Rep Omar: "Stop pretending we can't afford to house our homeless, heal planet, feed our children..."

[thesquanderer]

36. Nice sloganeering, but not quite the reality, as I understand it.

Last edited Thu Mar 31, 2022, 12:41 PM - Edit history (1)

The wealthy got 5 trillion richer largely based on the value of their stock. That's not "real money" that could otherwise be made available to solve poverty, it is (to pick up from another recent conversation here), "unrealized gains." It only exists on paper.

For example, Jeff Bezos owns a ton of Amazon stock, which has gone through the roof, and raised his net worth astronomically. But the only way he'd "have" that money would be to sell all the stock... and unloading that much stock at once would basically drop the value of that stock to pennies on the dollar.

So you can't raise the money to do the things Omar is talking about by, say, taxing Bezos's wealth-over-100-million at 95%, in order to get 185 billion or whatever in revenue to combat poverty, because there is no way to for Bezos to turn that much of his wealth into cash.