Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. Coming up, who wants to be a billionaire?

You may have worked hard, but if you built a company that made you billions, a lot of other people must have been involved.

It almost doesn't make sense to say, I did it by myself. We ask, should

billionaires be taxed out of existence as some politicians are now proposing? Taxing the wealth

of wealthy people actually means taxing active business assets that are generating production

and jobs. We'll hear from both sides of the argument here in Business Daily from the BBC.

Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Carlos Slim, Aliko Dangote. To some, these billionaires

or business leaders, any ambitious entrepreneur anywhere in the world, should look up to and emulate.

To others, their huge wealth is a sign that the capitalist system has failed, that wealth is not

being distributed fairly. There are 2,604 billionaires in the world. Over a quarter of them live

in the US. That's according to Wealthex, a research

company that tracks the super rich. The problem, as some see it, is that the number of billionaires

has grown, while 40 million Americans now depend on federal food stamps to put a meal on the table.

It's a big issue ahead of next year's US presidential elections, and Democratic contenders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren think they have the answer.

Hit the billionaires with a wealth tax and use the money it raises to increase government spending on health care, education and infrastructure.

We cannot afford a billionaire class whose greed and corruption has been at war

with the working families of this country for 45 years. So if you are asking me, do I think we

should demand that the wealthy start paying the wealthiest, top one-tenth of one percent,

start paying their fair share of taxes so we can

create a nation and a government that works for all of us. Yes, that's exactly what I believe.

Thank you, Senator. We have watched billionaires stand up and say, look, I want to run for

president, and one of the first planks in my plan is going to be no new taxes for billionaires.

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