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The tax system is made with large incentives for all business owners (from billionaires to small businesses to shareholders like retirees) to invest all profit

• michaelsshaw 9mo ago
  I guess I just totally imagined that $1 trillion pay package for Elon Musk.
  • carlosjobim 9mo ago
    It's not in the form of salary, if you look it up. So the money is still locked within the company, not taken out as profit.
• ricardonunez 9mo ago
  In most recent years they stopped doing part of that equation.
• _1 9mo ago
  Taxes are not a punishment.
  • wiseowise 9mo ago
    They are. Look at the Netherlands, they want to implement taxes on unrealized gains.
    • jdiff 9mo ago
      That's not a punishment.
      • danslo 9mo ago
        It is as long as they're not refunding you when you make a loss.
        • zbentley 9mo ago
          Couldn’t it just as easily be equivalent to saying “you grew this year, so contribute some money back to society for enabling you to have the educated hiring base/financial infrastructure/physical infrastructure that enabled you to grow”? Like, sure, you don’t owe growth taxes for a quarter when you didn’t grow. But why should you be refunded just because prior taxable growth isn’t denominated in money in a bank account?
          • wiseowise 9mo ago
            > you grew this year, so contribute some money back to society for enabling you to have the educated hiring base/financial infrastructure/physical infrastructure that enabled you to grow Apparently paying for gas, water, electricity, property taxes, taxes on everything you buy isn’t enough, now you have to “contribute for enabling”. What’s next? Pay because they “enable you to breathe”?
            • robocat 9mo ago
              Plus ignoring that our society depends on businesses. I have low opinions about unbalanced one sided arguments.
      • wiseowise 9mo ago
        What is it if not a punishment? If you’re a high earner (not obscene earner, mind you) you already pay 50+% in taxes, on top of that you now have to pay even more?
    • RGamma 9mo ago
      The system that exists in Germany has you pay 25% Abgeltungssteuer even on unrealized gains but those taxes can be deducted when you sell. Only in the event you sell at net loss do you not get that back. States are in dire need of liquidity. Just look at global debt.
  • dolni 9mo ago
    When a significant share of the taxes you pay are mishandled or lost to fraud, yes it is a punishment. That's been happening for a long time in the US. Staggering military industrial complex. Tens of billions lost in COVID relief. Billions lost in Minnesota due to unchecked privatized social welfare fraud (which has been known about for a decade). Some mistakes will happen. What we have is unacceptable. If the government can't handle the money responsibly, it has no business collecting the money.
    • jdiff 9mo ago
      Do you have any sources for either or both of "billions" and "known about for a decade" that aren't a figurehead of the current US administration? Because this all smells a lot like "the immigrants are catching and eating cats and geese" story which also turned out to be a lie.
      • germinalphrase 9mo ago
        The fraud in Minnesota is upsetting. Fraud also appears to be nationally prevalent: “New federal data released by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) shows the overall rate of improper payment in Minnesota’s Medicaid program is far below national averages. In the review released this week, CMS found an error rate of slightly over 2.1%, compared to a national average of 6.1%. The data for the review was compiled before the Minnesota Department of Human Services began implementing new strategies to minimize the risk of fraud and harden its systems against bad actors.” https://mn.gov/dhs/media/news/?id=1053-720779 https://mn.gov/dhs/media/news/?id=1053-720779
    • rswail 9mo ago
      Minnesota is only a drop in the ocean compared to Florida and other states. One of the current FL senators was CEO of one of the companies convicted of a much larger fraud. That's more an indictment of the way you (the US) starve your public services of proper regulatory power with the right level of personnel to handle it. But your Congress voted last year to defund the IRS and the administration are busy gutting the SEC and other regulators. Oh and government fraud has nothing on the commercial and rent-seeker frauds extracting wealth for no benefit from their positions of control. But anti-trust prosecutions are basically a dead path for rectification. Blaming the "government" for what happens from obvious policy failures is the fault of the policies and those that set them, not the "government" as some nameless bureaucracy.
  • w4yai 9mo ago
    say that to trump
  • lucaspm98 9mo ago
    Taxes are often used as either incentives or disincentives for certain behaviors. Examples of incentives are the Child and Dependent Care Credit and EV Tax Credits. An example of a disincentive is a Mansion Tax.
