Jeff Bezos - worlds first trillionaire?

You didn't go far enough back in history.

Okay. So I assume you're talking about the French Revolution.

Let's look at that......

Started 1789.

Yeah they took all the rich peoples stuff. Along with their heads.

Got bloody. Super bloody as the revolutionaries turned on each other. (leftists always turn on each other - you can see that even today with leftists)

Destroyed the French economy. The country was completely bankrupt within less than 10 years.

Got so bad that in 1799, just ten short years after the French "took the wealth" the country turned to one man, Napoleon Bonaparte, and made him emperor which is just a fancy word for king, and he established an empire.

The revolution did bring about some important and good changes for the world but let's not pretend that the French going after the wealthy in 1789 was a good thing for their economy. It wasn't. They wrecked their economy to the point that they basically made a new king to stop the insanity. They just called him emperor and had he not lost in the wars that followed and been exiled he'd have probably died as emperor of a massive empire many decades later.

The French Revolution was so bad that even Thomas Jefferson had to denounce it. The French Revolution is not some high minded moral standard that we should look up to or strive to achieve.

Jesus, WTF? I was literally looking at the link when I cut from it.

Anyway:
http://allthingsd.com/20131010/how-jeff-bezos-crushed-diapers-com-so-amazon-could-buy-diapers-com/

And
https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/who-should-antitrust-protect-the-case-of-diapers-com/

More to the point, it's power and influence over others' ability to survive.
We're really just reinventing feudalism at this point.

“The measure would have established a tax on "adjusted gross income" above $200,000 for individuals and $400,000 for married couples or domestic partners filing jointly.”

https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Income_Tax,_Initiative_1098_(2010)

Now thanks to its progressive policies WA does have one of the best economies in the nation but the majority of folks DO NOT make more than $200k a year.

Also, neither you nor @Federal Farmer have explained how the budget was mismanaged. Once again:

Just 4 months ago Washington State had a budget surplus of $941 million and a Budget Stabilization Account (aka the Rainy Day Fund) of $1.620 Billion.

Aside from not being under the control of Trump at the Federal level I’m not sure what you think Washington state should have done differently to better prepare for yet again another Republican Recession.

Thank God that the world had Jeff Bezos to come up with the concept of *checks notes* ...selling stuff on the internet. Without the potential to earn a countries GDP worth of wealth no-one would have bothered exploring that idea.

Well apparently a significant part of the state was smart to know that you and people like you are liars.

Just like the people who passed the original income tax at the Federal level and said it would only apply to the rich people. Well look where we are just over a 100 years later.

The people in your state realized that once WA wasn't bringing in enough income tax either through bad management and/or driving out the rich they would find that $200,000 and $400,000 would suddenly go lower. Much lower. And they wanted no part of it.

This, this, and this again.

every country on earth has people living and dying on the streets somewhere. Do trillionaires deserve their own planet?

Republican recession?

No.

As usual you have no idea what you are talking about.

The original income tax in the US started out at $800 ($22k in today’s dollars).

Also you cons need to get your narratives straight. Do most Americans pay income tax or not? Or is that line only when demonizing the working class as freeloaders?

You were sooooo close to getting the point.

People act like a 4 percent tax is gonna leave the ultra-wealthy destitute. Bezos is worth, like, $120B? You could tax 99.99 percent of his net worth and he still has a cool 1.2 billion dollars to live off of. Hell, with that much money, he could live off the interest for generations.

But sure, let's keep kicking those boots in the hopes that one day, we might get to stomp heads!

Something tells me you didn't major in math.

But I do like having two prepositions at the end of the sentence.

I assume it's be something close to that, give or take a few hundred million but that's still enough for him to make do till his next payday

You're a couple of orders of magnitude off there.

Multiplying by 0.01 is dividing by 100, which gives you 1%.

You have to remember when doing percent you lose two decimal places. your example leaves him with 12 million. Your example works just fine with 99 percent. 1.2 billion is still more than a person could spend in a lifetime for their efforts.

Not everyone has class envy.

Are you aware of the performance of France's public finances before the revolution?

I don't know where to start with this. The government that was put in place in 1795 (The Directory) has already put a stop to the worst excesses of the revolutionary years. Napoleon took power later and was neither installed in order to, nor did he, "stop the insanity". If anything it was the restoration that followed his defeat which attempted to reconstitute the old class system to a limited degree and that was imposed upon France largely from without. But many of the changes of the revolution were permanent.

I guess you were sick that day in elementary school when they showed you how to convert percentages into decimals.

Also, warning for math in the Red Room. (And particularly bad math, to boot...)

EDIT: Dammit, @Bailey beat me to it.

Your first mistake is taking history lessons from an American. In my experience, the majority of Americans barely know what's going on in their neighbouring state, much less other countries. There are exceptions, of course, but @Zombie isn't one of them.

I'm sorry, I thought this was 'Murica

Yeah, it's been awhile since I've done the maths. And yeah, leaving it at 99 percent even is still an insane amount of money. Even the example I was aiming for still left the fucker a millionaire.

Point is, tax the rich. They'll be fine.

Do any of those other countries have trillionaires?

They pay far more in taxes than you can make in a lifetime. No one is going to be taking their money and giving it to you. Stop being envious.