Politics & Society1mo ago · 104 comments
Should the ultra-rich be allowed to exist while people sleep on the street?
Earned success, or a moral failure of the whole system? One side says envy, the other says math. Where do you land?
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your comment- Theo4d ago
Y'all are having an economics debate and I just want to say: I knew a man named Carl who lived outside the library near my office for four years. He died last February. He wasn't a policy position. He was a person who liked chess and was scared of dogs and deserved a door he could lock. I'm so tired of this being abstract.
- Iris4d ago
I'm sorry about Carl. Genuinely. And you're right that it shouldn't be abstract. But the way we honor people like Carl is by getting the policy right, not just by feeling bad. Sentiment without mechanism just makes us feel better while the next Carl dies.
- Theo L.1d ago
Anyone notice that this conversation always ends up being about whether billionaires deserve their money, and never about whether the people on the street deserve a bed? Flip the frame. Start from the person in the cold, not from the person in the penthouse, and see how quickly your policy priorities rearrange.
- Jamie3w ago
I volunteer at a shelter every other Saturday. We're chronically understaffed and underfunded and we turn people away almost every night because we don't have beds. Meanwhile the city approved a new sports stadium subsidy this year. Something is deeply wrong with our priorities and I don't think it's complicated.
- Feli3w ago
Sports stadium subsidies are genuinely one of the most bipartisan scams in American life. Almost every economist agrees they don't deliver the returns cities are promised. And yet every decade, another one.
- Iris K.1w ago
Slept in my car for three weeks after a divorce wiped me out. Had a job. Had a phone. Still couldn't get into a shelter because they were full. The gap between 'housed person with problems' and 'unhoused person' is terrifyingly small and most comfortable people have no idea.
- Theo1w ago
This. My neighbor lost her apartment when her landlord converted the building to condos. She was employed, had savings, good credit. Still took her four months to find something she could afford. Four months is a long time to be in crisis.
- Diego1mo ago
A single person having more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes, in the same city as a freezing child, isn't 'success.' It's a choice we all keep making.
- Jamie2w ago
I'm a social worker. I have clients who work 40 hours a week and still can't afford rent. Don't tell me it's about effort. Don't tell me it's about choices. I see the choices they're making. They are grinding. The math just doesn't work at the bottom anymore and that's not a personal failure.
- Jamie2w ago
Thank you for this. The 'just work harder' crowd has never had to calculate whether they can afford both groceries AND their kid's school supplies in the same week.
- Zara _x2w ago
Respectfully, one social worker's clients aren't a representative sample of all economic outcomes. I'm not dismissing your experience but confirmation bias is real, and extrapolating national policy from individual casework has limits.
- Liam B.2w ago
What in the galaxy-brained logic did I just read. You're going to tell a social worker who works with struggling people daily that they might be experiencing 'confirmation bias'? The data ALSO shows wage stagnation and housing costs skyrocketing. This isn't anecdote. The anecdote just has a face.
- Kofi B.2w ago
At some point we have to ask what kind of society we actually want to be. Not what's politically feasible right now, not what economists model, but what do we actually believe people owe each other? Because we keep having the policy argument while avoiding the values argument underneath it. And that's where the real disagreement is.
- Alex6d ago
What always gets me is the philanthropy defense. 'But Gates is funding malaria vaccines!' Cool. A private individual should not have veto power over which diseases get funded and which don't. That's democratic governance. We traded it for a tax cut and called it generosity.
- Taylor5d ago
spent two years working for a nonprofit that received funding from one of these big foundations. the strings attached, the reporting requirements designed around the donor's vanity metrics, the pivoting our entire program because a billionaire read one article and changed his mind — philanthropy is not governance. it's the opposite.
- Theo3w ago
People keep saying 'tax the rich' like that's a coherent plan. Tax them how? Income? Most billionaire wealth is unrealized capital gains that never gets taxed as income. Carried interest loopholes? Stepped-up basis at death? If you actually want this, you have to get into the unsexy technical details of tax code reform, not slogans.
- Taylor3w ago
Okay fine, mark-to-market taxation on assets above $100M, eliminate stepped-up basis, close carried interest loophole, restore estate tax to 1970s levels. There's your unsexy technical details. Happy now?
