A nominally numerate engineer posted this recently, to praise from her nominally numerate friends.
The ethics of murdering people aside, let's assume you could kill the top ten richest Americans.
And let's assume that you could liquidate their assets at full price (impossible, in practice, since generally most of their assets are in the form of stocks, and selling that much of their stock at once would drive down the stock price).
But let's assume the impossible; such a sale would realize ~$675 billion dollars.
The US Government will spend about $6.1 trillion ($6100 billion) in 2020.
So, you'd be able to run the government for about 41 days.
Of course, once the other rich people saw you murdering and expropriating the top ten rich people, they would reasonably fear they would be next.
So, they would try to flee and move their companies and assets to less murderous countries. And no doubt the remaining entrepreneurs would be reducing their effort to avoid being killed/expropriated. Which would eliminate thousands of jobs and drastically reduce the tax base.
So, yay?
Original tweet:
https://twitter.com/GonzoHacker/status/1243323086956564481
The ethics of murdering people aside, let's assume you could kill the top ten richest Americans.
And let's assume that you could liquidate their assets at full price (impossible, in practice, since generally most of their assets are in the form of stocks, and selling that much of their stock at once would drive down the stock price).
But let's assume the impossible; such a sale would realize ~$675 billion dollars.
The US Government will spend about $6.1 trillion ($6100 billion) in 2020.
So, you'd be able to run the government for about 41 days.
Of course, once the other rich people saw you murdering and expropriating the top ten rich people, they would reasonably fear they would be next.
So, they would try to flee and move their companies and assets to less murderous countries. And no doubt the remaining entrepreneurs would be reducing their effort to avoid being killed/expropriated. Which would eliminate thousands of jobs and drastically reduce the tax base.
So, yay?
Original tweet:
https://twitter.com/GonzoHacker/status/1243323086956564481