"stole" or redistribute. the math works out the same in the end. the reason I used "stole" is because if you "redistribute" every ounce of someone's wealth, I imagine you might get some push back.
You can re-apply this formula to various top N% but you get similar numbers: both for income redistribution and wealth redistribution.
The reason all those articles of top 10% have 70% of the wealth seem so impressive is not because the top 10% have so much, it's because the rest of the 90% has so little. and so even a modest amount in the top 10% is much greater than the tiny bit the bottom 90 has.
Let’s frame it differently. If you redistributed all wealth from just the top 1% today to all us citizens, each person would get 40T / 300M = $133K, which would make a real (and massive) difference in most people’s lives. Redistribute the top 10%, and everyone gets $320k in savings. This would be an average of 30x more savings for the bottom half than they’d have otherwise.
The biggest problem with your calculation is the arbitrary line of billionaires, which leaves out all the millionaires. The top 1% have wealth exceeding 40T, while the bottom 50% have sum total wealth less than the 4T you used for billionaires.
Another problem is dividing by 30, that’s not well justified. Half of all us wealth was gained in the last 10 years. Your calculation implicitly assumes you would redistribute slowly, but since you’re using a hypothetical, why would you do that? Why not redistribute all of it today and see if the sum is meaningful? It doesn’t make sense to redistribute slowly, regardless of how long it took to accumulate.
A third problem is leaving out income from the summary, since wealth is savings and the lower class has little. You conclude that $500/year sounds small but glossed over the fact that it represent savings not income, and that it would add up to a lot even in your setup.
Ok, if you disagree with the number 30 as the number of years needed to acquire that wealth, just use yearly income figures.
Assuming 60K is the average.
So, top 10% at 173K means 113K more than the median houshold. 113/10 = 11.3K extra. So, redistributing top 10% would mean 11.3K extra for 60K average. It's something but not life changing. Considering that more than 70% of million dollar lotto winner loses almost everything within a few years, I'd say an additional 11K wouldn't help people a huge amount.
And, you have to remember, this is an excerise for learning how much wealth is distributed per capita in the top. if you actually instituted anything close to these policies, total, average wages would decrease dramatically as the reduced incentive to earn more prevents people from earning more.
I don’t blame you for it, this misleading headline has been widely reported over and over again. (But please consider not repeating this false information anymore.)
The primary study that lead to this conclusion is a study of Florida lottery winners of amounts less than $150K. The actual result of the study showed bankruptcy rates falling initially, and then rising again after several years, as people ran out of their winnings. The rates returning to normal was reported as people losing everything, which is clearly misleading spin.
You can re-apply this formula to various top N% but you get similar numbers: both for income redistribution and wealth redistribution.
The reason all those articles of top 10% have 70% of the wealth seem so impressive is not because the top 10% have so much, it's because the rest of the 90% has so little. and so even a modest amount in the top 10% is much greater than the tiny bit the bottom 90 has.