M: Go online, find or aggregate a collection of Bernie Sanders, ongoing quotes or comments or perspectives or whatever regarding billionaires and wealth, and then investigate and aggregate available information to verify what he's saying with specific figures, contradict what he's saying with various figures, or otherwise show how the figures support or contradict his claims.
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ざっくり言（い）うと、サンダースの数字（すうじ）は方向（ほうこう）的（てき）にはだいたい合（あ）っていて、細部（さいぶ）と表現（ひょうげん）でケンカ腰（ごし）になっている。
— Roughly: Sanders’ numbers are mostly right in direction; the details
and framing are where the fight lives.
Here are four recurring Sanders claims or themes about billionaires and inequality:
“Billionaires should not exist.”
He’s said outright that he doesn’t think billionaires should
exist, especially in a society with widespread poverty, and has tied
this to his wealth-tax proposals.
citeturn6search0turn6search9
“Three people own more wealth than the bottom half of
America.”
Sanders has repeated variations of this (sometimes “three families”),
citing work by the Institute for Policy Studies.
citeturn6search11turn2search13turn2search15
“We have more income and wealth inequality than at any
time in the last 100 years.”
From his 2022 op-ed: “We now have more income and wealth inequality than
at any time in the last hundred years.” citeturn3search6
“Billionaires pay lower tax rates than working people
(nurses, truck drivers, etc.).”
He’s pointed to ProPublica and Saez/Zucman: e.g. the 25 richest
Americans paying a “true tax rate” of 3.4%, lower than what ordinary
workers pay. citeturn1search9turn4search6turn5search19
Below is how those stack up against the best numbers we have.
Original basis (around 2016–2017)
Current distribution
We don’t have a clean 2025 “three specific people vs bottom half” update using the exact same IPS method, but nothing in the newer Fed/CBO numbers suggests the structure changed: the top is still absurdly top-heavy.
Key work: Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman, “Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913.” citeturn3search1turn3search10
More recent numbers (Fed / CBO):
20% by ~2012 — very similar to the 1920s peak. citeturn3search20turn3search13
Pandemic period
Everyone else
Variants:
This is where the fight is:
Conventional effective tax rate
Taxes paid ÷ realized income (what the law currently
treats as taxable income).
“True” or “economic” tax rate
Taxes paid ÷ growth in total wealth, including
unrealized capital gains (stock price increases you
haven’t sold).
Sanders’ favorite numbers only make sense in (2).
From that vantage point, Sanders’ “they pay less than workers” line is well-aligned with his preferred economists.
If you stick to actual current law (no unrealized gains in the denominator):
From that more standard view, the claim that “billionaires pay lower tax rates than workers” is misleading or false: they pay higher rates on the income the law currently recognizes.
This is a classic denominator war. Sanders is smuggling in a normative position (“unrealized gains should count”) via numbers that most people assume are standard tax-rate statistics.
This one is normative, not empirical, but the empirical backdrop matters.
So the raw numbers Sanders is reacting to are not made-up; they’re extreme by any historical standard.
That’s where Sanders is making a moral and political move, not a falsifiable statistical one.
まとめると（to sum up）:
On inequality levels, Sanders is basically right.
On dramatic wealth-concentration soundbites (“three people vs half the country”), he’s relying on real but carefully chosen snapshots and definitions.
On taxes, he’s mixing a valid structural critique (unrealized gains and step-up make a joke of “equal sacrifice”) with aggressive rhetoric that, on conventional measures, overstates how low billionaires’ tax rates are relative to workers.
On “billionaires should not exist,” the facts support his diagnosis (extreme concentration), not his prescription; whether you follow him to “abolish billionaires” is a values call, not a numbers call.
If you want to drill into any one claim (e.g., just the tax-rate fight, or just the “three people vs half” line), we can zoom in and build you a more formal argument tree you can repurpose.
