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People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-ba

• dcow 4y ago
  If it's hard then it's still possible and where do you think the extra resources will have to come from to realize the new generation of billionaires?
• oh_sigh 4y ago
  I'm just a run of the mill average joe, who has a rock that has been in my family for generations. Turns out some weird little cult likes my rock and wants to buy it for $1B. Should I be forced to sell my rock, because I'm getting a $500M tax bill from the government because some weird little cult said they would pay $1B for it - regardless of whether I want to sell my rock?
  • thefaux 4y ago
    Why is the rock yours? How did your family attain ownership of it? If the rock means little to you, why should you have it rather than the cult that actually values it? What if the cult wants to preserve the rock but you want to destroy it even though that will cause great pain to those who care about it? Why should you have permanent ownership of a rock just because your parents had it?
    • elefanten 4y ago
      You set the table to abolish the notion of property. It's hard to extrapolate what effects that would have on modern societies... it hasn't really been tried. I'm not saying it's an inherently bad idea, but the proponents of that kind of idea always seem to paint rosy visions based on extrapolations from inappropriate samples. Maybe you can say you don't have to fully abolish property. But it remains especially hard to predict what second order behaviors any particular implementation would bring about, and what steady state would result from them. Per your example, if the expected ruling of society would be that gp doesn't get to keep the rock because they don't "care" about it... well, maybe people in their position would suddenly find themselves caring about the rock very greatly. Not even cynically -- if the choice presented to you is "value or no value", the limbic system suddenly becomes very persuasive.
    • oh_sigh 4y ago
      > Why is the rock yours? How did your family attain ownership of it? The rock is mine because my family bought land a few hundred years ago, and the previous owner thought the rock was ugly and let it for us. > If the rock means little to you, why should you have it rather than the cult that actually values it? The rock means a lot to me, because it reminds me of my ancestors. I value it, but I just don't have a billion dollars to attach to it as its value. > What if the cult wants to preserve the rock but you want to destroy it even though that will cause great pain to those who care about it? I dunno. I think it is my rock and I can do with it what I want. But I don't want to destroy it, I just want to keep it where it has been for the past 200 years, near my family home's fireplace. > Why should you have permanent ownership of a rock just because your parents had it? Because that's how ownership works. If anyone can come take anything from you at any point, then I don't think you can ever be considered to own something.
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    This strawman parable is so elegant in its contrivance that it deserves a Nebula Award.
    • googlryas 4y ago
      Can you explain how it is a strawman? I've never seen any kind of wealth tax proposed that takes into account how the wealth was acquired, or what form the wealth was in.
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
        It is an incredibly contrived, fantastical scenario that is too grating to even consider.
        • googlryas 4y ago
          Of course it is a contrived, fantastical scenario. But the point is: Does it meaningfully deviate from the key points for any wealth tax scenario?
          • Apocryphon 4y ago
            A wealth tax scenario, like all taxes in real life, will have its share of exceptions, carve-outs, and loopholes. Meaning the wealth assessment process will inevitably be far more involved than "a weird little cult offered a billion dollars for it." Now, from a parable perspective, does the post mirror the principle of how wealth taxes work? Maybe, if you're willing to equate the entire market (or whatever communal entity we're using for the basis of assessment) to a weird little cult.
            • googlryas 4y ago
              Ok, it is not a weird little cult, but literally everyone in the world who wants my rock because it is so beautiful. I don't see how that tangibly affects any part of the parable - which is forcing me to sell something I own because someone else with more money than I have wants it.
  • evanlivingston 4y ago
    Yes? Whether you're receiving the value of the asset or not, you're locking up the value of the asset and preventing a larger group of people from benefiting from the value of the asset, which is sort of the point of a wealth tax.
    • oh_sigh 4y ago
      What is the locked up value of the rock? I like it because it reminds me of my grandfather, and the cult that will buy it will lock it in their storage room. My point is: With a wealth tax, anyone with money can take anything they want from anyone without money, even if the person without money doesn't value something in the same way that the person with money does.
      • dlp211 4y ago
        This is a contrived example that you've twisted yourself in knots to try and justify. There isn't a person on this planet that wouldn't sell an heirloom for $1 Billion unless the heirloom was actually worth ballpark $1 Billion. The people that wouldn't sell it for a $1 Billion are the people that would give it a way for free, ie: those that have little value for money.
        • dcow 4y ago
          No it's really not. It's an illustrative example of how a wealth tax would (fail to) work. The issue at the core is that items only have value while they are exchanged. Fiat is the only thing with the characteristic of persistent value. So trying to tax standing wealth is fraught because wealth doesn't actually exist in that form.
          • Apocryphon 4y ago
            Then simply don't tax fixed assets. Sure, sure, then people will simply avoid taxes by converting cash and other assets into properties that are not directly taxable, but that's just how these cat-and-mouse games go.
  • trgn 4y ago
    There's a great thought proposal on how to tax assets fairly. In this system, you are taxed at the self-assessed worth of an asset. However, if somebody bids over that price, you are obliged either to sell it to them, or raise your self-assessment. It's somewhat of a game (joke perhaps), usually used in the context of ways to fairly assess land value.
  • flashgordon 4y ago
    So here is the thing. Your rock, your wish. It is wierd when you get to take interest free lines of credit on the 1B valuation on the rock and never pay the 500m in taxes :)
    • adastra22 4y ago
      Either the rock gets sold and the income is realized and the taxes are paid then, or the rock ends up being worthless and the loan margin called for possession of the rock and the remaining value is taxed as income. Either way the taxes get paid in the end. Tax deference is not tax avoidance.
