Well, if just counting all the billionaires [1], they have a total net worth of ~135 billion, and there's currently ~47MM people in Spain [2], so if you sent out the stormtroopers and forcefully confiscated every last penny of net worth from all the billionaires, and redistributed it equally, each person would get a one-time payment of ~2,800. I'd theorize that the resulting destruction to the economy/country in the process would probably ultimately wipe more wealth from the people than 2,800 per person, but hey, maybe not.
> I'd theorize that the resulting destruction to the economy/country in the process would probably ultimately wipe more wealth from the people than 2,800 per person
I wonder if you wouldn't mind expanding on this idea more.
While I'm not saying I agree with the notion of redistributing wealth in the way you describe, I am skeptical of the "destruction" part. What does that look like to you, and why would it lead to that?
you only need to look in the past to see how collectivization in communist countries have fared to see what sort of results could be expected when you confiscate wealth from people.
Private debt is actually around $90k per inhabitant. But somehow this figure (private debt being more than 200% of GDP) is generally overlooked in favor of discussion about public debt…
When a significant proportion of private debt is housing, it's the entire society's problem. (And the subprimes crisis illustrated the problem in a very obvious fashion).
Ironically, a significant part of public debt we have today still comes from the aftermath of the last private debt crisis we had: first as a (too timid) response to the 2008 banking crisis, then as the result of the economic crisis that ensued.
When an entire society is built on private debt, it doesn't matter if you don't own debt by yourself, this is a society problem, and thus it becomes your problem.
Also, unless you are super wealthy (and should be taxed more) it's unlikely that you'll stay debt-free for your entire life.
If govts did not play capturing huge masses of money to do favors and we limited ourselves to court and hearings when needed, people would be way more responsible in their actions and the services would be way more efficient and oriented to waht people want without excuses and make-up.
This is not how states operate, unfortunately, and they are not interested at all in making things change. People in the state live to a big extent from selling favors, whether we like it or not, via regulations and capturing money to make others happy. All, with our taxes.
I know many people do not think this way but if you took the time to read and understand the inner workings of politics and power you would almost never think well of a person whose job is professional politics.
And let's not forget that Spain is already taxing the rich like crazy. As in: insane crazy. In quite some Spanish regions (not in Madrid, where the tax exists technically but is reduced by 100% so far) there's a yearly tax on wealth that can go as high as 3.5% of your entire net worth. To be paid. Yearly.
You're worth more than 1.3m? Anything above that is already taxed at 1.3 to 1.6% yearly. You're really rich? Be ready to gift 3.5% of your wealth yearly to the spanish state.
There's one million millionaire in Spain, already taxed like mad. I don't know if they could be taxed even more to give that 20K bonus.
One million millionaire to give 20 K to how many million of people? There are, what, about one million people turning 18 each year in Spain? (quick ballpark computation, one official source seems to say its closer to 500 K people turning 18 each year).
So let's take 500 K people turning 18 each year and one million millionaire. This means taking 10 K EUR, yearly, from each millionaire, to hand over to the 18 years old.
Sounds a bit unrealistic to me but then I'm not a politician begging for votes in the upcoming spanish elections.