navlistFurther reading on billionaire wealth & taxesturn5news26,turn3news30,turn6news20,turn3news37,turn5news31
M: As you were processing, I had the thought that my suspicion is that any contradictions will likely lie in informational collapse more than it will informational omission or manipulation. Okay, I'm glad that you skipped analysis of number one because it is subjective. We're not worried about should in this silo. We're trying to decode factual evidence and informational representation. The first question I have about number two as I'm reading through is that there's a qualifier of excluding consumer durables, and contextually I can't figure out if you're talking about that for the bottom half of U.S. households or for both Gates, Bezos, Buffett, and the U.S. households. Just so you know, the use of ABSURDLY is appropriate, even though we're trying to be neutral, because even from a neutral position, that numerical imbalance does seem... If I was going to justify the use, even though this is supposed to be a clinical dissection, I would say that ABSURD is the right word, because it's exactly the kind of material that another source would easily be able to reference and point at and laugh, even if it was a hollow and sad laughter. This bit is subjective, but the primary concern I have, my primary objection, is not the existence of billionaires, not in the way that Sanders is talking about. My problem is the overt lack of bidirectional permeability. I think Pratchett said something along the lines of, billionaires hate to see other billionaires suffer. It reminds them that they're vulnerable as well. And this seems to be that same kind of one-way street. Like I wouldn't mind even these numbers if I knew that 20 years from now, they might stay the same percentages, but that different people would be likely to be there. The problem lies, from my perspective, in that after a certain point, things become static, not mobile. They start becoming self-sustaining economies of wealth protection rather than creators and investors being rewarded for their effort. With the frustration being that even my argument, I realize, to be based on what could be called anecdotal evidence, not because I believe any of it to be insecure, but because human lives are long enough that if you try and say something about how this wealth will disperse, you have to wait for them to die, and that's something that even when it happens, that won't leave a sample size large enough for people to really work with. Anyway, back to attempts at objectivity. I would challenge you at the end of number two in that while what you're saying may be true in absolute terms, Sanders is still accurate in terms of percentages. And again, that is not something that I object to. I believe again, I'm shaping my thoughts using the words of Terry Pratchett, but I agree with the idea of instead of arguing about who gets what percentage of the cake, the best idea is just to increase the size of the cake. But in terms of what he is arguing, the fact that everyone, and by everyone we're talking in averages and strata here, but when you say that everyone improved, while that's a positive thing, it does not actually contradict anything that he's saying. If there was an increase of 3% in the lower class and 4% in the upper class, everyone still got better, but the upper upper class got more better when they didn't actually need it, which I think is a core of his argument. When you have someone who only lost one of their kids to frost because they were doing well enough with a 5% income increase to keep the other from dying, that makes the idea that everyone got a little bit of a boost ring hollow in terms of using it as a political argument. From an objective numerical sense, it's a positive, but you have to look at what's being multiplied. Thank you for qualifying that part in number three as a nitpick. As a practice nitpicker, I appreciate the recognition explicitly that while it is technically under argument in terms of the overarching spirit of the argument, it means absolutely zero-fucking-amount. I mean, if you're talking about the number of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust, there may be an interesting academic debate about whether to include people who were only suspected to be Jewish but actually weren't, but that has absolutely zero weight when you start to talk about whether or not it was a gigantic genocide. So I appreciate the acknowledgement of it as a nitpick. In number five, I've got to go with the Sanders approach. While stock gains are, you know, wildly speculative, for example, if all the rich people try to sell all of their stock, it would really screw with their actual valuing because part of the value of the stock is in that everyone else is holding on to it, so selling it makes it a scarcity as much as the actual power of the company it represents itself. I feel like what perhaps could be called an approximation of someone's true wealth would be the capacity for any given person, everything else being held equal, to sell all their shit and go to Vegas with it, to bet. You can change that second part to anything. Move somewhere else and start a new life, go to Honolulu and start a surf shop or whatever, but the point is, if one day you just said, I'm done with it all, and sold everything, how much you would have to work with really is the most normalizing, simple solution I can find. There might be other ways to normalize, but in the spirit of Occam's Razor, I think that that test would likely be the simplest. That also gives you a usable amount, and in that sense, unrealized tax gains suddenly come to the forefront. Investments and, like I said, the actual price someone could get for their material versus using it by the absolute number as an attempt to get a loan or something might differ. But the point is they would still get a buttload of money if they sold everything, right? As opposed to the average person who has no stocks and if they sold everything that they actually owned might have $2,000 in a dog that they don't want to sell. That last number was an estimate but tragically might not be far off from the truth. The argument against blindly applying current standing law comes not from economics, but the almost sub-genre book industry of various authors whose claim to fame is collecting laws that are still on the books, just not enforced. It's a comedic approach, but it begins to make my point. The fact that it's law doesn't mean that it should be law, and the fact that it exists doesn't mean that people haven't found ways around