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But the accounting difference is real. It is virtually impossible to earn a billion dollars. What is possible but still difficult is to create something worth a
by blfr 4mo ago
But the accounting difference is real. It is virtually impossible to earn a billion dollars. What is possible but still difficult is to create something worth a billion dollars which you can then sell if you choose so.
And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment.
Also, the most important thing to understand about a society is how people gain status, not just money/wealth. If you focus on money, you won't have an explanation for political movements or artistic endeavors.
- blitzar 4mo agoHaving to pay a fat wedge of tax every year on what you "earn" sucks a lot of the life out of the compounding effect.
- ceejayoz 4mo agoWe pay those taxes because not having the services and societal stability those taxes pay for also sucks a lot of life out.
- groundzeros2015 4mo agoI think that’s their justification in the abstract, not the justification for most individual tax items.
- ceejayoz 4mo agoI don't have to inspect every grain of rice with a magnifying glass to enjoy the overall dish.
- groundzeros2015 4mo agoAre you arguing that we should have bad taxes because some taxes are good?
- ceejayoz 4mo agoYes, absolutely. There's a cost to perfection. In our computing world, every extra nine of reliability is more expensive than the last, often with diminishing returns. See also: Florida drug testing welfare recipients cost more than it saved. https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/just-we-suspected-florida-saved-nothing-drug-testing-welfare https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/just-we-suspected-fl...
- groundzeros2015 4mo agoYou’re arguing that the cost to find bad taxes is not worth the savings. That’s not the same thing. If I’ve already found with a poor justification or better yet, someone is proposing a new one. Shouldn’t we remove it?
- ceejayoz 4mo agoI mean, I'd also argue that the definition of a "bad tax" is notoriously difficult to agree on. For example: https://x.com/NEWSMAX/status/1937470443168182386 https://x.com/NEWSMAX/status/1937470443168182386 > A government agency spending $300 million in taxpayer dollars to produce sterilized flies sounds like a dream scenario for a DOGE team looking to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. A year later: https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/09/business/what-consumers-should-know-about-screwworm https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/09/business/what-consumers-shoul... > Grocery shoppers could get hit with higher prices if the screwworm cases turn into a full-blown outbreak. That could cost $3 billion across the Southwest, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Good tax, or bad tax? Returning to your question, though: Yes, I assert the cost of troubleshooting a "bad tax" may exceed the benefits of having addressed it.
- groundzeros2015 4mo agoYou’re weasling. We don’t have to treat taxes as a pool we can look at the pros and cons of each one. Taxes are not benevolent and good by nature. You seem to be suggesting here it’s impossible or too costly to weigh pros or cons. So I would not consider you for an administrative position
- DrProtic 4mo agoBut the amount of tax we pay is because of inefficient, corrupt and incompetent government.
- ceejayoz 4mo agoWe have the current inefficient, corrupt, and incompetent government in the US because the anti-tax wealthy class threw an all-out tantrum over even the idea of paying a tiny bit more tax.
- inigyou 4mo agoWe have an inefficient, corrupt and incompetent government in the US because we voted for it. And we keep voting for it. That's our revealed preference. We obviously like inefficient, corrupt, incompetent governments.
- selfmodruntime 4mo agoI live in Germany and I pay almost 50% of my income in income tax and social tax. There is always "just that tiny bit more tax" that will magically fix the system (it won't). Turns out paying more money to an already corrupt government doesn't turn it less corrupt. Go figure, hm?
- ceejayoz 4mo ago> I live in Germany and I pay almost 50% of my income in income tax and social tax. I live in the US and pay less raw tax than that, for sure. But I reported $49k in medical expenses (premiums, deductible, copays, stuff they won't cover) last year on my taxes, and I've got two kids going to college in a year, which may cost $10-40k/year for each. I'd rather your trade-off.
- hparadiz 4mo agoYou forget that the college expense is temporary while the taxes are forever. And Germany still makes you get private insurance for medical. A single year of taxes in Germany based on my current American income would pay for all of that you just said. So then my question for you is. What were you doing with your money in those other years? I hope it was saving it. Because otherwise I'm gonna eye roll hard at you wanting to increase taxes on everyone just to get a small cut in how much you pay during one fiscal year. Seems silly.
- IncreasePosts 4mo agoYou can still collect taxes without taxing people who have already been taxed in the form of needing to exchange a large fraction of their life for the wage.
- ceejayoz 4mo agoI'm entirely onboard with reducing tax on low/mid income folks currently "exchanging a large fraction of their life for the small wage" in favor of increased taxes on the billionaire class, yes.