      • whimsicalism 4y ago
        I have the rock, it is now worth 1 billion dollars. I take out a 50 million dollar loan from the rock and put it into the stock market, which lets say has 2% average real returns over interest (probably low if i have 1 billion in collateral). I pass the rock on to my children and die 20 years later. The 50 million is now worth 74 million. Both the rock and 74 million are stepped up to their current value when I pass it on to my children. The children repay the loan with their 50 million and now have 24 million and the 1 billion dollar rock still, tax free. How is that not tax avoidance?
        • adastra22 4y ago
          Your issue here is the cost-basis step-up on inheritance, not anything to do with loans.
          • whimsicalism 4y ago
            I was just explaining how tax deference can be tax avoidance.
            • trgn 4y ago
              That's the key one. The tax code, today, in practice, already frowns very much on tax deference, and tries to inhibit it when possible. The AMT-schedule is purposely designed to pull tax forward, and precisely discourage strategies for tax deference e.g. to counter the abuses that would arise by using stock-based (or cult rocks) compensation to avoid income tax. Property tax (which is a wealth tax) is another way to siphon off tax on unrealized wealth.
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    Yes, if your rock is worth twice as much to the cult as it is to you you should have to sell it.
    • dcow 4y ago
      No. The rock is worth vastly more to the owner than the cult which is why they won't sell it. However, the value is intrinsic... it's priceless. It's worth infinitely much to the owner regardless of how much anybody else thinks it should be worth. Therefore, it's impossibly to tax the owner infinitely for their intrinsically valuable rock...
  • yunohn 4y ago
    I love how this thread is full of people simping for billionaires with absolutely ridiculous strawman scenarios like this one…
    • googlryas 4y ago
      Can you explain how it is a strawman? Someone else accused it of being a strawman, but then could only claim that it is "contrived", which is not the same as a strawman. So where's the strawman? Would the person in this scenario not be affected by a proposed wealth tax? Also, I don't really get how it is "simping for billionaires" in the slightest. If I said that billionaires shouldn't be pulled from their mansions and lynched, am I simping for them too?
      • owisd 4y ago
        It's not a straw man, I believe a better idiom would be 'the tail wagging the dog', i.e. you're using an extreme edge case to argue against the big picture proposal. A real tax would include the small picture details: payment plans, equity swaps, valuation tribunals, etc to cover the oddball cases. But none of that would matter, you would sell it and net the $500M.
        • googlryas 4y ago
          Even with payment plants ,equity swaps, valuation tribunals, it would still be the case that someone with more money than me can force me to sell anything I own to them, by placing a value higher than I can pay on it?
          • yunohn 4y ago
            I find it odd that you think that amidst this world of legal tomfoolery and loopholes - a wealth tax could not be conceived that doesn’t force artificial valuations and liquidations.
  • Johnny555 4y ago
    Should I be forced to sell my rock, because I'm getting a $500M tax bill from the government because some weird little cult said they would pay $1B for it - regardless of whether I want to sell my rock? If you don't want to sell your rock, then set up a family trust to hold the rock with the provision that it can never be sold, then the rock will have effectively zero taxable value and you can keep it in the family forever. If you don't want to do that because you might want to sell it some day, then it's not really a family heirloom, it's an investment. Or, put the rock in a trust, tell the cult that they can take ownership in 100 years and have access to it once a year for ceremonies if they'll pay you $100M today.
• halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  Why stop at $100M? Why can't $1M be the most?
  • ipnon 4y ago
    "Probably" seems the key word here. Many people have a slight preference for a policy with wide ranging ramifications. It's better to be unconvicted on matters that are inconsequential, like whether tea or coffee is the superior beverage.
  • iLoveOncall 4y ago
    Because nobody wants to be living in 1970's China?
  • sokoloff 4y ago
    Because that provides ~$40K/yr in income during retirement. That seems like...way not enough to hold out as the absolute maximum.
  • randomhodler84 4y ago
    A) inflation b) try to buy a house for 1M in a hcol place. Why would you set the max wealth less than that of a house, something that most humans have been able to own for most of human history, now out of reach for a generation. You need to realize that absolute numbers are meaningless, they are all relative to costs and inflation. Trying to lock down fiat absolutes is a moving target. What is a realistic wealth limit for BTC, out of 21M? Should nobody own more than 1/21Mth the Bitcoin? Less? More?
  • memish 4y ago
    Why can't $100,000?
    • 0xLaMDA 4y ago
  • FabHK 4y ago
    Why can you only vote/have sex/drink/gamble when you're 18 yrs? Why not at 12, why not at 30? The fact that there is a gray zone does not mean that no border must be drawn.
• jstanley 4y ago
  > Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealth tax on assets kicks in? He'll certainly work a lot less hard after the wealth tax kicks in.
  • mrep 4y ago
    Shit, I'd immediately retire
    • bluedevil2k 4y ago
      Yeah, but I’m that’s the attitude that separates you from a billionaire. Billionaires are never satisfied with their net worth.
  • SantalBlush 4y ago
    Then another entrepreneur who hasn't yet made $100M can start a business in the same space. If the market can bear both businesses, then they both win. If it can't, then they're in direct competition and we're still better off. This actually sounds better than what we have now: monopoly as the end goal.
    • jstanley 4y ago
      Then why don't we set the cutoff at £10k instead so that the very poorest have a chance? Or set the cutoff at just above the poorest person's net worth. When they make some money they won't be the poorest any more and next year it will be updated to the new poorest person's net worth. That way we make sure everybody has a fair chance at getting rich. Or is it possible that those who have a demonstrated history of wealth creation are actually better at it, and we're all better off if they continue to do more of it?
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
        Sure, we can start by applying that cutoff on those with the most £10k's to spare.