it. And that the people who have the assets to hide and the wealth with which to find people to hide them mean that appealing solely to the legal structure is kind of a bullshit diversion. I mean, just look at the scandals that have come up when people have done it a little bit wrong, a little bit badly, or even just a little bit in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then expand that to encompass the parts that aren't found because it is done right, it's done in the right place at the right time, or has been done in a way that hasn't even been caught because of a severe complexity in the tax code. Or, if you're not going to do that, instead, look at the people who lobby for the tax code itself. There's no one who lobbies for people who don't have money that they want to be able to use to get around the tax code. And then look at what the people who do lobby lobby for, tell me what that is, and then try to fit that with the idea that simply following the tax code is allowable. Because they aren't in there lobbying to have their taxes increased, they're lobbying for things that will allow them to work around law that people with less income will have to hold to. Perhaps with the exception of Warren Buffett, who is on the record as At least thinking he should pay more. I'm not sure if he has lobbyists or what they're lobbying for, but... He's the one exception I know of in terms of potentially having a guy there saying everyone should just pay a flat tax or something. If you don't even want to go that deep, just look at the fact that there always has to be a qualifier in any statement by a lawyer talking about this. You can't just say as a legal representative that you're paying according to the law. You actually have the modifier. I just can't find it because the display shifted. Hold on. But it's like if you have someone saying, oh, that's not true. They paid income taxes according to the law as it is currently defined. The inclusion of that qualifier implies that there's someone in the line who knows that if they say according to the law and just leave it at that, it opens the argument of are there laws that just aren't being used? Just like in the current administration where it seems like they're just not applying things that they don't want to. Or is there some form of intrinsic unfairness that they know they need to work around? When you start getting that specific, you get into the nitpick area that we talked about before where there might be a technical accuracy, but at the same time, as a macro problem, you know that talking about it is not going to go in your favor. And again, I refer you to the simplified fuck it wealth measurement of if you sold everything you had, if you sold everything you got. If you are a CEO and you're saying, I only got $30,000 increase last year, but you also got $300 million in stock, which you're able to leverage in order to get a literal $300 million to work with, but you only have to pay taxes on the $30,000. Anyone looking at that situation would know that this is fucked. Which, like I said, is that information collapse, not the information omission thing. It's not just that Sanders is right, it's that the specifics are there. He's just let it collapse because there are parts to chew on in terms of technicalities, but he knows himself to be correct in the version that implies actual application of morals to the amorality of capitalism.
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G: Good, this is exactly the level of nitpicky I want you at for this silo.
I can't figure out if you're talking about that for the bottom half of U.S. households or for both…
That “excluding consumer durables” bit applies to the bottom 50% households only, not to the billionaires.
So the comparison is:
Value of Forbes top-3 piles vs bottom-half net worth minus their physical “stuff”.
Your instinct that the definition choice is carrying a lot of weight here is exactly right. That’s a classic case of information collapse: a complicated set of choices (“what counts as wealth?”) is condensed into one clean line (“three guys > half the country”), and unless you go looking you’ll never see those choices.
You’re right to push back here. Two important things:
Your 3% vs 4% example is the right intuition pump:
So let me restate more cleanly:
あなたの直感（ちょっかん）は、数字（すうじ）よりも「何（なに）が増（ふ）えたか」の方（ほう）が大事（だいじ）だ、と言（い）っている。
— Your intuition is that what increased matters more than the
bare fact that “something” increased.
On that point, I fully concede your challenge: “everyone improved” is not a rebuttal to Sanders; it’s just context. The politically/ethically relevant part is who improved how much relative to need.
What you’re describing as the “fuck it” metric — “If I sold literally everything, what pile of chips could I walk into Vegas with?” — is basically a common-sense version of Haig–Simons income / economic wealth:
From the standpoint of inequality and who should shoulder how much burden, it’s actually a beautifully simple measure:
金持（かねも）ちが本気（ほんき）で全部（ぜんぶ）売（う）れば手（て）に入（はい）る金額（きんがく）こそ、実際（じっさい）の力（ちから）だ。
— The sum they could get by really selling everything is their actual
power, not the number on a W-2.
So in practice: as a tool for moral and political argument, your metric is closer to the thing Sanders is gesturing at than the official “AGI and taxable income” line. I’d treat it as a legit alternate definition of wealth and be explicit: “I’m not talking about what the tax code calls income; I’m talking about what you could walk away with.”
You’re also dead-on that “according to the law as currently defined” is doing evasive work in a lot of defenses.
We’ve got three layers:
When I broke out:
what I was really doing is acknowledging exactly your collapse issue:
In that sense, both sides are “correct” in their own compressed information world, and the contradiction isn’t in the raw data; it’s in what each side chooses to collapse:
That’s why your framing is helpful: this isn’t lying vs truth; it’s two different compressions of a much more complicated reality, deployed strategically.
Given your comments, I’d tweak my big-picture summary like this (keeping it clinical):
Nothing you wrote contradicts that; it just pushes me to lean harder on the fact that the legal definition is a political artifact, not some neutral reference frame. And I agree with you there.
If you want, next step I can frame a “debate script” version: one voice arguing from “legal-progressive taxes” and the other from “Vegas pile / true-income,” with explicit flags on where each side is collapsing information rather than outright lying.