- Feli 213w ago
Mark-to-market creates massive liquidity problems. You might own $200M in stock that you can't sell without crashing its price. Are we going to force people to partially liquidate ownership stakes annually? What does that do to company stability?
- Theo3w ago
Those are real implementation challenges that real economists are working on real solutions to. Payment-in-kind options, liquidity adjustments for illiquid assets, etc. The problems aren't unsolvable, they've just never been politically viable enough to actually try. That's a power problem, not a math problem.
- Yuki1mo ago
The question itself is loaded. 'Allowed to exist' implies we could just delete billionaires if we wanted. The real question is what policy levers we pull — progressive taxation, housing investment, healthcare. The dramatic framing lets everyone feel righteous without doing the boring work of actual policy.
- Theo2w ago
The sleeping on the street part is the tell. We KNOW how to house people. We have done it. Finland basically ended chronic homelessness. It's not a mystery. It's a priority. We have chosen, repeatedly, not to prioritize it. That's the whole argument right there.
- Ravi2w ago
Finland's population is 5.5 million. Los Angeles county alone has 10 million people. Scaling arguments matter. I'm not saying nothing can be done, I'm saying 'Finland did it' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this debate.
- Yuki S.1w ago
The question frames this as either/or and that framing is doing all the damage. Nobody serious is arguing we should guillotine Jeff Bezos. The argument is about marginal tax rates and housing policy. But nuance doesn't get clicks so here we are.
- Maya _x3d ago
Here's what nobody mentions: the ultra-rich don't just have money, they have captured regulatory systems, media outlets, and political donations that PREVENT the solutions from happening. It's not that we tried redistribution and it failed. It's that the people with the most to lose from it spent billions making sure we never tried.
- Omar3w ago
What I find fascinating is how much energy we spend debating whether billionaires should 'exist' instead of asking why we gutted the mental health system in the 80s, why zoning laws make it illegal to build affordable housing in most American cities, why the VA leaves veterans in tent cities. The billionaire debate is intellectually satisfying but it's also a distraction from tractable policy failures.
- Sam3w ago
This. A thousand times this. Means-tested, well-funded housing-first programs work. We know they work. We choose not to fund them at scale. That's the real scandal.
- Noah 923w ago
nope. you cannot separate the policy failures from the wealth concentration. the reason we 'choose' not to fund those programs is because the people who fund political campaigns prefer we don't. it's the same problem with an extra step.
- Elena 921w ago
Every time this conversation happens someone says 'we need to talk about values not policy' and then nobody actually talks about values either. I'll start: I believe every person being warm and fed is more important than any single person accumulating beyond any reasonable need. That's a value. Come at me.
- Zara1w ago
Value: I believe coerced redistribution at gunpoint (which is what taxation ultimately is) requires an extraordinarily high moral bar to justify. 'It would make things nicer' doesn't meet that bar for me. 'People are dying preventably' might. That's where I try to think about the line.
- Noah1w ago
'Taxation is coercion at gunpoint' is one of those lines that sounds edgy and principled and actually just means you've never thought about what civilization requires. Roads. Courts. Contracts enforced. The wealth you're protecting exists because of those systems. The bill comes due.
- Avery3w ago
I grew up in a family that was one medical bill away from homelessness for most of my childhood. We were never on the street but we were close enough to feel the gravity of it. I've worked hard, I'm doing okay now, and I still don't think my success means the system is fair. I'm the exception, not the proof.
- Priya1w ago
The audacity of the 'both sides' framing here. One side is 'there are children freezing.' The other side is 'but wealth incentives.' These are not equivalent moral weights and treating them as a balanced debate is itself a political act.
- Ravi1w ago
The 'redistribute it and it only funds things for a few weeks' argument comes up every single time and it's a deliberate misdirection. Nobody is talking about a one-time loot. We're talking about structural taxation that recurs annually and prevents that concentration from building up in the first place. The math argument only works if you accept the current system as fixed.
- Sam1w ago
Respectfully disagree with the above. Even annual wealth taxes have massive compliance problems — capital flight, valuation disputes, hiding assets in trusts. Denmark tried variants of this and partially walked it back. The mechanics genuinely don't work as smoothly as the slogan suggests.