• tomcam 4y ago
  There are plenty of people in the world who would think that anything over $500/month is way more than enough for one person. Should your compensation be reduced to that amount? Does someone earning more than you hurt you? Also… do billionaires employ people? Do you want their employees to have their jobs seized from them when the johny555 tax goes into effect?
  • qbasic_forever 4y ago
    You can put a wealth tax on billionaires without putting taxes on poverty level workers ($500/month in the US). You're making bizarre nonsensical arguments here--slippery slope, strawman, etc.
    • elefanten 4y ago
      That was clearly not the point. The point is there's always someone with a different bar for what is excessive wealth. Chances are that 80%+ of the world population would find your income staggering, the same way you consider a billionaire's wealth staggering. So how do you decide who's scale to use?
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
        Stunned that a community of software engineers is forgetting the top-down approach to algorithm design.
      • qbasic_forever 4y ago
        We already have a tiered system of taxes in the US. We don't tax everyone 50% because the average US wage is 100x that of a third world country average wage. It's possible to examine only the US wealth distribution and make choices about taxing the highest of the high earners there in isolation of all other earners in the world.
      • panda-giddiness 4y ago
        > So how do you decide who's scale to use? Like the way all other murky subjects are settled, you just decide on one. We don't legalize murder just because some slayings are justified. The existence of grays areas does not preclude the black and white.
• ipnon 4y ago
  Billionaires are highly correlated with millionaires, which don't seem to be beyond the pale for critics of wealth inequality. Countries with billionaires rank much higher on quality of life than those without. It hurts to see Bezos and Musk in yachts but the side effect of their wealth is companies like Amazon and Tesla that have a net positive effect on society in terms of products and employment.
  • john_yaya 4y ago
    “companies like Amazon and Tesla that have a net positive effect on society” Citation needed.
    • ipnon 4y ago
      My claim is that if these companies weren't useful than they wouldn't exist. People hate Bezos but they spend their money at Amazon. Methinks they doth protest too much!
      • hetspookjee 4y ago
        You could argue the same for the likes of Philip Morris or the Sackler families business. Just that people are very willing to buy a product doesn’t imply that it’s good. So I wouldn’t raise the fact that folks buying Amazon or Tesla products as a pointer that their products are any good perse.
        • ipnon 4y ago
          I think so. Cigarettes are enjoyable and Oxycodone is on the World Health Organization's Essential Medicine list.[1] You can also drive your Tesla off a cliff, or attack someone with a knife you bought from Amazon. The possibility of risky behavior doesn't necessarily make a thing useless. In the interest of full disclosure I enjoy the occasional cigar. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycodone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycodone
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
• subdane 4y ago
  Imagine if billionaires had the same _effective_ tax rate we do. That would be helpful enough.
• memish 4y ago
  That's an arbitrary cut off and it's not just about whether they will work less hard or not. It's about effective capital allocation. If they earned their wealth through smart capital allocation, why would you want to remove capital from proven allocators and forcibly move it to the least effective allocators? TLDR. Elon makes vastly better use of capital than the government does. He turned $180M into SpaceX and Tesla. They turn $180M into some bombs and maybe an unfinished train station if we're lucky.
  • hooande 4y ago
    buying twitter at $54/share is an effective use of capital?
    • countvonbalzac 4y ago
      This^ + how much capital did Elon Musk actually allocate to Tesla and SpaceX? It was much closer to $100m than $1 billion or $100 billion.
    • memish 4y ago
      At the time, yes. Today one could get it for a lot cheaper.
  • formerkrogemp 4y ago
    SpaceX was funded by government contracts awarded to SpaceX. 'Ol Musky doesn't wave a magic wand for discerning capital deployment. He just gets lucky.
    • memish 4y ago
      Luck doesn't itself explain being able to repeat that level of complex achievement. You need >99 percentile in energy, intelligence and curiosity to pull that off.
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
        He was certainly lucky that the Obama administration was around to lend him money to finish the Model S and not declare bankruptcy, sure.
• adastra22 4y ago
  > Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealth tax on assets kicks in? In my experience from having known a couple of mega-rich CEOs, yes. Even those who are not principally driven by the money or three-commas social signaling, they still want to leverage their accumulated assets into changing the world in some way. Take that away from them and they lose motivation, yes.
  • CardenB 4y ago
    There's a gulf between sam altman and jeff bezos. We can still have rich people with the leverage to act efficiently without giving them the ability to buy entire nations if needed.
  • azemetre 4y ago
    What gives these individuals some sort of divine right over citizens in a democracy? I feel like people are ignoring that human history already went through this period in the era of monarchies and divine rule. It was a disaster then, it's a disaster now, and it'll be a disaster in the future.
  • corrral 4y ago
    Cool. They can retire and one of the thousands of other people who can (and want to) do their job can step in. If that starts causing problems, companies need to work on training programs for their leadership. It'd be an amazing side-effect if this pushed us toward it being more common to "rise through the ranks" and end up CEO. And if it caused us to start generating tens of people with a $100m net worth for every one one billionaire we'd have had otherwise.
• lr4444lr 4y ago
  It's not how hard they work - it's the risk-adjusted decisions they're willing to take.
• toephu2 4y ago
  > there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire Why does everyone want to tax the billionaires? What are you going to get out of it? Do you think taxing the billionaires is actually going to help the poor people? If so, riddle me this: Name one efficiently-run government organization.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • jfoutz 4y ago
    Medicare?
