax income and wealth above them at 90%
@futurebird
If you have a million bucks and your workers that made that million bucks for you are still living in poverty, then you are obscenely wealthy. If you have a billion dollars, then you have not paid your staff what they are worth, no question.
@futurebird is "750k excluding the house one lives in" an option? Assuming it's not a mansion.
I.e. someone inheriting their parents' house plus half a mil isn't "obscenely rich" imo, but if they already own their own house, they don't need the second house. Idk if that makes sense 😅
@futurebird to me “obscene” is somewhere between 5-10M cause I think that’s the point where you never have to do any more labor of any kind to keep living a lavish lifestyle and probably guarantee the same for your children.
@futurebird 75M$ is dynastic-level, but not obscene as that's still spendable. New product dev projects at work run 8 figures. Can buy projects or things, but not cities or economies. Definitely should be subject to significant wealth taxes.
7.5G$ is Bond villain level obscene. Can buy countries / industries / cities. Absolutely should be taxed fractions with Should probably be hunted for sport.
I'm also one of those bad leftists that wants the dream of 90s Trek's better future and thinks labor-for-life is actually evil. Jobs guarantee just sounds like genteel slavery with extra steps.
@futurebird
What really matters for wealth is whether you can sustain multiple life altering family medical events and emergencies per person and never worry about housing, food, and care. That varies wildly by location, time, race, and gender.
Go beyond that and you can call it obscene if the individual chooses to be an asshole to others with it. Many people are just obscene assholes, no matter their net worth. Wealth buys attention.
@futurebird I have observed in doing estate planning: $2-3M per couple is about where you will not really lose money no matter what you do, will make sure that you can pay for health care, have a secure & comfortable retirement, fix your house, and provide some for heirs. Less than that will still work, but more than that is useless for any one lifetime. So I put my threshold at $5M.
Aware that it's beyond many ppl's means, myself included.
The line's always going to be fuzzy. I would say that while it's quite possible to have $7.5 million without having made it primarily off the suffering of others, it is much less probable to have $75 million or more without an expectation of lives lost somewhere in the bargain.
@futurebird
Rich: one standard deviation above the mean
Very rich: two standard deviations
Insanely rich: three standard deviations
Obscenely rich: four standard deviations
How did we get here: five standard deviations
Where's the guillotine: six standard deviations
@futurebird 100k is in most places in the US enough for a family of 4 to live a middle - upper middle class lifestyle for 1 year.
1,000k is enough for 1 person to retire on around 65 years of age similarly. 3,000k enough for the family of 4 to live off and their children to retire on after. 10,000k enough for that same family to never work, nor their grandchildren^x either. 100,000k enough to warp law and society. 1,000,000k enough to bully national politics and bend reality towards ones will.
@futurebird@futurebird in a world where a modest home in Sydney costs $1m, I think we need something between $750k and $75m.
.... We also need an economic system where one doesn't have to be a literal millionaire in order to access shelter in some swanky luxury lifestyle location like checks notes St Mary's
@futurebird I'd put the boundary somewhere between "do you have a 0.01% chance of living in poverty at some point in your remaining life" and "without making another cent or contributing anything to society could your four children live their entire lives on your wealth". So somewhere between the first two options.
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