7 ms·

They also pay way more than John Q. Public and yet only get the same amount of access to what taxes fund (police, fire departments, public schools, roads, milit

• pydry 6y ago
  >The whole situation stinks because many do have more money than they can realistically ever spend This bothers me less than having more money than you could ever possibly have earned fairly. If I paid more taxes through dint of making more money than you but also didn't work I'd still functionally be a parasite.
  • itake 6y ago
    > you could ever possibly have earned fairly. I'm just wondering, but what is the max amount you can earn "fairly"?
    • pydry 6y ago
      I don't think it makes sense to try and put a number on it. It makes more sense to look at narrow sources of income and ask "was this wealth earned or extracted?" In many cases (e.g. rental income from property passed from one generation to another that is managed by an agency) it is extremely obvious. In other cases (e.g. dividend income from a company you founded) it is less so, and there is probably a split. With outrageous sums of wealth (e.g. Bezos) you can bet that it's probably almost all extracted. I doubt we'd be losing much productive labor (if any) by taxing all people with assets over a billion $.
      • andrepd 6y ago
        Very well put.
    • oblio 6y ago
      It's hard to say, but except for some outliers, on average, won't it be something like: 40 years x the salary of the best paid profession x the compounded interest rate over those 40 years x heck, I'll be nice and add a 2-5-10x multiplier to account for various other factors More than that, aren't we talking about sheer, dumb, luck? Plus, anything over that, it doesn't really matter anymore, you're living like a king compared to the average person. If you're a religious person, it kind of feels like greed :-)
      • bluecalm 6y ago
        It's not about living like a king, it's about changing the world. If it was just about consumption I would never work another day in my life even though I probably have at least 25 productive ones left. I haven't exploited anyone either, I created software with my own hands and sold it to people without employing anyone (I have a partner and we sometimes had short term contractors but not employees). We are not a monopoly and we have very smart competitors. The reason I will not stop working? With enough money I can change the world around me: open a racket sports club/gym, maybe my gf opens a kindergarten for autistic kids (she currently works at one), maybe I can influence local politics so we finally get rid of the biggest polluters from my town. If it wasn't possible to do those things with money it wouldn't be the game worth playing and that would be a loss for everyone involved: me, my customers and the government taxing me. I can only change the world at a very small local scale. Jeff Bezos can send rockets to another planet. Elon Musk can among other things build infrastructure to give everyone around the world internet access. Please let them, the governments have enough money already and they don't have a monopoly for good ideas how to spend it to put it mildly.
        • oblio 6y ago
          That's not how this game is played. For every billionaire trying to make the world a better place, 10+ billionaires are just treating this whole thing as a game and abusing us, peons. And even for the folks working on those rockets, it's not so clear cut. Reading how their workers are treated, the whole thing is quite gray and murky.
        • andrepd 6y ago
    • nicoburns 6y ago
      Say it was 1000x what the poorest member of society has. That would seem to align incentives nicely. There is no limit on how much you can earn, but in order to earn it you have improve society in a way that actually impacts those who need it the most.
• failwhaleshark 6y ago
  This canard is worn and untrue. They bought the best, complicated tax system that benefits them to reap even more. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/4/20938229/zucman-saez-tax-rates-top-400 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/4/20938229/z... Reality: "Wealth Inequality in America" https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
• matsemann 6y ago
  > so they're already contributing an order of magnitude or more than I am Are they _really_ doing that? I don't like how hoarding assets is seen as 1000x more contributing than someone working 8 hours a day.
  • LanceH 6y ago
    You don't think the guy that buys the factory that a thousand people work in contributed more? He should get $10/hour for laying out a couple billion?
    • oblio 6y ago
      If all I have is $10, spending $5 on something risky and losing it is a tragedy. When I have $1bn and I spend $5 million x 100 risky investments, then losing $500 million means that I, my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren will still be richer than the top 10% in even the most developed country. At some point the whole risk-reward shtick breaks down.
      • gh-throw 6y ago
        This is why the pat answer of "capital is rewarded for taking risk, that justifies their pay" doesn't ring true to me. Your downside is... still being rich and never, ever having to work if you don't want to? Hot damn, give me some of that risk!
    • boomboomsubban 6y ago
      What have they done except have money in your example? Why should they get anything?
