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Taxing the wealthy: the justification [1]

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Date: 2025-07-02

I am quite certain that everyone at Kos is cool with raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy bigly, as are most Duhmerikans. But there are mindsets out there that make it hard to justify taxing them more. Far too many just think “Well, they have earned it.” “They are really smart and they work hard.” And the uber wealthy love to play up that last part, with Musk often commenting on the mega hours he puts in (which I doubt is a common occurrence, and certainly not hours of work that most of us would understand).

Let’s examine those two a little bit. Is Bezos smart? Does/did Musk work hard? Sure, but how hard do they work, how much smarter are they? Musk is worth about 300 billion, and the median wealth of the rest of us is about $175,000, or 1.7 MILLION times as much. To justify that disparity, Musk would have to work about 200,000 hours per day. Assuming an average IQ of 100, his IQ would have to be 170,000,000. So now, that justification is not even close to being valid.

An even better point is to understand the necessary ingredients behind their ability to gather vast wealth. Bill Gates built a company from the ground up and turned it into a computer software powerhouse. Hats off to him. But did he do so with nothing around to help build that? Did he take a sharpened stick and head off into the wilderness and come back with $200 billion he procured with his own hands? No, Gates needed computers, electricity, transmission lines, and a myriad of productive businesses and billions of educated humans to make use of his products. Did he educate them? Did he invent computers? Did he build the electric infrastructure? No, none of that but it was the backbone he needed to generate so much as $1 of revenue. Did Musk invent cars and batteries and build roads and generation plants and teach people how to drive? No. And all those things involved trillions upon trillions of investment of public and private monies and centuries of effort. Is it really too much to ask to have them support all that by putting back a large part of his wealth to pay it back and keep it going? To do otherwise is being a mooching wealth extractor.

There are many reasons to justify raising taxes on these guys and this is just another one. But these reasons show that is it perfectly fair to have them pay back a large amount of their wealth to support the system that was indispensable to their success. Who needs more than a billion? Its right, its just, its necessary for a functional democracy. Raise their taxes!

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