Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

My wife chats with her friend over the phone fairly often, her friend has "problems" like we all do, just paying bills isn't a problem for her of course.  We used to stay on her "estate" in France but she sold it, we stayed in a guest house on the property.  Some aspects of being wealthy strike me as negatives regular folks don't really suffer.

Anyway, I think the vast majority of US billionaires try and live quiet lives out o0 the public eye.

FIFY

The rich have always voted Republican. They're the only ones who can afford it.

there is a uniparty in Washington- and the rich bet on both horses.

what you stated was actually generally true- up until the Clinton revolution- where he courted big money and transformed the Democratic party into the party of Wall Street and mega multi-national corporations. Clinton got NAFTA pushed through- it was a wet dream of the Bush I administration that could never get it done- and why do you think Clinton did that....hmm? Out of the goodness of his heart to help the American working class? Lulz. 

And Obama just took what Clinton started with the party and kicked it up a notch on steroids. Obama raised more funds for his campaign from Wall Street than any candidate in history- his entire first cabinet was virtually hand-picked by CitiBank. Obama was the Wall Street bailout king- they loved the man- and one of his final acts in office was to hand out bailouts to Wall Street private equity landlords. Hillary was no better. And Biden is an archetype kingpin for a politician being bought off by corporations- won't even talk about his brother and son's shady foreign investment deals- we'll just stick to the Big Guy and the Big Guy alone- the Big Guy didn't fucking get the nickname the Senator from MBNA for nothing ya know.

you are living in an alternative universe and not in the real one. sorry to say.

Let's imagine somehow the government taxes billionaries at 10% of their wealth.  So, one of them worth say $200 billion, nearly all in stock of "X Corp", has to see a good chunk of said stock (for which he'd normally pay capital gains taxes of about 23%).  The price of X Corp would take a beating of course.

Then is would come up again the next year, and the next, until his wealth drops below the magic figure.

I don't know how you could tax billionaires on their stock holdings- and the entire idea just seems to be pretty stupid to me imo. 

the only time billionaires pay huge tax bills is when they sell stock holdings or exercise stock options. they almost never sell significant stock holdings- and often just borrow money from banks putting up stock as collateral. and it's not like they are exercising options every year- they usually have time window to exercise their options before they expire. 

there is a gigantic problem in this country with wealth inequality though- and it just gets SO much worse when government fires up the printing presses and injects trillions- like in '08-'09, like during COVID with CARES Act, and like with all of Biden's insane trillion dollar plus spending acts he signed into law which only drove the crisis further. when government prints and spends money like water all it does is devalue the dollar, inflates the price of assets (stocks, homes, & land), and that money just concentrates into the hands of the people who already have all the money. but this is not the fault of the billionaires. it is the fault of the politicians continually giving hand outs to them.

It's a hypothetical, often proposed by some in social media, and thus perhaps worth exploring for impact and ramifications.

It could be unconstitutional.

you could try to plug the bank loan and 1-2% interest hole in order to try and make them have taxable income- but not sure. you could maybe set up a sovereign wealth fund where they have to donate x amount of shares- which the government could then sell or get dividends from (if that stock pays them), or borrow against. not sure. no one ever gets into detail on it- they just say stupid shit like "tax the rich, take all the billionaires money!". 

but it's pretty stupid to try and tax them on a stock holding that could be worthless or lose half it's value in a month imo. most of these billionaires net worth are theoretical- they don't actually have tens or hundreds of billions on hand in cash. and if someone like Musk tried to sell all his Tesla stock or was forced to sell it at once- the value would crater because he owns so much of it. 

I would be a bit curious to see how 1/20th of that would halt climate change by 2030.  But, I suspect they could offer no plan.

I started picking up feeds on FB from sources VERY negative on economic prospects and saying to sell sell sell.  I was wondering how my postings attracted that stuff.  Whatever.  I wonder how many investors get advice on the topic on FB.

They spend more on that than they do taxes, so....