      • andrepd 6y ago
        Classic example of justifying X with X (justifying capitalism inside the framework of capitalism).
    • matsemann 6y ago
• slumpt_ 6y ago
  Sales / service taxes disproportionately hit the poor. We don’t need poverty to be more expensive than it is.
• klmadfejno 6y ago
  A policeman enforcing property rights generates a lot more value for the guy who owns the property.
• CogitoCogito 6y ago
  > They also pay way more than John Q. Public and yet only get the same amount of access to what taxes fund (police, fire departments, public schools, roads, military protection, etc). Well the government also enforces contracts and your claims to property. The amount this helps you is obviously proportional to your wealth.
  • andrepd 6y ago
    Ding ding ding. It's amazing the number of people who think that private property is this "natural right" and then goverment comes and "steals" part of it, when in fact the institution of private property and its enforcement is precisely what the state does, without which your company wouldn't exist! This means courts, legislature, law enforcement, an army. Even more generally: your company ultimately only exists because the country provides you with a stable environment and millions of well-fed people with money kn their pockets to spend at your company. So you actually have a lot to pay society/the state back for! I'm very partial to a georgist/mandatory public shares approach because of this.
• itake 6y ago
  > so they're already contributing an order of magnitude or more than I am My friend's gma passed away, giving him $500k inheritance. He invested that money at the bottom of the crash last year and increased it to $1.2m. In this situation, how did he contribute $700k of value?
  • peeters 6y ago
    Well not to put a dollar value on the contribution but he gave companies $500k in accessible capital which they used to grow or recover.
    • fock 6y ago
      you know how the stock market works?
      • itake 6y ago
        Can you explain it? My understanding is they bought the stock from another investor, held on to it, and then sold it. I'm not sure where the value was created. Maybe if the company was creating more shares and the investor bought them directly from the company, then the company use the new funding to create value, but I'm not sure that is what actually happened.
    • Slippery_John 6y ago
      It's not that simple. Buying $500k of stocks does not mean you gave $500k to a company to use unless the stocks were bought directly from them. More likely it was bought from another investor with cold feet, and at best the company benefited from the increased stock price generated by the demand.
      • bluecalm 6y ago
        Yeah but the reason companies are able to raise as much money with stock issuance is the promise of liquidity thus providing liquidity is valuable. This example isn't a problem either. Someone made 700k at the cost of someone else, likely an over-leveraged players who were forced to liquidate because of the threat of the pandemic. The market is far from efficient and the swings in prices are unavoidable. Normal long term investors didn't lose much if anything during this crash. The government got a cut because of money changing hands. If anything one could ask why is the government getting anything if no value was created.
• 0xfaded 6y ago
  There are several benefits that the wealthy generally take advantage of that the average person does not. Three big ones are: 1. An educated workforce 2. Enforcement of private property 3. Bailouts and junk bond purchases Most businesses benefit from a workforce which they do not need to pay to "produce", but merely hire at an hourly rate. Private property is only really possible in a system that allows it, otherwise might = right, and we would be talking about the 1% with the biggest biceps. My pet solution is a wealth tax. For those who argue that wealth is hard to trace, see point 2, the system can be designed to allow only declared private wealth.
  • zhoujianfu 6y ago
    Is the easiest way to implement a “wealth tax” just higher inflation?
    • andrepd 6y ago
      Not really because ideally you want to exempt the first say 1 or 2 million from the tax.
      • inter_netuser 6y ago
        so UBI + inflation?
    • 0xfaded 6y ago
      Every dollar is ultimately backed by something. An increase in money supply is not by itself a bad thing, but if those new dollars don't result in the creation of new assets on the other side of the balance sheet, the new money will just shuffle around to eventually map onto the same existing assets. In the worst case, the momentum this creates will cause people to follow suit and throw their savings into the asset market creating a bubble.
  • bluecalm 6y ago
    >>work force If you want to tax that why not payroll tax? >>Enforcement of private property Land value tax? >>Bailouts While they are people benefiting from that it's people in specific industries and/or connections to politicians. Your average 1%'er is not in position to benefit. We can all agree though that bailouts are bad but it's not a tax problem is a problem with a flawed system that induces a lot of short term pain if a given company fails and politicians being able to convince the public bailouts are necessary.