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Pretty obscene that somebody could have so much wealth that $7,000,000,000 is just the tax bill. Also weird that it's framed as a "gift."
by Kapura 2y ago
Pretty obscene that somebody could have so much wealth that $7,000,000,000 is just the tax bill. Also weird that it's framed as a "gift."
- FredPret 2y ago[flagged]
- HauntedDrum 2y agolol, please elaborate
- mmmpetrichor 2y agoIt's draconian to have some upper limit on wealth? what if a small number of people managed to, legally, extract wealth to the point where we all became vassals? (Or is that what we've already gone very far towards?)
- AdrianB1 2y agoNo. But it is a slippery slope of having limits on people, from wealth to anything you can think of (random example: limit ownership to a single car). In the end if it is all legal, it is nobody else's business. If it is illegal, setting an upper limit is not the moral solution.
- recursive 2y ago> If it is illegal, setting an upper limit is not the moral solution. Any particular reason you believe that?
- sieabahlpark 2y ago[dead]
- AdrianB1 2y agoYes, if something is illegal then you don't need to set limits, you send people to prison, don't pass Go, don't collect $200.
- mxkopy 2y agoYou can make just about anything a slippery slope if you wanted to - “they’re putting limits on guns, what’s next, kitchen knives?” Morally you should probably be spending more time figuring out how to get everyone their first car instead of worrying about your legal rights in owning your second.
- amatecha 2y agoRight? What's with all the volunteer billionaire-wealth advocates?
- fragmede 2y agowell, see, it's embarrassing to admit, but you see, I'm a billionaire. I mean, I'm not one right now, it's a temporary thing. Once I'm back on my feet, I'll have a billion dollars and then, see, I just couldn't have restrictions like that placed on me. I think everyone should be able to get that. So even though it's hurting me now that the rich don't get taxed more, it's just this temporary embarrassing thing where I'm not currently a billionaire.
- Auracle 2y agoJust because something won’t affect people doesn’t mean they can’t be allowed to think it’s morally wrong.
- FredPret 2y agoWhy yes, there are countries with limits on kitchen knives. And if your focus is on providing that first car, then the system currently doing that en masse for billions of previously-poor people is called “capitalism” and your moral imperative is to speed it up, not slow it down.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mxkopy 2y agoCapitalism only works when you have a middle class. Protecting billionaires’ abilities to hoard wealth is not in the interests of the middle class. To be charitable I’ll point out that in general that’s not what you’re arguing for. There is a real sense in which personal freedom is essential to people making it out of poverty. Protecting one person’s and not another’s would defeat the point. Here is the compromise. It should be easy for people to do things that billionaires would have no point doing (i.e. take out a business loan of $10K) and difficult for billionaires to do things that people would have difficulty doing (hoard the global supply of some good). That’s if your goal is to have an equitable society where everyone is on the same difficulty level, more or less. Approached this way there would not be a slippery slope because the delineation is quite clear. Moreover there’s no squashing of personal freedom, a billionaire is always free to do things a regular person is able to do. In fact the system we have now basically squashes the freedom of the average person because they are not free to do things (buy a house, have a chance in court) by virtue of not having money while other people have a ton.
- fragmede 2y agoWhere $1 billion is about 40,000 Honda Civics, I think most people would support limiting ownership of cars to 39,999. It doesn't even have to be a hard limit, just a luxury tax on cars that cost more than, say, $1 million, and on owning more than 40,000 cars. If you want a 40,001st car, your can do it but it means you're going to have to pay an extra fee that goes towards helping people with less.
- FredPret 2y agoWho cares what “most people would support”? It’s right, or it isn’t.
- AdrianB1 2y ago"most people would support" is mob rule or tyranny of the majority. Not morally right. People have no right to tell you how many cars (or something else) you are allowed to own.