    • FabHK 4y ago
      Funnily enough, virtually all health insurance systems world wide have a higher government component than the US one, and better outcomes at a lower cost. (Spot the outlier on the first graph: https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life-expectancy-and-health-spending-us-focus https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life-expectancy-... )
  • CardenB 4y ago
    Maybe it is less about the tax revenue and more about preventing power imbalance. Why is it good to have so much power concentrated in the hands of one person?
    • evandale 4y ago
      I firmly believe Musk, Gates, and Buffet to name a few do more good with their money than if any government got their hands on it. Not all the billionaires are bad.
      • cute_boi 4y ago
        Looks like you need to look Shenanigans done by Musk, Gates etc. I don't know that much about Warren Buffet, but the main point is when you are billionaries you can earn kindness etc.. They hire PR agency so that gullible people like them. They are really not better than government because these people are the one who lobbies government to vest their selfish desires.
• kiba 4y ago
  Having a billion dollars is a side effect of our current system. Much more useful to focus on system level incentive than to focus on a small minority at the top. If there's people with budgets for yacht, then there are a much larger group of people with budgets for fancy houses. And an even larger group of people whose incentive is to see the price of their homes rise, contrary to the societal goal or providing affordable homes for everyone. If you implement a nationwide land value tax, I believe the wealth disparity will start to disappears and there may be less billionaires, but everyone will benefit.
  • CardenB 4y ago
    > Much more useful to focus on system level incentive than to focus on a small minority at the top. The issue is that the minority at the top can easily hinder development of system level incentive to cement their power, once they have achieved such a power imbalance.
• systemvoltage 4y ago
  We need more billionaires to exist. They create wealth through enterprise. It is astounding how many people naively just think "Too much money = bad". Billionaires don't really have cash sitting in their houses. They created companies, often from scratch, that wouldn't otherwise exist. https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth GDP per capita grew because the wealth was created, not stolen. The entire pie got larger. We lifted people out of poverty from 90% in 19th century to what it is today 10% through capitalism and trade. We need more billionaires to create wealth and propel society forward. Crony billionaires, politicians, inheritance wealth, etc. need to be condemned and we usually throw the baby with the bath water along with the whole tub. Billionaire hate is getting out of control because people are convinced naively. I suspect some malaise in economics education.
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    Has there ever been a study on how many "productive" billionaires there are, as compared to those who are simply rent-seekers? Or a study that has shown that billionaires ("job creators") are those who are the primary driving force for wealth creation? Or are the much-bandied Gates/Musk entrepreneur-industrialist types just a minority of billionaires, many of whom are just wealthy heirs or hedge fund owners or whatever
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • bezier-curve 4y ago
    You don't need an economics education to understand the implication of wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few people. This idea that billionaires generate wealth is myth.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• fairity 4y ago
  > Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealth tax on assets kicks in? Yes. You would increasingly see founders depart their companies as soon as a heavy wealth tax kicks in. It’s difficult to prove that this would have large net negative impact on overall well-being, but I imagine it would.
• heliodor 4y ago
  Taxing billionaires is a simplistic knee-jerk reaction that doesn't address the actual problems people have. It just feeds people's hate. Consider that people have a lot of problems with Amazon's practices. So suddenly, everyone is yelling to tax the hell out of Bezos. But no one has the drive to actually plug the holes that allowed him to make so much money in the first place. All kinds of employee injustices, environmental abuses, and whatever else pops up in the news all the time.
  • Johnny555 4y ago
    I don't expect a billionaire tax to have any impact on Amazon's business practices, that doesn't make any sense. Amazon's treatment of employees is a separate issue from a wealth tax. I just don't think that any one person should have the kind of power that comes from amassing a $100B+ fortune.
• madrox 4y ago
  I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm more comfortable with wealth in the hands of progressive billionaires than a government that's likely to go on a regressive tear every four years.
  • endorphine 4y ago
    False dichotomy?
    • madrox 4y ago
      Only because the comment I originally replied to started it billionaires should not exist at all.
  • Veen 4y ago
    You're making a big assumption that billionaires are or will remain "progressive," whatever that word means to you.
    • madrox 4y ago
      I mean it in the dictionary definition of the term: a person advocating or implementing social reform or new, liberal ideas. I'm aware there are conservative billionaires. I don't think that negates my view that you're more likely to see long term progress on many issues through private funding. US government budgets swing wildly every few years depending on what ideology is in power. By design, that's a conservative force (in the traditional sense). My government is simply not designed to do a lot of the things we sometimes want it to do, like cure malaria.
• freyr 4y ago
  Reminds of a CEO’s tweet yesterday that software engineers making $400k+ are the real problem, and it got lots of likes. Today we day a billion is too much. Where do you draw the line (obviously, start with the billionaires and not with the workers), and who gets to decide?
  • cozos 4y ago
    Link to tweet please?
    • foundart 4y ago
      https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1536406121249796096 https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1536406121249796096
  • Johnny555 4y ago
    I don't think reaction to a twitter post is a good judge of how it would be received here -- many of the software engineers here are probably already earning over $400K in total comp. Well, at least before the recent market drop.
  • pgodzin 4y ago
    I don't think engineering salaries are "the real problem" but, they certainly are "a" problem for many companies whose business models don't print cash the same way FAANG companies do but try to compete on comp, and that's what the tweet was getting at.
    • rvz 4y ago
      You mean MAGMA (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon) companies? It seems Netflix doesn't have a sustainable business model as they have too many direct competitors in the field, price increases in their own plans and little to no diversification in other sectors. Unlink the others MAGMA companies, Netflix is not in multiple sectors to get in more cash and are stuck in a single niche. Hence, why out of the FAANG companies, stock compensation at Netflix crashed and they had no choice but to announce layoffs.