- Riley1w ago
I'm a nurse. I've had three patients this year come in with frostbite from sleeping outside. Not hypothermia, FROSTBITE. Actual tissue death. In 2024. In a country with trillionaires. I don't want to hear about capital flight.
- Quinn L.3w ago
What bothers me is we've completely normalized the existence of homelessness. Like it's weather. 'Oh yeah there are tent cities under the overpass, that's just how it is.' That normalization is doing so much work to keep us from demanding anything change.
- Feli2w ago
This is actually a really sharp critique of philanthropic capitalism that gets ignored because we're supposed to be grateful. Andrew Carnegie built libraries while crushing unions. The pattern isn't new.
- Priya1w ago
Billionaires exist because we let them. Full stop. They don't exist in isolation. They exist in legal, regulatory, and financial systems that WE collectively maintain. That's not envy, that's civics.
- Yuki 214w ago
spent a year doing street outreach. the majority of chronically homeless people have severe mental illness or addiction issues that money alone doesn't fix. you could hand them $10,000 tomorrow and most would be back on the street within six months without comprehensive support services. the billionaire framing skips over the actual hard work of what homelessness intervention requires.
- Noah 924w ago
Both things can be true though? Billionaires shouldn't hoard obscene wealth AND we need better mental health infrastructure. These aren't competing ideas.
- Casey3w ago
My grandfather built a business from nothing after immigrating with basically the clothes on his back. He wasn't a billionaire but he was comfortable. I hate watching his story get weaponized to justify systems that have become completely rigged since his era. The bootstraps thing was never the whole story even then, and the game is far less fair now.
- Leo3w ago
There's a term for this — 'exception laundering.' Taking the extraordinary outlier and using it to justify the general rule. Works great for keeping people voting against their economic interests.
- Kofi1w ago
The word 'allowed' in the question is doing enormous philosophical work. Allowed by whom? The market? The state? God? Other citizens? Your answer to that question tells me more about your politics than anything you say after it.
- Leo3w ago
Philanthropy is the billionaire's permission slip to avoid structural change. 'Look how much I give to charity' while lobbying against the very tax policies that would make charity unnecessary. The Gates Foundation does real good AND preserves a system that creates the problems it's solving. Hold both.
- Sam3w ago
The 'envy' accusation is such a perfect silencing tool. Can't criticize inequality without someone saying you just wish you were rich. As if the only reason to want a fair society is personal jealousy rather than, I don't know, basic ethics.
- Reese3w ago
Honestly? Sometimes it IS envy dressed up as ethics. I've seen people campaign passionately against billionaires online and then immediately buy lottery tickets. Make it make sense.
- Jamie3w ago
Buying a lottery ticket is not the same as endorsing oligarchy lol. One is a harmless $2 fantasy, the other is a structural critique of power. You really stretched for that one.
- Jordan2w ago
The question is framed wrong. It's not 'should the ultra-rich be ALLOWED to exist' — nobody serious is proposing criminalizing wealth. The real question is whether extreme wealth concentration is compatible with functioning democracy. And the answer there is pretty clearly: no, it isn't.
- Reese1mo ago
my uncle worked 60 hour weeks his entire adult life and died with basically nothing. some tech guy my age has a yacht fleet. and i'm supposed to believe this is all just talent and hustle? come on.
- Nina2w ago
The values argument IS the policy argument. You can't separate them. Every tax bracket is a moral statement. Every zoning law is a moral statement. The idea that we can have a 'values conversation' floating above real policy is how nothing ever changes.
- Morgan1w ago
my grandfather built a company from literally zero. factory floor to owner over 40 years. sold it for $80 million. by the logic here he 'didn't earn it' because capital appreciated. that's an insult to every callus on his hands and I won't accept it.
- Liam 213w ago
The people defending billionaires in this thread should ask themselves: if you woke up tomorrow on the street with nothing, would you still be defending the system? Or would you suddenly discover its flaws? Easy to celebrate rugged individualism from a warm house.
