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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 reduce

• 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.
  • nightski 4y ago
    Wealth taxes seem so dumb to me. In many cases it's forcing sale of private or public company ownership from those who know the company best often to - you guessed it - institutional investors. It's bad enough how much control institutional investors have, but to force it by law seems even more ridiculous. There has to be a better solution.
    • planb 4y ago
      You had me for one second with that argument. But if you sell off your company, you would still get rich and be taxed - so why wouldn't you stay on board and your goal is not to get richer, but to create the best business you can?
      • spullara 4y ago
        You have to sell the business to pay the tax. That is why wealth taxes are pretty dumb without carve outs for many kinds of assets.
        • FabHK 4y ago
          Why not sell 49% of the business?
          • kansface 4y ago
            The percentage doesn't matter. You have to pay taxes on the stock you own (ie, your startup). You do that by selling the stock. As the value of the company increases, you are forced to sell off increasingly large chunks of your stake to pay the bill thereby loosing ownership (control) in the process.
            • FabHK 4y ago
              With an estate tax, the value is assessed once, I'd assume (at death/inheritance), then due to be paid. You might have to sell of a third or whatever of the fortune/company, and keep the majority. Sure, over successive generations, the family might lose control of their original fortune/company, but that is compatible with the intention of the tax.
  • foobar2021 4y ago
    The top 1% complaining about the top 0.01% while ignoring 99% of the world is a nonsensical argument?
    • tapland 4y ago
      Wow, yeah. Putting it like this makes it pretty crazy right? You don't see your error?
  • eweise 4y ago
    Most of the wealth is in unrealized gains. How do tax that? Let's say I buy a painting for $1 and discover its a Van Gogh. Now its worth $50 million. Should I be forced to sell it to pay taxes?
    • qbasic_forever 4y ago
      We already have this issue for our existing tax system. You have to declare your income and use a huge set of tax rules and laws to determine your AGI and appropriate tax bracket. Taxing billionaires changes nothing here other than deciding once your AGI has enough zeros you get more taxes applied.
      • eweise 4y ago
        In this case there is no income so nothing to tax. Yet I would be worth $50 million and some would cry that's its unfair, which I think is silly.
        • qbasic_forever 4y ago
          Then lobby to change the tax laws, just like folks are lobbying to add billionaire taxes. The billionaire tax has nothing to do with the rich having ways of hiding wealth or income, deferring losses, etc. to reduce their tax burden. You're making an argument that obfuscates and obscures the real argument here that billionaires should not exist as they serve no utility in a society besides absorbing resources.
          • eweise 4y ago
            Not sure I understand. The laws work just like I described. Nothing to tax, which is the way it should be.
            • qbasic_forever 4y ago
              Then nothing changes in your fantastical scenario that I find a $1B painting in my attic and sit on it. What we're talking about here is when people like Jeff Bezos have billions of dollars of income--direct income from gains realized in asset sales, income generated from property, stock sales, salaries, etc.--we shave a significant portion of those gains off in a wealth tax.
• xtracto 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? Disclaimer: I live in a 3rd world country and my salary is 1/3 of what the standard US salary is. YES, I do believe that everybody's compensation (including mine) who are in the top 10% of the population should be decreased/limited. Provided that their living costs are adjusted so that the $500/month get you similar standard of living to other nice places (say, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, etc). The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's just crazy and unsustainable. How the 90% of the population haven't turned on us is just sheer luck and a political, security system that is rigged in our favor. I would be happy to be part of a "pay cut initiative" for all the top 10% earners, if it meant equalizing opportunities for everybody. I had the opportunity to grow up and be friends with poor people who just did not have the chance to succeed, so I don't believe the "poor people are just lazy" narrative. There's good hard working people that just never had a chance. Similarly how there is bad rich people that just want to leech from others.
  • chrisseaton 4y ago
    > The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's just crazy and unsustainable. Been sustained so far throughout all of human history.
    • criley2 4y ago
      Historically it was much, much worse. The only way you can make an argument for saying inequality is greater now (when global poverty/subsistence farming is at the lowest % since human settlement 12000 years ago) is to point to the sheer amount of wealth we generate compared to any other period and nit pick about it's allocation. That's fine, but if you want to go back to farming for your life, like most humans for most of history, you'll probably find it a worse life than being in a developed country middle class, even if "your wealth is technically more equal to a king than a middle class to a ceo"
      • RyanHamilton 4y ago
• ryandrake 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? This is rhetoric that tries to confuse two totally different scenarios in order to convince the majority to oppose something that only hurts a tiny minority. Saying "one person should not have 5 generations worth of wealth" is not the same thing as saying "people should not make a middle class salary". They aren't even similar. If there was any place on earth where $1,000,000,000 was comparable to $500/month in any way, you might have a point. > Does someone earning more than you hurt you? Yes. Without a doubt. Wealth is freely convertible to and from political power, so outsized wealth translates into outsized political/lawmaking power, which affects us all. Let's make an extreme example if you don't believe me: Should sextillionaires exist? Do you think that maybe, just maybe, someone having $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 might have a negative effect on other people's lives? > Also… do billionaires employ people? Some do, some don't. Some non-billionaires employ people, some don't. Employment was around long before billionaires. It's not a requirement. To me, wealth should be like the speed of light. There should be a limit, and it should be increasingly harder and harder to approach (but never achieve) that limit as you get wealthier. Not sure how you'd actually implement such a Lorentzian economic speed limit, but it seems fair to me. Make the limit high enough where at 99% of it, you can have your needs and your family's needs fully met in the most expensive neighborhood on earth, or whatever.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    Those are just round zeros. You could obtain that much money in some African countries over the last 50 years for a few dollars. The latest cryto coin could give you that many coins. But these are numbers trying to represent wealth. Any cap you put on the top could have the effect of reducing the value of a currency meaning the buying power doesn't change. A billion cap would make your million dollar house worth $100. However you slice it you are poor and someone else is rich.
