When people think every issue is solved by making the rich poor..

in wealth •  5 years ago 

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It's not mathematically possible to do this. People vastly overestimate how much wealth and cash the billionaires actually have.

In 2016, all the US's billionaires had a total wealth of $2.4 trillion.
Source

If you split that among all the 323.4 million people there were in the US (in 2016), you'd have $7,421 per person.

But that's if you took the entire WEALTH of the billionaires. But that's not possible. Most of that wealth is not liquid, and furthermore, the act of liquidating it would vastly devalue it. The very attempt to liquidate that wealth and redistribute it would cause much of that wealth to lose its value.

So the actual per-capita cash value of all that wealth is less than $7,421 per person. It's hard to know what the cash value is, but we know that it must be less than $7,421 per person.

The world's billionaires hold 22.2% of their wealth in cash, on average.
Source

If we apply that figure to the US, it means that US billionaires hold $532.8 billion in cash. If we split that among the US's ‬323.4 million people, it means $1,647 per person. And then the money runs out.

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