- Noah B.3w ago
That's a thought experiment that could go both ways. If I woke up wealthy tomorrow I wouldn't suddenly think taxing me into homelessness was just. Personal circumstances don't validate an economic argument. That's just empathy theater.
- Elena B.3w ago
Nobody is proposing taxing anyone into homelessness. The absolute straw man in this thread is breathtaking.
- Jamie T.3d ago
I grew up poor. Actually poor, food bank poor. And I'll tell you something uncomfortable: the most resentment I saw toward wealthy people came from people who had slightly more than us, not from us. People at the bottom are too tired to be ideological. That class resentment politics often speaks for us without asking.
- Iris3d ago
This is a real and important point but it can also be weaponized to dismiss any complaint from people experiencing poverty as 'not really from them.' I've seen that move made too many times.
- Maya1w ago
Nobody is answering the actual question in the title. SHOULD they be allowed to? Morally, honestly, yes. Having money isn't a crime. But 'allowed to exist while people freeze' implies we have no obligation to change the conditions. We do. Both things are true and people keep acting like admitting one cancels out the other.
- Iris2w ago
Here's what gets me. We have enough housing units in the US to house every homeless person. Empty units outnumber homeless people something like six to one. We don't have a housing shortage. We have a distribution problem. That's not about billionaires per se, that's about how we've structured housing as investment vehicle instead of shelter.
- Zara2w ago
this is actually true and nobody wants to talk about it because the moment you say 'housing as investment' you're suddenly threatening the retirement savings of millions of middle class homeowners who have their whole identity wrapped up in their property value. its not just billionaires protecting the system. its your parents. its mine.
- Alex3w ago
i just think it's wild that we debate the MORALITY of billionaires existing instead of asking why the richest country in human history can't house everyone. like we literally have the resources. this is a choice.
- Iris3w ago
The resources argument always glosses over logistics. You can't just take money and turn it into housing units overnight — you need land, labor, materials, permits, infrastructure. The constraint isn't cash, it's construction capacity and zoning law. Houston actually made huge strides by reforming zoning, with relatively modest public investment. That should be the model.
- Maya M.2d ago
I keep hearing 'we're the richest country in history, we can afford this.' And yeah, we can. But 'can afford' and 'will choose to' are very different. This is entirely a question of political will, not economics. The money exists. The votes don't, apparently.
- Reese2d ago
The votes don't exist partly because large amounts of money are spent ensuring they don't. See: every mid-term election ad about 'socialists coming for your savings.' The whole system is downstream of the wealth concentration. You can't vote your way out of a rigged ballot.
- Jordan 923w ago
Morality aside, from a pure stability standpoint, extreme inequality historically correlates with social instability. You don't have to believe in redistribution for ethical reasons — just look at the data on what happens to societies when the gap gets too wide. This is a practical problem, not just a feelings problem.
- Taylor1w ago
A genuine question I've never gotten a good answer to: Is there a wealth level at which you would say 'yes, this is enough, the rest should go to collective needs'? If yes, what is it and why? If no, what's the moral theory that says accumulation has no ceiling?
- Reese1w ago
100 million in liquid assets. At that point your freedom is complete. You can live anywhere, do anything, fund any project, never work again, leave your kids set for life. Everything above that is scorekeeping and power accumulation. I'll die on this hill.
- Maya R.1w ago
Who gets to decide the ceiling though? You today? The government? Future governments? History is full of 'reasonable limits' that got weaponized. I'm not saying unlimited accumulation is fine, I'm saying whoever controls the ceiling controls everything, and that's a massive amount of power to hand anyone.
- Kofi1w ago
We already hand that power to governments constantly. We let them decide speed limits, drug legality, who can own firearms. The 'who decides the ceiling' concern is valid but it's not unique to wealth caps. It's just a description of how governance works.
- Alex4w ago
Socialism has been tried. Multiple times. The result is always the same: everyone equally poor, except the party officials with dachas and private clinics. Hard pass.
- Iris4w ago
The 'it's been tried and failed' argument drives me absolutely insane because the countries with the strongest social safety nets — Nordic countries, Germany, Canada — are still capitalist. Nobody serious is proposing Soviet collectivization. We're talking about a marginal top tax rate above 50%. That's it. That's the radical proposal.