- fragmede 2y agohow many slaves do you own, how much cocaine do you own, how many guns do you own? how many crocodiles or tigers can I keep as a pet? there are lots of limits on what I can own
- bawolff 2y agoI think anti-trust laws are generally more effective at dealing with that than wealth limits. When capitalism is functioning well, what cones up must go down, and the main trick is to make sure the ultra-wealthy can't leverage their wealth to prevent anyone competiting with them.
- xpe 2y ago> When capitalism is functioning well, ... I recommend this question as an interesting conversation starter at parties: Is it in the self-interest of the most successful capitalists to have a well-functioning capitalism?
- bawolff 2y agoObviously not. Which is why we have antitrust laws. If it was in the self-interest of the most succesful capitalists, we wouldn't have to have laws about it.
- xpe 2y agoRight. Phrasing it as a question and waiting for the gears to turn can be a good strategy.
- bawolff 2y agoI still don't really understand your point. I don't think anyone disagrees that monopolies and other anticompetitive behaviour is a thing that exists.
- xpe 2y ago> I don't think anyone disagrees that monopolies and other anticompetitive behaviour is a thing that exists. There are people who never learned this or have essentially forgotten it. Some ideologies bury such truths. Among business/tech circles, there is a fairly common disdain of regulation. People can conveniently forget that self-interest taken too far can destroy the conditions that make competition work. It is one thing to criticize a powerful monopoly that isn’t you. It is another thing to say “Oh. Maybe what I’m doing is part of the problem.”
- BurningFrog 2y agoYou don't become a vassal by someone else having a lot of wealth. The feudal systems arose as a way to organize military defense locally in the absence of a strong central power like the Roman Empire.
- defrost 2y agoFeudal systems are better described as local organised threat of violence. There are castle strongholds, control of choke points, a lower strata that are required to work the land and pay tithe upwards to the military heirarchy. Feudal systems have existed in times and locations where there was little need for military defense against external forces, they persist in form as a polite, polished, chivalrous bikie club on horses, mafia with great houses. Warrior nobility systems farm farmers.
- aebtebeten 2y ago> Warrior nobility systems farm farmers A farm is a system with many living beings, but most of the benefits accrue to those we call the farmers. A farmer farm is a called a fief (feudum in latin), so it's no surprise that under feudalism most of the benefits accrue to those who have control over heaps of feuda. Would it be true that under capitalism most of the benefits accrue to those who have control over heaps of capital? [to the original point: capitalism works very well when it allows people to trade and specialise in their comparative advantages; under what conditions might it work less well?] EDIT: > little need for military defense against external forces I think they were also successful even where there was need, as long as those external forces were also based on a warrior class. What Napoleon managed was to "scale" the nature of warfare; two poorly remembered quotes from a book one of his cavalry generals wrote: — 10 mamluks could beat 30 french, but 100 to 100 was even, and 300 french could beat 1000 mamluks — our troopers' horsemanship was pitiful, and their officers' not much better, yet with this cavalry we made the tour of Europe I'd say both point to innovation in the use of mass over class.
- gradschoolfail 2y agoMorally speaking, is ((profit<->negative externality) <-> (speculation<->liquidity provision)) a tautology i could get any of u curious about? It motivates a search for the mystical beast: Marxist financier (not the pastry?) (Not to mention elucidates the boney/HF-inspired principle of intertwining* (wrt scaling — CENDEC, decentralizing by centralizing — marxist-financing-in-itself)) *https://archive.is/FxHSl https://archive.is/FxHSl https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40603483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40603483
- FredPret 2y agoHow can you not see that it's draconian? You may think it's no biggy since the limit will be so high. 1. First of all, when party A contracts with party B, party C (that's you) does not have a moral right to dictate an upper limit on how many times they can do that or what the terms can be as long as the transaction is legal and A and B are willing participants. Thus, either A or B can build up an arbitrary amount of wealth and you have exactly zero to say about it. Would you have similar concerns for people who have a disproportionate number of friends, or sex partners, or hit songs, or hell, even votes? 2. If there were to be an upper limit, what is the limit? Today it's a billion dollars. What if it's 100m next, then 10m, then 1m, then 100k? What happens after a couple of decades or centuries of inflation? I suspect you don't care about this because the limit seems far out of reach to you. And so it might be - for now. 3. If there was a limit, who will decide what it should be? What are their incentives? Do you really want a jury of your peers reviewing your financials and drawing lines through it? 4. If there was a limit, who will enforce it? And how? Hand over a check or you go to prison? There's no way to implement this without an authoritarian regime that has unlimited power over its citizens.
