9 ms·

Great read, but it should be taken with an enormous grain of salt. The economic system that maintains Gates' private wealth is dependent on positive PR. Showing

• jmpman 8y ago
  How much should [bm]illionaires be allowed to leave to their children? My opinion is no more than $10m per kid, and only to the first generation (direct children). Trust fund babies only help yacht builders.
  • r0fl 8y ago
    Yacht builders employ lots of people to build large yachts, what's wrong with being a yacht builder? Why $10 million? What about in countries outside of the United States? What if a wealthy person has a single asset that is worth more than $10 million and has one kid? ex: a $50 million commercial building. Would you force a sale of the asset and then strip away $40 million away? What about lottery winners who win over $10 million? Should lotteries be capped at $10 million?
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Should lotteries be No.
    • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      > ex: a $50 million commercial building. Would you force a sale of the asset and then strip away $40 million away Plenty of householders or businesses have to sell an asset to settle some debt or tax bill, why not estate taxes? Of course we might have to bring back capital controls for it to be functional.
    • mc32 8y ago
      Exactly. The kind of millionaire you don’t want is thd one who hides money under the mattress. Those who invest or conspicuously splurge are a boon to the economy and to workers.
      • greeneggs 8y ago
        This is wrong economically. Conspicuously splurging is just a waste of resources. If a wealthy person and all her descendants save their money forever, then there's no harm to the economy. The money is just numbers in a computer, nothing concrete. (Politically, it could be dangerous, since there is always the threat that they could spend it.) If she spends it digging holes, on the other hand, then that's wasting real resources. It employs people, yes, but in a pointless task. Their labor could have been better deployed. There's obviously a continuum, but $100 million yachts are probably closer to the digging-holes side of the continuum. (But maybe not. For example, spending $10 million on a painting for that yacht has very little real effect, since aside from the purchase transfer overhead, it is mostly moving numbers from one bank account to another.)
        • covercash 8y ago
          I imagine some of the r&d (tech, materials, manufacturing processes) leads to improvements in areas that less wealthy people benefit from.
          • deleted 8y ago
            [deleted]
        • macspoofing 8y ago
          And how do you know what the correct usage of resources is? This is why communism _always_ fails. Every attempt at a top-down control of the entire economy will lead to failure. The economy is too complicated and chaotic for that to ever work.
          • jordanbeiber 8y ago
    • maxxxxx 8y ago
      "What about lottery winners who win over $10 million? Should lotteries be capped at $10 million? " Actually I think so. I would prefer if more people won a modest amount vs. one person winning tens of millions with a large jackpot.
      • TeMPOraL 8y ago
        It would definitely make more people realize how much of a money waste lotteries are. If you'd expect to win $1000 every year, you'd quickly realize you spend more on tickets than you get back.
        • Pristina 8y ago
          I can spend $1 on a ticket and feel an insane whirlwind of emotion imagining myself winning $1 billion, or i can spend $1 on a candy bar and feel some pleasure eating it. If buying a lottery ticket is a waste of money then all forms of entertainment are.
          • pluma 8y ago
            Ooh, nice one. A genuine defense of gambling as pure entertainment rather than a system built on exploiting addicts and people's irrational perception of chance events. I haven't seen that in decades. Are you next going to say cigarettes aren't addictive? EDIT: Okay, fine, here are citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_gambling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_gambling https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/add.13929 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/add.13929
            • cardboard 8y ago
              https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • macspoofing 8y ago
    No. In your best case scenario, where you actually successfully enforced this ludicrous policy, it would create ugly incentives for the government (or corrupt agents in the government) to profit from an untimely death of the self-made billionare. In this scenario, the murder of Jeff Bezos would lead to the nationalization of Amazon. More likely, however, it would incentivize massive tax evasion, with schemes being cooked up to move money offshore as quickly as possible.
    • stochastic_monk 8y ago
      They already do this as much as possible as it is.
    • elefanten 8y ago
      Come on that's a little silly. Even Amazon or Apple would be a rounding error to the government's balance sheet. Noone would have the incentive to organize such a public and attention-drawing murder conspiracy for super incremental gains to an entity noone can reliably control.
      • User23 8y ago
        Interestingly though, this is how the Roman Empire funded itself from time to time. Caesar would proscribe some rich citizen and then seize his assets.