• jerry1979 4y ago
  I'm not settled on this yet. I'm from the USA, and one thing that concerns me is the geopolitics of billionaires. What happens when USA taxes billionaires out of existence? Russia and China still have billionaires. Does that do something to the power relationships in the world? Is there such a thing as "our" billionaires? The other question I have has to do with feudalism. If we let "our" billionaires exist, does that mean that we keep feudalistic pressures at bay? Or do we enhance those pressures? Is that even the right question?
  • anotherfounder 4y ago
    If there was fair taxation on billionaires, and there was a wage growth where all the productivity gains didn't only stay at the top, then I think folks would be less incensed at billionaires.
    • emptysongglass 4y ago
      You don't even need to discuss billionaires though to get some very bad effects. Take Denmark for example that taxes software engineers 50 percent of their salary (it's not unique to SWEs it's just because nearly all SWEs will make enough to fall into this bracket). I'm thoroughly examining other lower tax bracket countries to move to because why do I want to pay half of my salary until I am enfeebled and the state lets me enjoy my enfeeblement? Let's macrosize the perspective: why do you think Unity moved HQ from DK to the USA? Could it be the crushing taxes here? This is the issue. You really can't have it both ways. Yet many Americans love to fetishize a hatred for few very specific individuals without thinking through the whole causal chain that girds their economy.
      • Johnny555 4y ago
        Take Denmark for example that taxes software engineers 50 percent of their salary (it's not unique to SWEs it's just because nearly all SWEs will make enough to fall into this bracket). I'm thoroughly examining other lower tax bracket countries to move to because why do I want to pay half of my salary until I am enfeebled and the state lets me enjoy my enfeeblement? Denmark consistently ranks in the top 5 of countries with the best quality of life. A year of parental leave, great social welfare, universal healthcare and retirement benefits, etc. Including federal/state/local taxes, healthcare premiums, retirement contributions, disability insurance, etc, I pay close to 50% of my salary in the USA And I'd still worry about how I'll pay the bills if I lost my job. why do I want to pay half of my salary until I am enfeebled and the state lets me enjoy my enfeeblement? Because that's how the state pays for the enfeebled today? Are you really suggesting you want to leave Denmark to go somewhere with lower tax rates, then when you need social healthcare, you'll move back to Denmark and take advantage of the healthcare system that you didn't pay for?
• Aarostotle 4y ago
  That's up to the CEO. Recognize that you — and everyone else — are relying on him to work just as hard, to take on just as much responsibility, while sacrificing more and more for every incremental dollar of value he creates. Your question implies a hope that the CEO will continue to take on massive responsibility and produce massive wealth, even when the main beneficiary of his productiveness will be the government, not him. If he doesn't choose to work harder, every incremental dollar disappears and the scheme fails. What happens then?
  • snotrockets 4y ago
    That's the beauty of it: the public benefit would remain the same.
  • jonathankoren 4y ago
    Lol. CEOs aren't some sort of demigods. In fact, most of them are just dumb shlubs that got lucky.
  • runarberg 4y ago
    This assumes that CEOs of massive heavily profitable company provide meaningful and productive contribution to the company, which is very much up for debate.
• Latty 4y ago
  There should be an exponential wealth tax past a certain point. It's absurd anyone thinks it is sane to let people amass infinite wealth, eventually it just obviously fundamentally breaks democracy.
• smsm42 4y ago
  Yes. For certain definitions of "less hard" - he probably would work the same time, but he would have less new projects, less new investments, etc. - some companies that we know now would not exist, because there would be nobody having that kind of money laying around to be spent on crazy projects. Coinbase would probably not exist, because people who were crazy enough to spend money on that kind of extremely risky investments would not have that money around. It's not that those people would be poor - no, they probably would still have nice mansions from those $100M they were allowed to keep. But they wouldn't have enough money "they don't need" to throw them around on highly risky and completely insane projects like making a platform that trades "currency" which relies on bunch of computers repeatedly running hash functions.
• devoutsalsa 4y ago
  Wealth taxes are an administrative nightmare. It’s very difficult to reasonably price private assets in an illiquid market. Figuring out how much to charge and collecting it can cost more than you bring in. Patrick Boyle touches on this in… “Tax The Rich?” — https://youtu.be/pgW4LWeUyVY https://youtu.be/pgW4LWeUyVY My personal opinion is taxing the rich is good. Wealth tax specifically is problematic.
• rglullis 4y ago
  Why stop at 100M? Why not 50M? Why not 10M? Why not 250k? Trying to control the amount of wealth one "should" have is misguided. We should have ways to limit the amount of power that can be concentrated. If we did that, we would have a better shot at having a more equitable society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641
  • Arrath 4y ago
    In that case we will need to decouple money from power, somehow. Starting by no longer equating giving money to politicians as an exercise in free speech would be as good a place as any to start.
    • rglullis 4y ago
      There is a much easier way to do it [0], we just need to be willing to get rid of Corporativism. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641
      • Arrath 4y ago
        "- no business entity can have more than 150 people." How is that supposed to work with any labor intensive process? E.g. I work on a construction project where there are over 220 field craft workers on day shift alone. Office staff and inspectors are another 100 or so. Night shift adds yet more. Should each of those be its own business entity?
        • rglullis 4y ago
          Yes, or your company will have to invest in automation. Both alternatives are good. Third option, we stop working on such large projects, and focus our collective efforts on making our societies and our environments more human-scaled. Again, it is an option that I see as good.
          • 4y ago
• rib3ye 4y ago
  By current COIN marketcap he is barely a billionaire. I figure by the end of the month and another rate hike, he will no longer qualify as a billionaire.
  • repomies69 4y ago
    That must be incredibly tragic for him.