• softwaredoug 9mo ago
  Arguably these and billionaires have become a social menace. They undermine democracy, destroy our environment, and prioritize shareholder value over long term well being of the economy they live in. If they all had unified in one voice against the administration, Trump might be more constrained. They might not be so hated. If they realized, like Henry Ford, that a strong middle class actually is good for THEM too, all this could be avoided. Instead they’re showing up at Melania screenings while average citizens are getting shot in the streets. I don’t think they realize the fire they’re playing with my stomping on the social contract that made them so wealth.
  • yetihehe 9mo ago
    > I don’t think they realize the fire they’re playing with my stomping on the social contract that made them so wealth. Some of them do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42335797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42335797 But the pitchforks are coming for 12 years already. They got accustomed to the sight and even put some measures to redirect the masses so they fight each-other.
  • Grisu_FTP 9mo ago
    I just googled confused what a "Melania screening" (Thought it was like a sort of security screening, maybe all the ICE is messing with my head) is. First time i heard about the Movie. This feels like one more step the Trump fam. took to become some sort of celebrity-king thing.
    • rswail 9mo ago
      It's just grifting, bribery, and extortion. Bezos gave $40m to make the movie. It was a way to maintain his companies position. It's standard oligarch tribute to the godfather. See Russia or Hungary for further examples. The movie cost nowhere near that much to make. Melania got the money. It was her very own little grift, while her husband and his children have been extracting literally billions.
  • cucumber3732842 9mo ago
    >Arguably these and billionaires have become a social menace. They undermine democracy, destroy our environment, and prioritize shareholder value over long term well being of the economy they live in. Sadly, I'm far more worried about a thousand people who make a million bucks than I am about one guy who makes a billion. You don't get to the B number by not being pretty darn shrewd and sociopathic so those guys must be pretty evil but man have the "upper middle class" or "professional managerial class" or whatever you wanna call the "comfortable enough to not think about the harsh economic realities of their ideas" class been an unmitigated disaster for western society over the past 20-70yr depending on how you wanna measure.
• RGamma 9mo ago
  And not investing in society has some consequences as well... Increasingly it seems big business is bad business (again).
• mhitza 9mo ago
  The double irish, single malt, capital allowances for intangible assets. If everyone would be able to play these tax avoidance schemes I'm sure society would collapse. For big players these are easy schemes and somewhere this untaxed wealth must be recaptured. Just favoring the rich further accelerates the wealth imbalance.
  • carlosjobim 9mo ago
    That of course depends on what you mean by "society". But everybody is able to reinvest profits into a business they have, whether that's an industry giant, or a tiny one-man shop. There is no government on planet Earth which considers that to be "tax avoidance". Governments want profits to be reinvested and not paid out to owners, even the most socialist governments you can find. If you're against this, then you shouldn't talk about taxes. You should rather talk about abolishing private property completely.
    • igogq425 9mo ago
      > That of course depends on what you mean by "society". Yes, that is the old discrepancy between society in the true sense and society as imagined by libertarians. A few strangers waiting together for the bus do not constitute a community. If the bus is canceled and they organize a carpool, then a community has formed. If you scale this up and replace personal relationships with institutions, you have a useful concept of society. For libertarians, society is any large gathering of people who interact with each other in some way (or not), even if they rape and devour each other. If you understand society in this way, it cannot collapse (or is constantly collapsing).
      • carlosjobim 9mo ago
        If we remove from life everything that people have access to by industrialization and mass production, then many or most people would say that "society" has collapsed. That would be the consequence of taxing ownership in companies, since there would be no reason to invest to create big companies. And for industrial society you need big companies. You need giant companies, and taxing owners on the size of the company means that people will not invest their money or effort build industrial scale companies. The other way to have industrialization is to instead have a command economy, where the government mandates what is to be done.
• zbentley 9mo ago
  > Now the government wants to tax them on the company value? I’m genuinely baffled at the incredulous tone here. Yes, that is exactly what should happen: laws, subsidies, and incentives enable a company to grow and flourish. Then, as the company grows, other laws incentivize it to give some of its state-sponsored affluence back to benefit the country. Like, sure, the execution of that process is often dysfunctional, but the fundamental contract there does not seem like it should be surprising to people: we don’t have (many) socialist state-owned businesses, but the point of a functioning country is still to provide good things to the people living in it. Not to benefit businesses or a tiny sliver of the population. That’s why we have everything from income taxes to interstate highways: to distribute wealth and resources to (a flawed approximation of, but it’s still the goal) everyone in the country. That’s just how non-corrupt governments are supposed to work!