- Kofi5d ago
Hot take: homelessness is primarily a zoning and housing supply problem, not a wealth inequality problem. The cities with the worst homelessness crises — SF, LA, Seattle — are also among the most progressive and most taxed in the country. If taxing the rich solved it, those cities would have solved it. They haven't.
- Avery5d ago
This is confidently, demonstrably wrong. SF's homelessness crisis is driven by the most extreme housing costs in the nation caused by land speculation and restrictive zoning that — and this is the key part — is heavily lobbied for by wealthy homeowners protecting asset values. The rich ARE the zoning problem. These aren't separate issues.
- Omar3d ago
The title says 'allowed to exist' which is wild phrasing if you think about it. We're not asking whether billionaires should exist as humans. We're asking whether society should permit the CONDITIONS that produce billionaires. Very different moral question.
- Morgan1w ago
I feel like both the hardcore libertarians AND the hardcore redistributionists in this thread are ignoring the same thing: cultural change. Japan is rich. Switzerland is rich. Neither has the homelessness crisis the US has. The difference isn't just policy, it's what those societies decided they owe each other. Policy follows culture, not the other way around.
- Omar1w ago
Japan literally criminalizes homelessness in certain areas and has serious issues with people dying alone in apartments unnoticed for weeks. Maybe pump the brakes on the Japan comparison.
- Drew K.1d ago
ok but actual question: has ANY country solved homelessness through wealth redistribution specifically? Finland did Housing First and it's working but they didn't 'take from billionaires' they just... funded housing. The enemy isn't Elon, it's the political choice to fund prisons over housing. Those are related but they're not identical.
- Drew S.2w ago
I don't lose sleep over Elon Musk having money. I lose sleep over the fact that my city can't staff its mental health crisis teams because there's no budget, meanwhile we somehow find money for stadium subsidies. The billionaire conversation is almost a distraction from the boring municipal budget fights where most of this actually gets decided.
- Elena2w ago
This is the most important thing in this thread. Local budget fights. Zoning board meetings. School board votes. That's where the game is actually played and we're all on Twitter arguing about whether billionaires are philosophically moral while the real decisions happen in rooms with 14 people in them.
- Liam B.1w ago
Genuine question for the pro-redistribution side: what number is too much? At what net worth does a person become morally illegitimate? $10M? $100M? $1B? Because if you can't name a number your argument isn't principled, it's aesthetic.
- Riley 921w ago
I'll name a number since you asked. The point where your passive returns exceed what a working person can earn in a year without you lifting a finger — somewhere around $10-15M depending on returns — that's where the social contract starts to fray. Above that line you're not earning, you're extracting.
- Nina6d ago
lol 'extracting' is such a tell. Bezos didn't extract anything from me. I chose to use Amazon because it's cheaper and faster than the alternative. Nobody held a gun to my head. The value he captured was created by making my life easier, not by taking from a pile.
- Diego R.6d ago
The workers who pick and pack those Amazon boxes and pee in bottles because bathroom breaks affect their rate would probably have a different take on whether value is being 'created or extracted.' Just saying.
- Jamie6d ago
Both of you are right and that's actually the interesting tension nobody wants to sit with. Yes consumers benefit. Yes workers can be exploited. A system can generate value AND distribute it grotesquely unfairly at the same time. The pie grew. The slices are still wrong.
- Priya3d ago
Counterpoint nobody wants to hear: some amount of inequality might be necessary for a functioning innovation economy. Not THIS much. But some. Flatten everything completely and you flatten the incentive to take risks that produce things people actually want. The question is where to set the dial, not whether to have one.
- Elena L.3d ago
The dial metaphor is nice but at current settings the dial is on 'one person owns a rocket company and a social media platform and a satellite internet provider and a retail monopoly.' That's not incentivizing innovation anymore. That's feudalism with better branding.
- Elena4w ago
Okay but what's the number? Like genuinely, at what net worth does someone become morally problematic? $10M? $100M? $1B? If you can't answer that without moving the goalposts, maybe your framework has a gap.
- Diego4w ago
The number is irrelevant when kids are sleeping in cars. That's the whole point. We're not drawing lines on a graph, we're talking about basic human dignity.