- WalterBright 4mo agoWe already have the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
- ceejayoz 4mo agoWe already have all sorts of things that I like. We seem to be making most of the changes in favor of the already very well-off, instead of, say, expanding the EITC. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1960-_Tax_rates_of_richest_versus_low_income_people_-_US.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1960-_Tax_rates_of_r...
- IncreasePosts 4mo agoThat covers maybe the bottom 30% of households, and realistically only if they have kids.
- MagicMoonlight 4mo ago[dead]
- geysersam 4mo agoTo add to that: There are also "compounding effects" from investments made by tax money, just as for any other investments, the difference is that the compounding gains are collectively owned and not controlled by an individual.
- inigyou 4mo agoIn a healthy society that's the case. In an unhealthy one, who knows.
- vixen99 4mo agoThere again you might pay a lot of taxes and not get the services and have questionable societal stability. Ask some Brits about that.
- fractallyte 4mo agoOnly up to a certain threshold – after which you can afford "creative" accounting which reduces the tax burden and restores the compounding effect ;-)
- saghm 4mo agoWhen capital gains tax is so much lower than income tax, this holds even more true for people who work at the companies being sold for lots of money and make income in wages than the people who own the companies, and that just reinforces the original point
- hdgvhicv 4mo agoPeople who earn money pay taxes While at Amazon Jeff Bezos considers his worth to be 80k a year hence he was paid that much, and paid taxes in that salary. If someone becomes a billionaire by being paid 50m a year for 40 years and paying taxes on that income then congrats.
- WalterBright 4mo agoBezos has paid $billions in capital gains taxes.
- hdgvhicv 4mo agoAbout 1% of the wealth he’s accumulated Has he earned his wealth over 40 years at an income of 7b a year he’d have paid 115b in tax, not 3b.
- atwrk 4mo agoThose taxes are the necessary condition in silly essays like this one from pg. Or why do you think those billionaires miraculously mostly end up in the US and not in countries like Sudan or Peru? I mean if those billionaires would actually be the wealth creators, not depending on society at large, they could become billionaires everywhere, right?
- WalterBright 4mo agoSome countries have far more repressive governments.
- dmurvihill 4mo agoLuckily, billionaires don't have to worry about that.
- dmurvihill 4mo agoWhat's missing is that the billion-dollar value is based on the expectation of exploiting the employees/customers/environment to achieve profit in the future.
- edanm 4mo agoMissing cause it's not true.
- rayiner 4mo ago> And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment. Well that’s wrong. Exploitive businesses do exist. Rent seeking and arbitrage does exist. But the ire today isn’t directed to Wall Street or private equity. It’s being directed to people who built real companies. It’s not inherently exploitive to sell a customer a valuable product or employ someone to build that product. In the 1990s, it took weeks to order something by mail. Amazon can now deliver me stuff the same day of the next morning. That’s amazing, considering that it’s all done with trucks, warehouses, and other things that already existed in the 1990s. Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.
- WarOnPrivacy 4mo ago> Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire. This bit might be a bit unfair. USPS and Amazon Delivery are different services, fulfilling different needs. Neither will deliver a pizza in 30 min or less, for example.
- hawaiianbrah 4mo ago> Neither will deliver a pizza in 30 min or less, for example. Looks like Amazon will deliver me a (frozen) pizza in 23 minutes, actually!
- callmeal 4mo ago> Amazon can now deliver me stuff the same day of the next morning. That’s amazing, considering that it’s all done with trucks, warehouses, and other things that already existed in the 1990s. Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire. It's also impossible without Amazon exploiting all the workers in the chain - from warehouse workers forced to undergo dehumanizing _unpaid_ searches that take hours when leaving the warehouse, to being forced to pee in bottles. It is impossible to become a billionaire without exploting people.
- 4mo ago
- WalterBright 4mo agoMusk minted 4,000 millionaires last friday.
- nullocator 4mo agoHow many paupers did he create? I haven't seen this reported on, seems biased to ignore it.
- greysphere 4mo agoIt's pretty hard for someone to make something worth a billion dollars then sell it, because someone else could make the same thing and undercut you. We even have a word for the way around this: 'moat.' In the 2000s 'network effects' were the most common moat, and they seemed a little crappy but not outrightly evil. Now the most common scheme seems to be breaking law until your big enough for the rules to not apply. That's why people see it as cheating.
- nullocator 4mo agoIs it hard? It seems like if you have capital you just buy your moat, isn't that what basically every modern billionaire has done to get there? SpaceX used it's capital sued the U.S. government to get it's contracts and now 20 years later the regulatory capture and Elon's influence in government as a whole is beyond most people's wildest nightmares.