  • carlosjobim 9mo ago
    > give some of its state-sponsored affluence back Then why not tax the military? They are surely the most affluent company of them all, if you take a tally of all their inventory. If you tax companies based on their size rather than their profits, then you're not going to have any big companies. Any investor or entrepreneur would be a fool to invest in making a big company. But many endeavours need big companies and big investments. For example power plants. That's a whole lot of value to tax, such affluence! Better redistribute this wealth, and instead have a hundred thousand non-affluent hot dog stands. > That’s just how non-corrupt governments are supposed to work! In practice, every government in the world does not tax companies reinvesting their profit into growth.
    • zbentley 9mo ago
      > why not tax the military? Narrowly: because they're a utility funded by taxes, not an independent entity benefiting from tax-funded infrastructure. Having a military for defense/power projection/whatnot is one of the infrastructural benefits of being part of a state (and one of the things that a company that grows in that state "owes" the state tax money for--whether that's owed on growth or just capital). Like, do I personally think my country's military should have a vastly different funding profile, incentives, and behavior? Absolutely. But that doesn't change the fundamental dynamic: $state provides $thing (security, clean water, cheap gas, whatever) that makes being in $state good for many people, people who do well financially within $state owe it money back on the basis that their doing well is at least partially a result of $thing being available to them. > Any investor or entrepreneur would be a fool to invest in making a big company. Not true. A growth tax need not be a 100% tax, so growth would still be an advantageous thing to do. Many countries have tax brackets today; that doesn't discourage people from getting rich.
• igogq425 9mo ago
  Ultimately, an economy is all about the side effects you describe (goods and services for the population). The fact that, while producing these side effects, the machine also leads to massive wealth accumulation among a small number of people is another side effect that basically has nothing to do with the core tasks of the economy. The question now is how to evaluate this additional side effect. If it does not have any negative consequences, it can be ignored. If it does, it should be counteracted. It's like in a combustion engine. Oil has to be added for the engine to work. But over time, dirt particles, metal abrasion, soot, and combustion residues accumulate in the oil, overwhelming the oil filter and reducing its lubricating ability. If you don't reset it to a “healthy” basic state at regular intervals, it gets so bad that it prevents the engine from operating and ultimately even destroys it. Does the massive wealth inequality we see today cause problems that lead to the erosion of society itself? I would say yes, definitely. Of course, it is frustrating for these people when the money they have generated is taken away from them. But let's look at it realistically: if someone has $100 billion and $99 billion is taken away from them, they are still in a situation where they lack nothing financially. At some point, you've played capitalism through to the final level. And then you should put down the controller and go outside to listen to the birds chirping instead of frantically chasing after the growth of a number that, due to its sheer size, no longer has any concrete meaning, apart from the fact that there may be two other people whose numbers are bigger or who are hot on your heels.
  • carlosjobim 9mo ago
    > Does the massive wealth inequality we see today cause problems that lead to the erosion of society itself? I would say yes, definitely. On a side note. Yes, the massive wealth inequality is eroding society. But billionaires aren't the source of this problem. They are outliers, freaks if you so will. The real problem is the massive wealth inequality is the gigantic prices of real estate and rent, created by the monetary system being based on real estate instead of productivity. That means it is very hard for a person to claw and scratch her way to equality if they're not born with real estate or gets that benefit at an early age. For most, their irredeemable mistake in life was choosing to be born in the wrong decade. At the same time a huge percentage of the population who has never made any effort in life and generally have no talent or any admirable qualities, get great wealth and comfort by having been born at the right time. For every billionaire there is a a hundred thousand of the kind of person described above. Most of us have them not far away, and they have a hundred fold bigger impact on our lives than any billionaire. And at least many billionaires have at least accomplished or done - something - in their life. > At some point, you've played capitalism through to the final level. And then you should put down the controller and go outside to listen to the birds chirping instead of frantically chasing after the growth of a number that, due to its sheer size, no longer has any concrete meaning, apart from the fact that there may be two other people whose numbers are bigger or who are hot on your heels. Wouldn't building a rocket to go to Mars for example be such an endeavour, which is bigger than chasing the imaginary dollar number? Or the philanthropic endeavours of other famous billionaires? Or even exacting political influence in the shadows, which is probably something all known and unknown billionaires do?