- komali2 2y ago"Mutual" implies lack of coercion, which doesn't exist under capitalism, since the ownership class leverages significantly greater political power than the working class.
- mystified5016 2y ago[flagged]
- kinghajj 2y ago> For the transformation of money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must find the free worker available on the commodity-market; and this worker must be free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realization of his labour power. > Why this free worker confronts him in the sphere of circulation is a question which does not interest the owner of money, for he finds the labour-market in existence as a particular branch of the commodity-market. And for the present it interests us just as little. We confine ourselves to the fact theoretically, as he does practically. One thing, however, is clear: nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history, It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago“Draconian”
- sushid 2y agoThe article highlights that it’s not actually that hard for the ultra-wealthy to avoid a massive estate tax bill through proper tax planning and investment strategies. What’s striking here is that this individual wasn’t even the richest person to ever die, yet he paid the largest estate tax in history, likely by choice.
- bluGill 2y ago> likely by choice. There is an element of competitiveness there. Some rich want to be known as rich and so they can brag about paying the most taxes that in turns implies they have the most money. Others want to be quieter about their wealth and so don't want you to know they have it and wouldn't tell you how much taxes they pay.
- rootusrootus 2y agoIf he were doing it competitively, I don't understand the strategy. His name was leaked, not announced, and since he is dead he cannot feel like he won the competition.
- deepsun 2y agoSometimes rich could not find a way out of paying a large tax, so instead they pull at least some good from their bad situation, and make it a PR. And it's a good thing that government is strong enough to be able to collect large taxes. Contrary to popular opinion, rich people are mostly OK paying large taxes, but only as long as all other rich pay their share as well. The grudges they hold are only about unfairness, not about amounts.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 2y agoAnyone can make a voluntary contribution to the United States Treasury: https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html
- mynameishere 2y agoI always wondered if there was a way to effectively "burn" one's entire wealth, creating a small deflationary event that would increase the value of existing dollars. How could one do this? Donate to the Federal Reserve? Or would you literally have to cash everything out and burn it?
- hollerith 2y agoAccording to my understanding, burning US dollar bills, donating to the Fed (if such a thing is possible) and donating to the Treasury are approximately equivalent in their effects. What puts a lid on how much money the Fed creates is the desire to keep inflation to reasonable levels, preferably 2% per year. Your burning your cash allows the Fed to create more while adhering to their inflation target. Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that although the Fed decides how much money is created, the Fed is not allowed to keep or to spend newly-created money, but rather must give it to the Treasury (perhaps through some complicated or non-obvious mechanism) which makes it available for the government to spend.
- MobiusHorizons 2y agoAt least one way they do this is to buy treasury bonds. It is not clear to me what happens to the interest though .
- willcipriano 2y agoA big part of modern monetary theory is taxing the newly printed money and putting it towards (wasteful) government programs to "burn it" in a sense. Predictably, politicians who support MMT only did the printing part and skipped that bit once inflation started.
- somethoughts 2y agoInterestingly a lot of the larger philanthropic organizations are just as administration heavy as the US government and suffer from the same mission creep and the same obfuscated, bureaucratic decision making process, etc. Not to mention the leadership is often richly compensated (i.e. $1M in salary) and non-elected. In fact we should probably celebrate gifts to the US government more than we do.
