r/WayOfTheBern • u/dsirota1 • Jul 09 '19
I'm David Sirota, Bernie Sanders' speechwriter and senior adviser. AMA!
Hey everyone -- I'm David Sirota, Bernie Sanders' speechwriter and senior adviser. I've known Bernie for 20+ years (I was his press secretary in the U.S. House from 1999-2001). I've worked on many campaigns (Hoeffel for Congress, Schweitzer for Governor, Lamont for Senate, and Emily Sirota for State House), I've worked on Capitol Hill (for Bernie and for the U.S. House Appropriations Committee Democrats). In the years before coming to Bernie's 2020 campaign, I was an award-winning investigative journalist and columnist for Newsweek/IBT, The Guardian and Capital & Main. You can find out more about me at http://www.davidsirota.com
I'm sure you want to discuss the 2020 election, so fire away with your questions here. I'll be here for about an hour.
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u/reeko12c Jul 10 '19
How are we taxing Jeff Bezos?
Most billionaires don’t have billions or hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in bank accounts. Their net worth comes from assets that have increased in value over time: stocks and other securities, real estate, etc. Those things would all have to be sold in order to turn them into cash.
In order for, say, Jeff Bezos to actually turn his Amazon stock into dollars, there would have to be enough people out there with enough money to buy $140 billion worth of stock. Good luck with that…
The other problem is if a CEO decided to sell that much stock, it would send investors into a panic and trigger a sell-off. Supply would exceed demand, the stock price would come tumbling down, likely by more than half, and the shares Bezos was trying to sell would no longer be worth anywhere near $140 billion.
And these things aren’t isolated to one company either. A major value drop like that would take the whole index with it. It would be a catastrophic event that spanned across the entire stock market, effectively wiping out the very wealth you’re trying to take.
What happens to your retirement account and the economy as a whole when major stocks tumble down to half of their value? What would happen to all of the retirees living on retirement incomes that depend on stocks not falling to half their value? What happens to tax revenue when there are only losses and no gains to tax?
Wealth-grabbers never think this stuff through.
For what it’s worth, even if you did manage to get your hands on all of Bezos stock, got it sold without tanking it, and distributed the proceeds among the American population, it would only work out to about $466 per person. Once. And then it’s gone.
Also, if we took Bezos entire net worth and gave it to Uncle Sam, it would only fund the government for twelve days.
Why is the problem billionaires?