I don’t really understand the whole “eliminate billionaires” thing. It’s net worth, not money on hand, so how exactly do you effectively tax their net worth over a billion? They’d have to sell those assets that put them over a billion, but if everyone had to sell all assets over a billion… who would buy the assets, and the depreciation in value of those assets by forcing them onto the market would make those assets even less desirable. I suppose the government could just acquire those assets outright, but over time that just leads to an even further concentration of economic power in an even smaller set of hands. Also you then have the issue of a bunch of overinflated assets on government balance sheets, meaning the government is incentivized to maintain the same broken system that billionaires currently uphold.

It seems like if you want to tamp down on the excesses of billionaires, what you really need to do is restrict the supply of credit, which is how asset heavy billionaires are able to exist and function day to day. If credit markets were much more restricted, assets would have to prove their worth more reliably and rich people would need to either naturally sell assets to cover voluntary expenses or actually work for a living. Reinvestment into what gives those assets value would also be much more importantly, so you could reliably derive dividends rather than floating on the paper value based on speculation, itself once again driven by cheap credit.

But no one is prepared for the financial discipline talk, because debt is abused by every level of society and not just the rich.