No one needs a billion dollars.

[applegrove]

Thank you for coming to my TED talk
@msrachelforlittles.bsky.social

— StrictlyChristo 🇺🇦🌻🚫👑 (@strictlychristo.bsky.social) 2025-10-26T00:33:52.789Z

[raccoon]

1. Wish I could rec this 1000 times.

[Greg_In_SF]

2. So, if someone

has a billion dollar net worth, what do we do?

[DFW]

4. Well if he or she earned it all on their own

Obviously we kill them, confiscate their wealth, and then those doing the confiscating decide on the redistribution, since they know best how to do it, and who is best deserving (¡alo presidente!).

in case it wasn’t obvious

[applegrove]

7. Do what Massachusetts did and tax it at 5% wealth tax.

Last edited Sun Oct 26, 2025, 07:07 AM - Edit history (1)

Make sure they pay the full income taxes they owe, so they pay a way higher percentage than a doctor or a nurse. Make sure the tax system is tight so the billionaires can't game the system.

[mucifer]

11. Tax the money out of them so they have less than a billion dollars. Isn't $999,999,999 enough money for one family?

[BeerBarrelPolka]

3. I don't care

if someone has a billion dollars. Good on them. I care that no one goes hungry or without health insurance. Some billionaires or extremely wealthy people, have been very generous throughout the years. The billionaires can coexist with a functioning government. The billionaires owe us nothing, just like your neighbor owes you nothing. It's our government that owes us something.

[DeeDeeNY]

5. Absolutely true

Being a billionaire is not a crime. It's only the pathologically greedy people who think their accumulation of wealth is more important than the suffering of the poor that are the problem.

[Shrek]

6. Does anyone need a million dollars?

Or a thousand?

Where is the line, and who draws it?

[BeerBarrelPolka]

8. Certainly

not the asshole who posted his "TED" talk. He's as clueless as they come.

[ColoringFool]

9. There Should Be No Billionaires

No billionaire is 100% "self-made."

Oh, sure, they might very well have originated a brilliant concept that they turned into something the public valued enough to buy, and we can all think of examples.

But without favorable tax laws and co-operative banks and/or backers, what are the chances of going from millionaire to billionaire?

Beyond a favorable Capitalist system, there's the real question of ethics and corruption, and in this decade we've seen little of the former and innumerable examples of the latter, from attorneys to judges to politicians to media people to too many others, souls purchased by.....billionaires.

And while it is true that there exist charitable billionaires, why should that be laudatory, when a government, with the monies from fairly taxing the wealthy before they got to Musk status, is able to more equitably distribute those funds. At least, until the current Administration.

IOW, I strongly believe that billionaires have far too long a reach into our government, buying votes in order to benefit themselves, to determine budget considerations, and even to affect geopolitical decisions.

That isn't even touching on international crime.

[Dr. T]

10. The few rich people I've known

got that way on the backs of their workers and by screwing over other business partners. If their success is equally distributed among those that got them their millions, that's one thing. But that's rarely the case. At the very least, they need to pay the same 30% of their income in taxes as the rest of us do.

There's a reason why millionaires run for congress, and it isn't for the lower 6-figure paycheck. That's pocket change to them. They are simply cutting out the middleman and directly legislating conditions that contribute to the redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to themselves.

[Shermann]

12. Even the "good" billionaires like Bill Gates engaged in cutthroat practices to get there.

That said, I'm not in favor of wealth caps.