        • macspoofing 8y ago
          We can go a step further. That's the modus operandi of every authoritarian regime ever, including every communist dictatorship.
      • macspoofing 8y ago
        It is fun to come up with unintended consequences of an unworkable feel-good policy. But I wouldn't necessarily dismiss it because the incentive is there. Having said that, I don't think there's any question that this policy would lead to massive tax evasion. Not including all the fun societal unintended consequences we can only speculate about ... and all for what? To punish some trust fund kids OP is bitter against?
  • Flemlord 8y ago
    Apparently $10m is the exact amount Bill and Melinda plan to leave to each of their children. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/05/who-is-jennifer-gates-bill-and-melinda-gates-oldest-daughter.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/05/who-is-jennifer-gates-bill-a...
  • briandear 8y ago
    Why is it your place to decide? It isn’t your money.
    • jmpman 8y ago
      No, it’s not, but in societies that allow too much wealth disparity, heads roll in the streets.
      • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        And it can be your head, even if it wasn't your money. And sometimes it feels like we're approaching that point...
      • rjf72 8y ago
        This is an example of correlation != causation. The French Revolution, commonly cited as an example of this, was not caused by wealth inequality. It was caused by the fact that the French were practically, in some cases literally, starving while the government flailed about ineffectively, accrued tremendous debt seemingly to no end largely driven by fruitless wars, and ultimately turned to taxation to try to sustain a failing state. It was not an otherwise comfortable people suddenly deciding to lop off people's heads because wealth inequality rose beyond some acceptable level. I doubt we'll ever see another effective organic revolution in any developed nation because people in general no longer have the chutzpah for the actions required to change a government that doesn't want to change, and because we've all become contented from that pale white glow in front of our faces for ever longer fractions of every single waking moment. There's also the effective division of society. Two sides increasingly hate each other which means if either side ever crossed that invisible line, the other side would suddenly become hugely pro-government. There are also some economic changes that mean France's situation would never be replicated in a place such as the US. In particular money no longer has any real meaning. It's not backed by anything and governments can 'print it' (not how most money is made, but that's another topic) to no end. The only real constraining factor is perception. So long as your people and other nations agree to believe your money has value, then it does. This is how we can spend trillions of dollars we don't have on wars, be $22 trillion in debt that nobody expects will ever be paid off, inject huge sums of money in the market to artificially inflate it and call that 'growth', yet still have an ultra-premium rated currency. This is also why 'helicopter money' [1] is thought to be a good idea * . You print money, load it up on a helicopter, and then drop it down to the people. The asterisk there is because it's a good idea only if people don't expect it to be repeated. It all goes back to perception. Keep dropping the helicopter money and people stop believing in the value of the dollar and so it indeed loses all value. This is, as an aside, a major issues with things such as a basic income. We could easily 'afford' it. But you very much are risking a perceptive change on the value of the dollar with such systems in which case all that money you're tossing around becomes worth about as much as the beads at Mardi Gras. And tossing even more only trends towards hyperinflation. The point of that aside on money being that France lived in a time where there was a fixed amount of money and their government was wasting that money. Today our governments waste money like never before but it has less effect on the common people since governments don't need the amount spent to be less than the amount 'earned.' [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money
  • User23 8y ago
    As much as they want. It doesn't really matter since 90% of them will lose it all, which is to say stimulate the economy. Today's 1% is not yesterday's 1%. The Rothschilds and the Rockefellers are outliers, most families lose all their money in 3 generations.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > How much should [bm]illionaires be allowed to leave to their children? As much as they want. Without estate or gift taxes, either. OTOH, it should be taxed as normal income to the recipient (as should capital gains), though to avoid excessive taxes on non-repeatable windfalls, there should be mechanisms both for recognizing and paying taxes on advance of realization and spreading taxes one incoe over several years after realization, with some limits on the latter. And several higher tax brackets should exist above where the current maximum kicks in.
    • ancientworldnow 8y ago
      Not even Andrew Carnegie agreed with this take. He was an ardent supporter of heavy estate taxes - despite being worth over $300 billion equivalent today.
