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‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’: mayor Zohran Mamdani in his own words
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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politics
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You can't even spend a billion dollars with the most ridiculous luxury items you can think of. Spending that much in a lifetime for things you would even remotely appreciate would feel like work.
The only difference having billions of dollars makes instead of only a few millions in a rich person's life is that it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions. Which is something nobody should be allowed to do to begin with.
Meanwhile had that billion dollars been distributed to the worker class through fair wages or even to the consumers through fair prices it would have contributed to the economy and the well-being of everyone. Having to tax it to avoid seeing that money sit in some asshole's offshore bank account is a failure of the system to properly distribute wealth when it is generated to begin with and even that isn't being done right now.
How many "billionaires" actually have a billion dollars to spend though? They usually are "worth" a billion dollars through stocks they can't sell, with a couple of million in the bank
Except that they do just that by borrowing money against their stocks, which also incidentally allows them to avoid paying taxes. That's how Musk bought Twitter.
Yup, their latent wealth grows faster than what they borrow to use as actual spending, they literally don't spend money, they accumulate it
I think it might be a good idea to tax loans like this as income, but I'm not an economist and am not sure what the follow on effects would be. I feel like if there were exceptions it might be used as a loophole, but if there aren't it might affect poorer people trying to get loans for housing.