- jimcsharp 2y agoMy hunch is that taxes are the most efficient 'charity', even with the bloat, and everyone's too busy sniffing farts in their corner to see it.
- enos_feedler 2y agoNot only that but it’s also the structure that enabled the riches in the first place. I don’t see why more people don’t do this.
- advael 2y agoMostly because of a very successful propaganda campaign by people who sought to loot the post-war economic boom Generally speaking, the sad truth of a complex economy is that coordination is hard, and there's usually a short-term privatized gain to be had by someone willing to poison the future and the commons. No amount of benefit to humanity overall or even the specific society such a person lives in will convince a person who simply doesn't care about anyone else. Fortunately for humanity, a very small minority of people actually operate like that. Unfortunately for humanity, some of them have managed to accumulate a lot of power
- enos_feedler 2y agoWell said! I feel better already
- mozman 2y agoNo thanks, I’d rather keep more of my paycheck.
- nomdep 2y ago[flagged]
- yughnior 2y agoPeak HN. (I feel comfortable saying that considering the link to a pg article and “you are in the wrong forum”) In the face of calling out someone else’s ignorance by saying we are all ignorant then going on to assume the thing you like is wonderful while assuming the thing you hate is terrible. Classic. PG would be proud.
- bko 2y agoWhy is that obscene? Presumably the person created something very valuable to the world. Sure there are zero-sum ways to generate wealth (e.g. suing people, theft, front running trades) but generally that kind of wealth comes from actually generating something that people value.
- vkou 2y ago> Presumably the person created something very valuable to the world Or they are a rent-seeker, or a straight-up thief that sucked a lot of value out of the world. (Or one of their ancestors did, etc, etc.) Or they robbed Peter to create value for Paul, and took a share of the difference. These are all tried and true mechanisms for wealth generation. Without any information, you shouldn't assume that their contributions were net-positive.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoBarring evidence to the contrary, some of us prefer to assume that people have good intentions.
- vkou 2y agoHere's some evidence to the contrary: Almost every family of old money has been built on one form of theft or other.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoThat's an assertion, not evidence.
- FabHK 2y agoThe word “Presumably” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. That Econ101 justification is harder and harder to keep up as you learn more about both economics and the real world. For detailed counter arguments, see Branko Milanović Global inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, James Kwak Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality, Walt Bogdanich & Michael Forsythe When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm, and many other books.
- wisty 2y agoIt's not real money. They aren't holding all the gold like a dragon. Or maybe they are, but that isn't hurting anyone, it's wealth not consumption. They consume the same number of calories as a poor person. They breathe the same amount of air. Maybe they have a few extra bedrooms, but their consumption could easily be less than a millionaire.
- kaibee 2y agoIdk man, I'm pretty sure I consume a lot fewer labor hours than a billionaire with a super-yacht. The thing to focus on is how many labor-hours someone is consuming. When a billionaire allocates ~20 people of labor-hours every day to maintaining that super-yacht, that means there's ~20 people fewer labor hours for services for everyone else. And building that super-yacht also consumed a lot of high-skill labor hours.
- bluGill 2y agoThat means there are 20 MORE labor hours, not less. The typical person reading this is only working a couple hours to do anything related to the basics (you don't need nearly as large a house as you live in - even if you live in a tiny house)
- wisty 2y agoAs I said, it's consumption not wealth. A billionaire with a super-yacht is more obscene than a trillionaire who doesn't have one.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Dalewyn 2y ago>Also weird that it's framed as a "gift." https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/gift-tax https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe... https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/frequently-asked-questions-on-gift-taxes https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe... >The gift tax is a tax on the transfer of property by one individual to another while receiving nothing, or less than full value, in return. The tax applies whether or not the donor intends the transfer to be a gift.
- juunpp 2y agoGift tax is a tax on gifts. It's not a tax that happens to be a gift. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/gift-tax https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...