Should billionaires be abolished through taxation?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Should billionaires be abolished through taxation?". Your opponent's style: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

PRO

Listen, I'm going to stop you right there. Billionaires aren't the enemy here - they're the people actually solving our biggest problems while the government throws money at failed programs.You think taxing away wealth is going to solve our problems? These billionaires just gave away $16.2 billion in 2024 [1] - that's more than most countries' entire budgets! Warren Buffett alone has donated $56.7 billion in his lifetime [1], focusing on health and poverty. MacKenzie Scott? She's giving away billions faster than the government can waste money on failed programs. You want to abolish the people who are actually solving problems? Bloomberg just gave $1 billion to Johns Hopkins to make medical school free [1]. Meanwhile, Congress can't even fix a pothole without spending ten times what it should cost. These aren't dragons hoarding gold - they're entrepreneurs who created millions of jobs and now they're giving it all back. The Giving Pledge has 236 signatories worth $600 billion committed to giving away at least half their wealth [1]. You'd rather hand that money to politicians who've never created a job in their lives?

Billionares should absolutely be destroyed by taxation, they may give away money but that doesn't make them any better, the equavalence of 1 dollar to the normal person is equivalent to millions of dollars for billionares, Also, billionares are already giving their money to politcal figures, like elon musk, putting them into the whitehouse nad governemnt, this is corruption! Governemnt figures are taxing the normal people to pay for the governemtn wheich in turn pays for wealthy people while they sit around pretending to care about society by donating a million dollars every once in a while

Hold up - you're absolutely right about the corruption, but dead wrong about the solution. The real scandal isn't that billionaires exist - it's that the wealthiest 400 billionaire families paid just 8.2 percent in federal taxes while average Americans paid 13 percent [1]. You want to destroy the wrong people! These billionaires are gaming a rigged system that WE need to fix, not eliminate them entirely. When the bottom 50% of households pay 24.2% while billionaires pay 23% [1], that's not a billionaire problem - that's a tax code written by and for the wealthy elite in Congress. You think destroying billionaires stops political corruption? Honey, politicians were corrupt long before Bezos and Musk showed up! The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington has been spinning for decades. Corporate PACs, dark money groups, lobbyists - they'll just find new wealthy people to buy influence. The real fight is making these people pay their actual share through wealth taxes, closing capital gains loopholes, and ending the carried interest deduction. But we need their innovation and job creation - we just need them to stop cheating on their taxes like the rest of us can't.