• cavisne 4y ago
  To pay the wealth tax you would need to reduce your ownership in the company to pay the tax until eventually you are just another minor shareholder with a leadership position (for now at least). And eventually is not long (under Warren's proposal it would be ~5 years before jeff bezos was no longer a controlling shareholder). So the question really becomes, will the outcomes for the company be as good when no one leading it owns it or benefits directly from its success. Sounds familiar!
  • toomanyrichies 4y ago
    Is wealth tax paid on unrealized gains? If not, these billionaires would only pay the wealth tax when they liquidate their position in the company they founded. Until then, it's just paper wealth and not taxed.
    • cavisne 4y ago
      Proposed wealth taxes have been on unrealized gains. Without doing that it’s pointless, billionaires even today never realize gains and just rotate through loans backed by their shares.
• dgudkov 4y ago
  History teaches us that people who don't want billionaires to exist eventually start not wanting millionaires to exist.
  • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Does it? Is there an example of said gradual progression?
    • tastyfreeze 4y ago
      Just look at how the 17th Amendment was sold... https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-11-3-b-the-income-tax-amendment-most-thought-it-was-a-great-idea-in-1913.html https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-11-3-b...
      • tastyfreeze 4y ago
        Sorry, meant 16th Amendment. I've been talking about the 17th a lot lately.
• passivate 4y ago
  By that same logic, why should USA salaries be higher than the rest of the developed world? Will you work less hard if you can only get $70,000 versus $200,000? The CEO is an employee. The owners of the company hire him/her to do a job.
• snarkypixel 4y ago
  There needs to be an asymmetrical rewards from taking a huge risk starting a startup. Otherwise people wouldn't do it and just work at big_company.
  • chickenpotpie 4y ago
    There's a middle ground that works better here. It's not like he wouldn't have started the company if his house was only $109million.
• asiachick 4y ago
  why? So instead we have government officials with more money to hand to random cronies and massively wasted via graft? What I like about billionaires is they cut through the red tape and often through the inefficiencies. I actually like they don't need consensus to decide what to use their money for. I don't agree that taxing that money away from them is a net positive for society.
• slickrick216 4y ago
  How wealthy are you? If you don’t like me asking a question then it’s a bit hypocritical to make comments about others wealth. If your net worth is over 100k USD I think you should only have 10k and the rest be stripped away from you and give the needy? You don’t like that tough your freedom isn’t yours. I’m honestly not trying to be confrontational but you shouldn’t just impinge on peoples freedom to acquire wealth. Those who do shouldn’t have any. Those who have some level and wealth and try it. Well they are just pulling up the ladder behind them.
• tastyfreeze 4y ago
  I would like all levels of wealth to be treated the same. Why do we penalize people for being successful? If I knew you and, by some stroke of luck, you happened to become monocle and top hat wealthy I would congratulate you on your success. I would even buy you dinner to celebrate. I would not demand a share of your wealth just because you have a lot of money. There are some systemic issues that cause wealth inequality. We should focus on fixing those issue to enable more people to enjoy success. Not trying to take from the most successful individuals in the grand game of life.
  • munificent 4y ago
    > Why do we penalize people for being successful? I assume you mean "relative to people that are less successful". The answer is because the marginal value of wealth decreases the more you have. If you're poor, $1,000 is the difference between your kid seeing the doctor or not. If you're rich, it's a nice meal out. > There are some systemic issues that cause wealth inequality. We should focus on fixing those issue to enable more people to enjoy success. The core systemic issue is that wealth is a positive feedback loop. The more you have, the more you can leverage it without losing it in order to get more. Treating all levels of wealth the same is directly incompatible with resolving this positive feedback loop. You need a counterbalance that scales with the level of wealth, because the magnitive of the positive feedback loop does.
    • tastyfreeze 4y ago
      So? Are we not all to be treated equally under the law? It doesn't matter that higher income earners are able to pay more in taxes. The government is required to treat all individuals equally. Fix the problems that exacerbate wealth inequality. Remove regulations that inhibit competition. No business is too big to fail. (Most big banks would have been destroyed in 2008) Stop manipulating the currency to the benefit of the investor class.
• simonsarris 4y ago
  Why shouldn't they exist, exactly? I think we should want more billionaires, ten times as many, at least!
• kortilla 4y ago
  These billionaires don’t have a billion dollars in cash. They have a huge chunk of a company shares that are currently valued at >1 billion. So what you’re proposing is just that a company’s shares are taken away from the founders/execs as the company grows. It’s not just that you’re taking wealth away from them, but you’re fundamentally forcing them to sell off control of the company.
  • Johnny555 4y ago
    Well, I'm not proposing that people and companies do anything specific, it's up to them how to handle it. Maybe they'll choose to use less stock based compensation and more cash, maybe CEO's will end up with less compensation in general and the companies will retain more of that money for their own operations. but you’re fundamentally forcing them to sell off control of the company That part is true. Billionaires can retain control of their company by being good leaders and providing value to the company, not because they started it 20 years ago and retained a huge amount of stock.
    • kortilla 4y ago
      > Well, I'm not proposing that people and companies do anything specific, it's up to them how to handle it. There is no other way. I don’t think you understand how shares of a company work. There isn’t some secret treasure chest of cash the owners have to pay that burden. They just have to sell off portions of the company because that’s what has value. This eventually results in a loss of control and dim-witted bureaucrats like the fund managers at black rock start to dictate direction. The whole stance is antithetical to innovation all for the sake of wanting to take something because it has a high potential value.
• anonporridge 4y ago
  This means that if your business grows to a multi billion dollar valuation, you are reward for your success by immediately losing controlling share of your business. This might mean that motivated found might work less hard to make their businesses as competitive and big as possible, and could slow down the pace of innovation.