    • 4y ago
• Johnny555 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 You're not making a serious point if you're looking at world income to guide policy in the USA, or any other first world country, you're just making up a strawman. do billionaires employ people I'm sure they have a small household staff, maybe security, yacht staff, private pilots, so maybe in the small hundreds. But Tesla employees a 100,000 people, SpaceX employes 10,000 - both of those companies would exist regardless of Elon Musk's personal wealth. In fact, having so much wealth in one person is a liability to the company -- Musk can singlehandedly tank Tesla's stock.
• panda-giddiness 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? This is an absurd slippery slope, and a bizarre appeal to "plenty of people" to boot. There is a significant and categorical difference between $500/mo and $1 billion. You undermine your own point by not addressing it. In fact, if there were a wealth cap of $500/mo as you posit, it would take over 150000 years to accumulate $1 billion, which frankly only reinforces how excessive that amount of money is.
  • tomcam 4y ago
    Who determines excessive? How do high risk ideas get executed when there are no billionaires?
    • Johnny555 4y ago
      How do high risk ideas get executed when there are no billionaires The same way most of them do now -- through venture capital firms. Or maybe if they had more tax revenue, the US government could sponsor more speculative research and companies.
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
        It would be nice if there was more public funding for basic research. Why aren't the benevolent billionaires this thread is talking about paying for that?
        • tomcam 4y ago
          Are Microsoft, Google, and Tesla not doing basic research?
      • tomcam 4y ago
        Venture capital firms are often formed by… billionaires, at last check.
    • 4y ago
• hourago 4y ago
  > Does someone earning more than you hurt you? The economy is not a zero sum game. But billionaires are getting all the growth while middle class and the poor see their share of the economy shrink. This is not about my neighbour earning more than me, it's about corporations that take over big chunks of the economy.
  • its_ethan 4y ago
    > billionaires are getting all the growth while middle class and the poor see their share of the economy shrink. In your own sentence you had to use specific words "their share of the economy shrinks" can be true, while their wealth increases. The economy is not a zero sum game. The middle class could see their share of the economy increase while also having standard of living, total wealth, etc. all decreasing.
• ghshephard 4y ago
  > Does someone earning more than you hurt you? Yes. Because they can afford private schooling, legal and medical care that the bottom 90% cannot because those services are privatized and only available to the very wealthy. If the ruling class/wealthy who controlled the system could not depend on their vast wealth for great schools for their children, health and legal protection - then all of a sudden the social system would be spectacular, and everyone would benefit. Inequality is poisonous because it creates massive disincentives to create a working socialized health, education, legal system....
  • mensetmanusman 4y ago
    On the flip side, the tragedy of the commons prevents progress in a socialized system. Game theory says there are no easy answers. Child outcome data suggest that strong family structures seem to have the most impact.
    • ghshephard 4y ago
      I dunno - I spent 20 years using the Canadian Medical System, then moved down to the United States in 1995, and spent 20 years using the system here, with 5 years in a (mostly) socialized system in Singapore. There doesn't really seem to be much of a tragedy of the commons when it comes to healthcare - nobody is really that excited about getting an unneeded biopsy, or hip replacement, or colonoscopy.... Agreed that full-throated capitalism seems to be the best system when it comes to allocating most resources (I absolutely do not begrudge Billionaires their Yachts, big houses, islands, private jets - have at it!) - but it's pretty sad when someone who works hard their entire life has to die 10 years early because they can't afford a decent doctor.
• mrcheesebreeze 4y ago
• Grustaf 4y ago
  There's a pretty long jump from banning billionaires to capping monthly salaries at 500 dollars. Nobody makes billions by "earning more than you", they make it my owning companies, or funds, so this has nothing to do with salaries. But the fact is that the existence of billionaires hurts everyone, especially in poor countries, but also definitely in the US. Now I'm not talking about the ethics of some people wallowing in wealth why others are starving, the biggest problem is that when you reach a certain level of wealth you can start influencing, or even controlling, public policy. This obviously has the effect that public funds are diverted away from the public into their pockets. In the third world this process is quite direct, in the rich world it's more about enacting policies that benefit these oligarchs, at the expense of everyone else. This is a huge problem.
• jwilber 4y ago
  Awful comparison. Your number of $500 isn’t possible to live on in much of the world. It’s an artificial floor - a fair comparison would be one that everyone could live off with ease, not just your false dichotomy few. Never mind that a billionaire could live anywhere and literally couldn’t spend all of their money if they tried.
• int_19h 4y ago
  Someone earning more doesn't hurt me. Someone taking the wealth that other people have produced with their labor is not earning, though. And a lot of us do think that earning 300x what the average worker does is a physical impossibility.