      • dragonwriter 8y ago
        > Not even Andrew Carnegie agreed with this take. So? > He was an ardent supporter of heavy estate taxes Yeah, so what? Heavy estate taxes are a not-horrible band-aid over not adequately taxing the income of rich people as income, but it's better and simpler just to tax income appropriately. The fact that some rich people like heavy estate taxes doesn't really change that.
    • Pristina 8y ago
      the idea that people don't get their properties seized by the government is controversial. who could have thought?
  • 8note 8y ago
    $100k? less? If they want their kids to be rich, they should teach their children to get rich, not just be rich
    • x220 8y ago
      Why not $0? If they want their kids to be rich, they should teach their children to get rich, not just be rich.
  • simula67 8y ago
    > How much should [bm]illionaires be allowed to leave to their children? As much as they want/can. > Trust fund babies only help yacht builders. But it does convince the parents to build useful companies, provide useful services etc
  • x220 8y ago
    >How much should [bm]illionaires be allowed to leave to their children? As much as they fucking want. The rationale for taxation is the idea that you owe your government money by using up public resources (such as national defense, public works, emergency response, etc.). That's why you get taxed for activity such as buying stuff and earning a living. Dying doesn't use up the government's resources. You don't need the government's protection and assistance to die without interference. Just lay your motives naked and talk about expropriating property from the rich without compensation. That's what estate taxes are, just with extra steps.
    • magpi3 8y ago
      > The rationale for taxation is the idea that you owe your government money by using up public resources (such as national defense, public works, emergency response, etc.). If this were the case, then everyone would be taxed equally. People with more money have always been taxed more (at least in the U.S).
      • x220 8y ago
        That's because the rich use up infrastructure and protection (they have more stuff worth stealing) more than they would if they were poor. The poor also get a pass because they can't easily pay regular tax rates and we want to lift them out of poverty so we can tax them more once they are (hopefully) in the middle class.
    • Simon_says 8y ago
      When you're a socialist, you don't believe people have any fundamental right to private property. It may be allowed in a socialist system as a means to an end in order to motivate people to work and create, but don't any funny ideas about owning it.
      • ionised 8y ago
        > When you're a socialist, you don't believe people have any fundamental right to private property. Wrong. There is nothing in socialism that prohibits you from owning things.
  • Pristina 8y ago
    If it's my money, why can't I choose who to give it to when I die? Are you so envious and bitter that the idea that some people get given large amount of money is so painful to you that you think it must be forbidden?
• manigandham 8y ago
  Are you confused about where his wealth came from? He co-founded Microsoft, one of the most valuable companies on the planet which has made tremendous impact on people around the world. He's also giving away almost all of his fortune, that's the whole point of his foundation.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • thaumasiotes 8y ago
    It sounds like omegaworks is claiming that in the absence of positive PR, the unwashed masses would pass laws expropriating Bill Gates' wealth.
    • manigandham 8y ago
      If the "unwashed masses" need PR to show that the Gates Foundation has helped eradicate Polio then perhaps those masses should not be involved in any laws.
      • thaumasiotes 8y ago
        That is certainly the majority opinion historically and cross-culturally, but it conflicts with the modern American conception of democracy.
  • pluma 8y ago
    If you run a company you understand that you're not the person creating the profit. If every worker vanished you'd make zero profit (in fact you'd probably lose money because of static costs but depending on the scale you might still contribute some income to offset that). Entrepreneurs don't create value, labor does. Entrepreneurs seed and lead organisations that direct labor towards profitable activities. Bill Gates took a certain level of risk, yes. He also had a strong financial safety net and head start by sheer circumstance of his upbringing. Unless every employee throughout the lifetime of Microsoft was compensated in actual proportion to their contribution to the overall profit of the company, Bill Gates didn't derive his wealth from his contributions but simply from those of his employees. We have a cultural norm of hero worship but Bill Gates wouldn't be where he is if he had paid everyone their fair share. The reason we don't consider this is that we consider this to simply be how businesses operate.
• moneywoes 8y ago
  Why did your comment get greyed out?
  • grzm 8y ago
    Comments become progressively grayer if it's been downvoted more often than it's been upvoted.
• shaki-dora 8y ago
  He has given away half his wealth, and plans to give more than 90%. If this is all a ploy to keep his money, he’s doing a terrible job at it.