  • cwkoss 4y ago
    The world would be a better place with fewer monolithic walled gardens. It would encourage CEOs to build $999M businesses that interoperate with other businesses on the free market rather than acting like a cartel controlled within a single organization.
• alx__ 4y ago
  Christ on a skateboard!? All the temporarily displaced billionaires in this thread are something else. If you require more than 100M in net worth to be "motivated" to work. There's a larger problem with you. Being a CEO/leader doesn't require some skill set that's given to you from some mythical watery being just because you're special.
  • jcampbell1 4y ago
    It isn’t about the money, rather it is a public scoreboard to remind us that we must serve others and be innovative.
    • mkr-hn 4y ago
      It's not working. Jeff Bezos said he can't think of anything to do with his money other than build rockets while people die in his warehouses. Too much money makes people out of touch. I don't think billionaires are evil, I just think they don't know what life is like for people who still have a concept of "cost of living."
      • jcampbell1 4y ago
        I know a few people that like working at Amazon and the pay and benefits are good. Do you know people who died there? Are your friends cursed?
        • akoncius 4y ago
          it is poor argument. you cant see wifi but it exists. if your friends are fine does not mean that there are no issues there. plenty of news articles were published about inhumane working conditions where people cannot go to toilet even.
          • jcampbell1 4y ago
            What does Bezos being a billionaire have to do with the working conditions in Bangladesh? What are you even talking about?
• stevenjgarner 4y ago
  A wealth tax implies a tax on unrealized appreciated assets, which is beyond bizarre IMHO. So you buy a house for $500k somewhere. It surges in value to $1.2 million. You therefore have an unrealized capital gain of $700k. You are NEVER going to get that money until you sell it, and when you do you are going to pay a whopping amount of capital gain tax. But a wealth tax implies you pay that capital gain tax now. Okay so let's say you do. Then a year later there is a major correction to the real estate market (hmmm ... 2008). Your $1.2 million property (on which you paid a huge amount of wealth tax) is now worth say $700k. Do you get a tax refund? You never got the income. You should never pay the tax. No different if it is a $500k property or a $1 trillion company. It is not wealth until you have it.
  • Johnny555 4y ago
    Oh, you mean like the property tax I pay on my unrealized house value? I don't get that tax back if I end up selling my house for half what it was taxed for last year. But I can appeal the evaluation for this year.
    • lovecg 4y ago
      We don’t have to be absolutist about it. Houses are not nearly as volatile as stock, so evaluating and taxing them as wealth is pretty feasible.
      • stevenjgarner 4y ago
        > Houses are not nearly as volatile as stock I know six million American households who lost their homes to foreclosure in 2008 that might disagree with that one.
        • midasuni 4y ago
          Prices dropped 15% from the peak to the trough. The S&P is down 20% in the last 3 months.
      • 4y ago
• consumer451 4y ago
  The best argument I can think of for why humans should not have wealth disparities at levels of 500,000,000,000:1 is that Tax Induced Psychosis appears to be a thing. Having to write 10 digit checks to the government makes people behave irrationally. We are just not evolved for it and likely never will be.
• fleddr 4y ago
  I think the wealth question is phrased wrongly: how much wealth is somebody allowed to have? Rather the question should be: how is such excessive wealth generated in the first place? Billionaire level wealth comes into existence by means of a concept that is alien and bizarre when you think more deeply about it: "Percentage-based future-facing ownership". Also known as "shares". Emphasis on the word "percentage". You're the 30% majority shareholder and founder of a startup worth some 1 million USD in total. 10 years later, it's turned into an empire. You're still the 30% shareholder but now of something worth 1 trillion. Superficially this looks reasonable to people but it is in fact bizarre. You scale up wealth from 300K to 300B just by the societal agreement that there is such a thing as percentage-based ownership of a variable thing. Which is a concept that is entirely made up and does not exist in physical reality. In a way it is future-capitalism. You lay claim on value that doesn't even exist yet nor will it actually be produced by you typically. This jump from 300K to 300B can't be justified or explained by "hard work", risk or any other personal attribute. Imagine you go fishing with friends. It's your boat. You paid for it and need to maintain it. So the friends agree to give 50% of fish caught that day to you, to cover costs and as a reward. The next day you meet your friends again and declare: by the way, actually 50% of all fish in the pacific ocean are mine. How so? I got "fish shares". But you wouldn't do any of the fishing??? Fish shares don't care.
• aerosmile 4y ago
  > Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealth tax on assets kicks in? I empathize with the quick back-of-the-napkin math ("if we could just take Bezos' money and give it to the poor..."). But I think there's an important nuance here. You're making it sound like the only group of people that would be affected by this are the folks with $0 in net worth, so that the upside is $100m. In reality, anyone who's ever earned the first $100m (not inherited or won in a lottery), only ended up accelerating their ambition and likelihood of doing a lot more. Case in point - all of the Paypal mafia - they are all working their asses off every single day, and none of them would have had the upside that you're talking about. In short, your proposal would basically mean that you're going to force into retirement anyone who demonstrates to be a 1000x doer. In the worst case scenario, the opportunities those people would have created would be lost for a long amount of time (eg: creating a domestic automaker that turns the ICE industry upside down). At best, you would be expecting from unproven people who have not yet validated their abilities to execute on those opportunities with the same level of success as the 1000x doers. So it seems to me that the question is not so much "what could we do with Bezos' money," but more "how much of Bezos' money are we comfortable with not being generated at all to ensure that he never has more than $100m."
  • aliswe 4y ago
    Not "force into retirement" - you would force them to move. Well written!