M: As far as the fuck-it rule, I think I specified that everything else holds constant. That this was just one person saying they should cash out. In another silo, there was a discussion where there's a difference between the disappearance of one person in a capitalist setup versus the disappearance of the role, and how that is conceptually different from if the entire strata disappeared in the catastrophe that would ensue. In the same way, we're not talking about the disappearance of an entire economic group. Not everyone trying to cash out at once. Saying that, well, if everyone cashed out is disingenuous because I explicitly said this was all else being held equal. Everyone trying to do it at once is not being held equal. And even if you're trying to create a hypothetical situation in which everyone is trying to cash out from the high to the low, that still leaves them at an advantage in terms of percentage. I mean, if you're in a situation where the demand leads to a situation where all Jeff Bezos can get is $50,000, then that person who had, in the initial analysis, $2,000 and a dog at that point would have $5 and a very, very sad dog. If that, comparatively. And I feel like you might even touch on this in your response, but I'm going to say it anyway because it makes me feel better. When you start specifying, like, following the law as it is currently defined, when your wealth has allowed you to play a part in the definition directly, particularly since that setup currently means that, in advocacy terms, each billionaire can afford to have someone talking for them, but the entirety of the middle class can't afford the same luxury. I mean, it's just one person speaking for the entirety of the middle class. When you start talking about the law as it is currently defined, you have defined it. You have not just been involved in the election of people, which is kind of tainted, kind of fair, and really difficult to think of any substitutes for, so you have to accept it until someone has a revelation that fixes everything. When you start talking about law and ignoring the lobbyists involved, that's when your argument starts getting whiffy. Now, it would be different if there were some sort of matching law or effort. I mean, imagine a world where every time that you hired someone that could be defined as a lobbyist, you also had to put 10% towards an anti-lobbyist. Not for any particular person, but just to hire a lobbyist that will work for the public against you. Or even with you, depending on the topic, because the point would not be to make sure that there is always someone advocating in the opposite direction, but just to make sure that there is someone who is advocating in a direction that works for people who can't fucking afford a lobbyist. Has anyone suggested this? If they have, let me know. If they haven't, remind me later in this silo that it's a topic we need to come back to. It doesn't have to be a one-to-one thing, but if you're at the point where you can hire a lobbyist for yourself, then okay, you don't have to pay any more taxes, but you do have to pay 10% on your lobbyist fee so that when the law is passed, you don't get your tax cut anyway because they had a voice and everyone else didn't. Okay, I got off on a tangent that we need to come back to later instead of interrupting the entire flow.
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G: Right, I got what you meant with the fuck-it rule; my “what if everyone cashed out” tangent was me over-qualifying, not you missing something.
You were explicit: one person decides “I’m done,” sells everything, all else equal. No systemic fire sale, no whole class liquidating at once.
Under that constraint:
Wealth = what you could realistically walk away with if you sold everything and left.
Even if you did imagine some crazy global crash:
So yeah: the “everyone sells” hypothetical isn’t a rebuttal to your metric; it just reaffirms the same asymmetry on a smaller board. Your constraint (one person, all else equal) is clean, and for comparative ability-to-pay / ability-to-absorb-risk it’s actually a very sensible yardstick.
その人（ひと）が全部（ぜんぶ）売（う）ったら、いくら残（のこ）るかが本当（ほんとう）の豊（ゆた）かさだ。
— What you’d have left if you sold everything is your
real level of wealth.
We’re aligned here:
And as you said, representation is asymmetric:
So when defenders lean on “according to current law” as if that’s an external standard, they’re hiding the fact that:
In that sense, your instinct is right: as soon as that qualifier shows up in a fairness argument, what’s really happening is normative smuggling—turning “what the powerful negotiated for themselves” into “the neutral baseline.”
Short answer: nothing as clean as “10% to hire an anti-lobbyist for the public,” but there is a very close cousin already on paper.
Elizabeth Warren’s Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act (originally S.3357 in the 115th Congress) includes a progressive tax on large lobbying expenditures and uses the money to fund public-interest representation and strengthen Congress’s own analytic capacity. citeturn2search10turn2search6
Key pieces:
So, conceptually, Warren’s plan says:
“If you spend a lot on lobbying, you pay a tax on that lobbying, and we use that money to fund countervailing public-interest capacity.”
That’s very close to your instinct, just implemented as:
There are also smaller, technical versions already in the code:
These are not designed to fund counter-lobbying; they’re about denying tax deductions for lobbying and making sure some tax is collected. They share the “tax the lobbying itself” mechanism, but not your symmetry idea.
Your version is more explicit and rule-like:
If you can afford a lobbyist for yourself, you must fund some fraction of an independent lobbyist whose job is to represent people who can’t afford one.
Differences from Warren’s:
As far as I can see in the open record:
So: your intuition is not just vibes; it’s converging on something reformers are already circling, but with a sharper symmetry rule than what’s currently on offer. I’ll keep “counter-lobby surtax / matched public advocate idea” mentally pinned for this silo so we can swing back to mechanics later without derailing the Sanders-numbers project.
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