The rich now own a record share of stocks, about 93% of U.S. households' stock market wealth is held by the top 10%

Bruh, if you had invested your school lunch money instead of literally eating it and thus draining it down the toilet, you would have been a millionaire by now. Subscribe for more of my finance tips for just $20 a month.
- i was so fucking dumb at 8 years old. instead of buying a house for renting for passive income i bought a 5 dollar guitar hero rock the 80s game on ps2
  
  Wait, what did you do with the small million dollar loan from your parents?
- You had lunch money? I had enough to cover 1 small milk carton a week. I had hunger and no investments.

tax. every. trade.
- If you mean a small tax per share when purchased then that would be a great idea. Make high frequency trading, that contributes zero to society, unprofitable. It wouldn't hurt household investors as the tax would be small but it would hurt the assholes who manipulate prices through trading back and forth.
  
  High frequency trading is fully automated insider trading done in broad daylight, but nothing gets done about it because most people don't understand what it is. It shouldn't be taxed; it should be illegal.
  
  Thats a great idea.
- Hard agree. Make it impossible to dodge with loopholes for the wealthy. Eliminate capital gains and losses Taxing every trade is the only fair way to do it. And people don't need shares of stock to live, so it's not a burden on the poor.
  
  Don't worry, they'll raise a panic alarm about how everyone and their brothers retirement pensions are invested in the market, and so "you'll hurt the poor" will resound, ignoring that a lot of those poor never had a choice to not have their pensions gambled on the fucking market.
- Abolishing the stock market in general would be nice, or at least moving towards that direction gradually. The wealthy don't typically get their money from great trading, but parking their money and letting it grow.
  
  The stock market itself isn't the problem either though, it's that the wealthy have money and the poor do not. If you want to buy a house and you don't have the cash for it, you need to borrow from someone...and that means someone who has a lot of money. And you'll pay interest for the privilege because there is a time value of money. That doesn't go away without a stock market.
  The real solution is to tax the wealth itself, either directly or through taxing the step-up in value after the owner of a stock dies, or a massively increased estate tax.
- Or, require a stock buyer to hold that stock for 365 days before they can sell it. Then tax the sale.
- tax. every. trade.
  What is the justification for taxing a trade that lost money? Said person certainly didn't generate an income from that trade.
  How much would you even tax for a trade that lost money?
  
  The same justification as when you place a bet on black in vegas, it comes up red, and the house takes all the chips you bet.
  You can call greed "rational self-interest" and gambling "speculative investment" all you like, but trying to change the language doesn't change the reality.
  When you're gambling, you might lose, and society shouldn't subsidize the days you gamble and lose. Only income derived through labor should be truly safe, as labor is useful to civilization, unlike gambling, often with winnings from previous gambling gained using loaded market influence dice and marked insider information cards.
  
  Are you thinking it's a flat tax?
  It would be percentage of the price...
  Buy 10 at $100 and pay 10%, that's $10.
  Later you sell 10 at $50, that's $5.
  If it was $200, pay $20.
  Profit or lose, get taxed when you trade.
  It incentives long term holding which is better for the company anyways and stabilizes prices.
  And pretty much elimate all the day trading bullshit that makes companies focus on constantly improving profit margins no matter what the long term repercussions are.
  Companies would want to show sustained long term growth to intice investors who could potentially keep the stock for years.
  
  A trade could be taxed based on the value traded. You trade 200 bucks worth of stock should get hit like you're buying 200 bucks worth of jewelry.
  
  its not the tax mechanisms problem that your market is not based in reality.
  dont like it, dont trade. that is the point.
  im thinkin flat fee/rate. 10$/per. yeah.
  
  Service fee for Freedom^TM.

Well of course they do. That's the whole point of the legal scam of investing. If it benefits regular people it wouldn't exist.

Don't worry, it'll trickle down.... Annny day now.
- I can already feel it trickle on me! No wait, that‘s asbestos.
  
  Just give it 30 years or so, and we'll be swimming in that sweet sweet mesothelioma money.
  
  It's ok though because they sprayed it down with urine first.

This is an important thing to note when someone claims that you should be eager about stock market performance because of your [comparative handful of] shares in your retirement account. Accounts such as the 401k were probably devised to tie up regular people's money into the stock market, injecting more money into it and making it seem more important (and thus worth bailing out).
- They were devised to get rid of pensions so companies didn't need to care for their employees, they could just have the option to match input, but retirement was made to be 100% on us.
  More bullshit to benefit corporations, but to be honest there are so many scumbags out there and so many pension plans that were stolen from, I don't know how to feel about it.
  
  It was also devised so that when a crash occurs, the lower classes get wiped out, the rich still have piles of cash, and they get to buy up everything at fractions of a penny on the dollar.
  
  You know exactly how to feel about it. Douchebag MBA's who think they're Masters of the Universe gamble with other people's retirement money. And all those sweet sweet fees...
  We should invest in guillotines.
- This point is huge and seemingly overlooked by most people? Once a majority of boomers start pulling their 401k money I don't think millennials and gen x will be putting as much money back in.
  
