Say a billionaire gave away all his money to middle class families. He targeted those in the range of say 40-80k. In the end he chose people who were entrepreneurial. That's essentially 100k to 1,000,000 families w/ an entrepreneurial bent.

Say just 25% are successful in re-investing that money by buying small businesses w/ cashflow off flippa, or buying rental property, etc... Or starting a SaaS business, and that 25% is able to increase their income to 1 million.

Then that 1 million+ * 250,000, means his investment of 100B brought 250B to the economy. The other 75% who weren't so lucky in business, maybe they also invested and still built up a nice nest egg for retirement, or maybe they bought a home so they had a guaranteed roof over their head if hard times hit.

Many of the 75% might be able to get their net worth to 250-500k because of the 1-time gift.

This is all speculation.... In the real world it might be more like 10% are successful, but maybe 1-3% are super successful (become billionaires themselves).

If we had a cap on how much capital you could hold, then that would at least guarantee it funnels back to the bottom echelons of society. Though, I think the best cap would simply be a CEO cap of 150x average salaries (including contractors/offshore/etc). The CEO could earn whatever they wanted, as long as they simply gave everyone on their payroll a raise to meet their new bonus.

The other fact is that 90% of the successful people ARE successful because they didn't have to worry about money. When you struggle to put food on the table, it's hard to think about anything else or work on a side project. There was a good twitter feed/conversation back and forth w/ some people in SV a few months ago that basically was about one person saying 'anyone can make it', and the others saying 'those same people started at their parent's basement, they weren't exactly homeless or struggling'.

Actually it was Paul Graham who said:"The next time someone claims that starting startups is for rich kids, remind them that Airbnb happened because its founders literally could not pay their rent,"

Matthew Prince, the founder and CEO of Cloudflare replied: "Oh Paul, you know better. I had to borrow money from my mom to pay my taxes when we were starting Cloudflare. But I certainly came from a relatively privileged background, and so did the AirBnB founders. It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net. #bereal,"

Source: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1129897694984646657

I'm not saying we can ever 100% make everything equitable. Not until we have robots doing 100% of the work and < 10% employment and the means to just let people have what they want or need to be happy, in a world where money isn't even a thing we value anymore, or even use.

But if we could just give everyone a floor, or safety net then we can see a lot more combined global progress. Imagine if every child had food on the table just in America and a roof, and healthcare, and could focus on being a kid and getting an education. Imagine if just doing this created 1 million new scientists over the next 50 years that wouldn't have originally existed.

What could they find or discover? The goal shouldn't be take everything but.. take enough that the game isn't forever slanted out of control. That's what GBI or a negative income tax would do. Hell just single-payer healthcare might be enough for some families -- if they didn't have to pay medical bills or copays.