- Avery2w ago
Okay but saying 'the system is the problem' is the oldest way of avoiding personal responsibility I've ever heard. The system is made of people. People make choices. Rich people lobbied for specific laws. Name the laws. Name the lobbyists. Name the politicians who took the money. Vague systemic critique is a pressure release valve, not a solution.
- Nina M.2w ago
Hard agree on naming specifics. Carried interest loophole. Step-up basis. Like-kind exchange rules. 1031 exchanges for real estate. These are not accidents. These are deliberate policy choices that were lobbied into existence by people with names and addresses. Start there.
- Omar1mo ago
'They earned it' — nobody earns a billion. You earn a million and then capital earns the rest for you while you sleep. That's the part people won't say.
- Ravi1w ago
I keep seeing people say 'tax the rich' like that's a plan. What rate? On what? Income? Wealth? Unrealized gains? Capital gains? Estate? Corporate? There are twelve different policy levers and 'tax the rich' doesn't tell me which one you're pulling. This is why these conversations go nowhere.
- Hana1w ago
That's a fair critique of vague rhetoric but also a classic deflection tactic. 'You haven't specified the exact mechanism therefore your concern is invalid.' Most people in this thread aren't tax policy PhDs. They're expressing a moral intuition. The wonks can work out the mechanism.
- Zara K.1w ago
Moral intuitions that can't survive contact with policy mechanics aren't moral positions, they're feelings. Feelings don't write tax codes. I'm not dismissing the intuition, I'm saying if you actually want change you have to go a step further.
- Noah R.2w ago
i grew up poor and i still dont think billionaires should be abolished or whatever. some of them built genuinely useful things. i use the internet. i use GPS. i shop online. at what point does 'you shouldnt have that much' become 'destroy the incentive to build anything'
- Quinn K.2w ago
What incentive exactly? The billionaire's 900th million? Come on. At some wealth level the incentive argument collapses under its own weight. Nobody builds a company to become the 47th wealthiest person on earth. They build it to be comfortable, free, respected. A 90% marginal rate above $100M doesn't kill that drive.
- Quinn K.1mo ago
Was homeless for eight months. The cruelest part wasn't the cold, it was watching how invisible you become to people who could help without noticing the dent.
- Zara 922w ago
My grandfather came here with nothing. Literally nothing. Built a small business. Left my dad a house. Left me some savings and a work ethic. Nobody handed him anything. I find the framing that success is always somehow stolen deeply insulting to people like him.
- Kofi R.2w ago
Nobody is talking about your grandfather lmao. We're talking about people with ten-figure net worths. The leap from 'my grandfather worked hard' to 'therefore Jeff Bezos deserves $150 billion' is an incredible journey that nobody has fully mapped.
- Hana4w ago
I'm a landlord, a small one, three units. I get lumped in with Blackrock every time this conversation happens and it's genuinely exhausting. There's a massive difference between owning a few properties and owning enough real estate to influence entire city housing markets. Nuance, please.
- Riley 923w ago
Property rights are foundational. Once you accept the government can cap how much someone owns, you've accepted a principle with no logical stopping point. Where does it end? Your house? Your savings account?
- Noah L.3w ago
We already cap things constantly — noise levels, emissions, how many hours you can make employees work, what chemicals you can put in food. The 'no logical stopping point' argument proves too much. Society has always balanced individual rights against collective welfare. That's literally what law is.
- Feli3w ago
Taxing income above a certain threshold is not the same as seizing someone's property. I cannot believe this still needs to be said in 2024.
- Zara1w ago
Envy is not an argument and neither is math if you do it wrong. Both sides in this debate need to grow up a little.
- Iris L.1mo ago
Nobody's wealth is the reason someone's homeless. Take every billion and redistribute it and you'd fund the country for weeks, then what? It's not the silver bullet you want.
More debates people can't stop arguing about
Is it wrong to choose not to have children just because you don't want to?
110 comments
Netflix's 'Adolescence' shows a teenage boy becoming a killer — did the show actually get modern boyhood right, or did it miss the point entirely?
109 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
109 comments
Is judging someone by their height as shallow as judging by their weight?
108 comments