  They really cooked up such a great Ponzi with 401k. I'm sure it'll get rugged right when we come of age to cash out.
- Accounts such as the 401k were probably devised to tie up regular people’s money into the stock market
  Aren't pensions also tied up in the stock market. Yes there's a difference of who manages and how the contributions are made, but both plans put the security of your retirement in the market in some capacity, right?
  
  Pensions also allocate some funds in stocks, but overall they invest conservatively. By default, most 401k funds are set to a target retirement date fund and early on those are mostly stocks. These funds also often have significant annual fees. Instead of a single large fund managed conservatively, you have many individual funds that are managed all over the place. The common advice is to invest more aggressively when you're younger, there has also been a huge push toward ETFs which are their own tangled mess and have a potential for trouble in the future, but that's a different topic.

And you thought Monopoly was just a game!
- Half of the game. You're supposed to end the Monopoly phase when everyone gets frustrated, and switch to the Prosperity rules.
  https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1105295/prosperity
  
  Close.
  Halfway through the game you're supposed to end the Monopoly phase and switch to eating the rich. This redistributes the wealth and allows everyone a fair chance again.

Billionaires shouldn't exist.

The "Eat the rich" crowd continues to do absolutely nothing.
- Unfortunately cannibalism is still unwelcome in society 😔
  
  Just become rich, no need to eat anyone.

No no you guys all don’t understand that this is a good thing because… (let me check my notes…) ….uh…hm…derrr…communism.

Seems weird to make this assertion, and fail to provide what the total holdings cutoff is to be in the top 10%.
- Right. Is it 10 figures? 7 figures?
  ... 5 figures?
  
  Almost like it's clickbait designed for echo chambers like eattherich.
  Don't get me wrong, fuck the rich. But bold claims like this need to show their methodology. Hiding it is sus.
- According to Wikipedia it's an annual income of 154k as of 2019.
  
  154k is middle class. And everyone in this thread is trying to figure out how to fuck them the hardest.
- https://www.kiplinger.com/personal-finance/605075/are-you-rich
  It’s under 200k easy. I’d guess it has more to do with an inflated market than pushing poorer people out.

My wife and I constantly lament how we were born a few decades too late. For everything
- Born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore space. Born just in time to explore Dank memes.
  
  Truly, a time to be alive.

- Even when the stock market crashes the rich don't get poor. They can seemingly lose ungodly amounts of money exceptionally quickly but even after all that they'll still be rich because being rich is a comparison: If everyone on a mountain falls down the ones at the top will still be there.
- Click on the link. Literally the first thing in the article is a graph over time.
  tl;dr it was about 80% in 1990, and is now 92.5%. Or alternately, the bottom 90% of the population owned 20% of stock market wealth in 1990, and now they own 7.5%, so around one third as much as a generation ago.
- Only if you consider "getting poor" going from a $200B net worth to $175B net worth.

One thing the article doesn’t make super clear to me is if that figure includes investment funds and whatnot, and to what degree. It sounds like it might but elaborated very little beyond a vague statistic.
- It is extremely vague, because the top 10% of Americans in net worth are those who have over about $850,000.

No shit. If someone does not have money they don't need then they can not buy stocks or any investment.
- So many hands
  
  As is tradition.

Cause and effect

Is this really a new thing? Haven't the rich always been the stock-holders?

Gasoline is relatively cheap.
Just saying...

Tax stock over 100,000 shares 1% per current price, per stock, per quarter.
- Guillotine anyone who tries to buy a yacht or private jet.

I don't think it's good to have such wealth inequality, but I do this general investment into the stock market should be encouraged.
401ks are so much better than pensions as a retirement vehicle. Better return on investment and more financial separation from the company I work for. I never worry about someone raiding the pension fund or a company going bankrupt, and I've received much better return on investments than the numbers you hear from pension funds! That's not even considering 401k matching......
- Ok rich person, or it will be owned only by a tiny few and collapse bc of it.
  
  Your comment makes no sense. Try replying to what I wrote please.

I'm shook!

So if everyone in the US stops buying publically traded companies, it would bankrupt the top 10%?
- Only if you're including the top 10%. The vast majority of retail investing makes little difference even when combined, in comparison to institutional investing.

It's actually insane knowing that so many people on this planet live in extreme poverty, in slums, have no safe access to food and water and yet we have many single humans buying 15 cars, villas worth 15 million, yachts etc.
At this point I shouldn't take me out of the equation because even though I am not rich I still buy useless stuff I might not need and someone else needs the money more than I do.
But I just can't wrap my head around that a lot of individuals have so much money. No human should have 10x more than an average person needs. What justifies someone making albums and selling them for 15$ and that person earns 20 million $ cause so many people buy the album for 15$. At some point the money should flow to programs or other things that benefit society.
Sure the album is great, thats why it is selling, but why a nurse for example is doing hard work and just will never earn that money. I'm pretty sure most nurses have done a lot more things during their career that SHOULD be worth millions. But thats not the point. Even nurses shouldn't have more than 10x what they need. No one needs it. It's great to have but no one needs it.