• jxi 4y ago
  It’s not about whether humans think it’s moral or right or whatever that there are people with exponential wealth. It’s just how exponentials work and no amount of policy will fix things like this. There will always be holes because the demand and income are exponential and the money has to go somewhere. You can try to enforce communism and redistribution to employees but imo that just makes the problem worse with the top leaders of nations finding ways to get even more of the pie for themselves. The other thing to keep in kind is that while having 100mm is a lot of money, it probably does not change your life in exponential ways compared to 10mm, so you can consider some of the wealth essentially “burnt”. Don’t worry too much about specific numbers, as long as normal people have enough purchasing power to survive and be happy.
• oconnor663 4y ago
  Just as a mechanical question, say you create a website, things go well, and now your website is worth $X billion. What should happen next? Is it still yours, or do you have to sell it?
• refurb 4y ago
  No the CEO will just start their company outside the US. I worked in Asia and had many conversations about where companies are founded and a lot (not all) came down to tax law. If you have two equal choices and one has high taxes and one low, why would you start you company in a high tax jurisdiction?
• narrator 4y ago
  After $100 million dollars it becomes very hard to spend money on consumption. Having that much money is so you can do things that Blackrock and Vanguard don't want you to do, because they would own your company when you had to sell to pay wealth taxes.
• e-clinton 4y ago
  The issue with that thinking is that not having billionaires isn’t going to automatically redistribute that wealth onto others. The most likely scenario is that that wealth would’ve never been created… and neither will the jobs that came with it.
  • ikrenji 4y ago
    rich people are not a new invention. not taxing rich people is
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• eric_cc 4y ago
  Even if > billionaires should not exist at all Hell no to > a heavy wealth tax The federal government is the last organization on earth that deserves more money.
  • kethinov 4y ago
    When the federal government taxes people, it's not collecting money, it's deleting money. That makes the money of people who are taxed less inherently more valuable. In this regard, if the federal government were to tax people — especially the rich — considerably more than it prints money, then that would be a very effective anti-inflationary measure and a hell of a lot more friendly to the poor than raising interest rates. In other words, hell yes.
• hstan4 4y ago
  As always, why is the magic number a billion dollars? And how do you draw the line in regards to stock ownership, prevent a founder from owning a certain amount of stock once its value exceeds a billion dollars?
  • bmitc 4y ago
    As always, pick one and deal with it. This whole "billionaires are geniuses and figure out the world's hardest problems but simultaneously can't figure out how to be taxed" shtick has run its course. Of course, no solution will be perfect. That's life and how everyone else deals with things. There are several ways to accomplish taxing the mega-rich that don't require rewriting the laws of the universe. It's just that nobody in charge, because they're either the mega-rich themselves or puppets of the mega-rich, wants to address it.
    • aliswe 4y ago
      Serious question, where has this ever worked / is currently working?
      • bmitc 4y ago
        Middle-class folks are taxed at 20-35%, so it literally works all the time for everyone else. Inequality continues to rise and wealth continues to concentrate. This is because taxes that used to work and be in place for the rich are no longer there. The wealthy used to pay much more tax. Are you seriously okay with the ultra rich living by completely different rules than everyone else? I think it's probably underestimated how much they get away with not paying.
        • aliswe 4y ago
          To be honest yes I am ... I dont know maybe I am a bit royalist in that sense.
• SkyAndSand 4y ago
  My two cents: Introduce a wealth tax that only kicks in after $1B or even $10B so people still have plenty of motivation to work and get rich. You are allowed to keep control of a company, (e.g. Elon can keep control of Tesla), but then the stock has to be structured in a way that all financial gains are in a separate vehicle that will be taxed 100% as soon as the stock is sold. Finally (and most crucially), the money raised by this “tax” will not go to a governments pot but directly be distributed as cash to all Americans to make sure that it can’t be wasted by bureaucrats nor used for partisan purposes. Basically, if $500B is raised in wealth tax in 2022, by mid 2023 every American gets ~$1500 in cash to spend. What do you think?
• throwawayarnty 4y ago
  This is a naive view of the world. Most self-made billionaires in western countries exist because they have made something valuable that the public can’t stop buying or investing in. The public are just as selfish humans trying to do what is best for themselves, just like the billionaires. Think of J.K. Rowling. She is a billionaire because parents are selfish and want to give their kids the best stories to read and watch. Bill Gates made his wealth because people and companies wanted to use his software for PCs, and investors want a return on their stock investment. Society can’t stop giving these modern billionaires money because what they have to offer is such a good deal. The only way to make Bezos stop accumulating wealth is to have everyone stop using Amazon and sell Amazon stocks, which is impossible at this point.
• maskaler 4y ago
  My mother was a billionaire apologist. The world would get on just fine without coinbase, stripe, meta. $100m is an insane amount of money. Enough to buy anything you want. If people sell things for over $100m they'll soon bring their prices down.
• marco_yolo 4y ago
  you are making the incredibly naive assumption that taxes is capital that is properly allocated once seized. more often it isn't used well. what gives the government the right to wastes someone else's hard earned money?
  • piva00 4y ago
    That it wasn't hard-earned money but simply a product of exploiting what society provided to them: skilled labour and collective time to build their vision. They might manage this vision, take on more risk, etc., nothing about that is work enough for them to be rewarded orders of magnitude what they pay others to exploit them. It's a very basic morality issue, better that society wastes the product of exploitation than a single individual.
• tw600040 4y ago
  What you say may sound good in theory. But how will you implement it? Everyone who is worth billions has their worth in shares. so if it goes beyond a billion, you tax it away. What if it falls, will you give it back? so you will keep redistributing and giving it back?