Many conservatives view income as "earned" and then taxes as appropriation ("taken away"). Under such a perspective it is only a return of what was originally theirs in the first place.
This country is run on deficits/debt so 1.7M less from rich people is not marginally 1.7M less to poor people.
I.E., the same people who have benefited from (and whose wealth was probably grown in) a social system where utilities, infrastructure, schools, etc are paid by tax dollars.
If anyone pays a million less in taxes then someone gave them a million dollars back. so yes, you are giving them something. One can argue in some irrational way that taxes are theft so you never 'give' someone something if you reduce their taxes. At the end of that game, you have more money than you had before, gift or other political arguments aside.
Someone who was going to pay a million in taxes and now has 1 mil less is not going to put their money into the economy the same what that 1000 people with moderate income, like say restaurant workers getting $1,700 would. Those people poorer will spend all that money. I'm fortunate to be a well compensated software engineer, and I pay a huge amount of taxes. I'm not out there begging for more money (via tax reductions) and then claiming it was already my money, not a gift. That's a dishonest argument.
> is not going to put their money into the economy the same what that 1000 people with moderate income, like say restaurant workers getting $1,700 would. Those people poorer will spend all that money.
Wealthier people spend or invest all of their money. Only drug dealers hoard cash, and that's only because they have difficulty laundering it.
It doesn’t seem hard to argue that purchasing stocks or expensive real estate is not as beneficial for the economy as thousands of people spending the same amount in their local economies.
I agree, but it doesn't make any sense. Investing is literally putting money to work. Storing it in a mattress is not putting it to work.
For example, what happens to the money when people buy real estate? The seller of that real estate gets the money. They don't hoard it, they also spend/invest it.
What happens to the money you put in your bank account? The bank loans it out to people who spend/invest it. (Banks don't make money hoarding cash, they make money loaning it out.)
Think about it another way. Wealthy people in general are not stupid with money, if they were they wouldn't be wealthy very long. They put it to work. That means spending it or investing it to people who spend it.
Unfortunately, when wealthy people get money they do not spend it on goods and services that employ people and drive the economY. Rather, the invest it in the financial vehicle with the highest ROI. Giving money to the rich does not trickle down to people. It goes into a holding pattern of financial engineering. That maybe why there has not been any inflation with all the quantitative easing that has been going on these past 2 decades. Instead of having more money chasing the same amount of goods and services (which would happen if all that QE hit the real economy) there is more money chasing more financial products. That is why the value of financial products(stocks,etc) has been skyrocketing for a decade.
> Giving money to the rich does not trickle down to people.
All of my well-paying tech jobs have been funded by VC money from rich people and/or IPO money from rich people. Same goes (indirectly and partially) for all the people who have been selling me goods and services over those same years.
> the invest it in the financial vehicle with the highest ROI
And then where does the money go that was spent on the investment?
Consider that a high ROI means the money is used for something useful. For example, investing into a financial vehicle that loans money to people buying a house.
Let's say the rich person buys a yacht. The yacht construction employs a large number of people. The money goes into the pockets of the people who made the yacht.
> Giving money to the rich does not trickle down to people.
For this to be true, it would follow that if all the rich people were made not-rich, it would have no material effect on the rest of the people. But that isn't how historical examples played out. Getting rid of rich people made everyone else worse off. Every time.
It's not about getting rid of rich people. It's about the relative flow of wealth and the behavior of rich people that makes life miserable for 'the rest of the 99%'. how about housing? The digital divide? These are negative externalities from the increasingly large numbers of extraordinarily wealthy people. Inflation will never happen no ,matter how much money the govt prints. Since when does a lower Fed rate help the common man who cannot even get a loan? Since when does the purchase of massive amounts of Tbills help the guy who doesn't have a job? These ancient economic tools date from the time before derivatives, before financial giants and their complex tools. It goes to financial vehicles which just invest it in more financial vehicles.
> when wealthy people get money they do not spend it on goods and services that employ people and drive the economy
That’s such a naïve statement. Those financial vehicles actually do things: provide capital for other businesses. Provide market liquidity so that capital can flow to the areas that are in demand. Grandma saving money under the mattress does a lot less than a “rich” person investing in REITs.
There are no grandmas that can save money anymore. The wealthy can afford to pay so much for housing that real working people can even afford it. The wealthy consume so much simply because they can. And there are a LOT more of them thanks to financial engineering.
Of course not. That's a silly argument also. But if they reduce your taxes for some special reason, like you live in a state that votes a certain way or votes a certain way, then they are giving you the tax money back.
There is nothing special about current tax rates that say any reduction in taxes is "giving people money". In reality, you're "just taking less money from them".
Don't forget a lot of your federal taxes go to financing overseas wars and other military interventions. Some of it also goes to prop up oppressive regimes; and lets not forget funding Al-Qaeda-associated Islamist fundamentalist militias.
Landlords who took big losses from tenants who didn't or couldn't pay their rent and suffered a loss will be able to deduct more of their loss from their personal income tax.
The reason why you get better yields from being a landlord or investing in shares than from keeping it in the bank is because you also accept risk. These people accepted the risk, and their reward during normal times is a better yield. By bailing them out (and specifically only the ones who also get income tax)
It’s one thing to make a profit or a loss, it’s another thing when a government forces you to take a loss to subsidize someone else. If there was a risk that you’d be forced by the government to take huge losses then that risk should be priced into the rent — which means future rents will have to be much higher to accommodate the increased risk. Imagine if a grocery store were required to give free food to everyone at the command of the government. Who covers that expense? The shopkeeper? Any shops that managed to survive would have to jack up future prices to recover their loss. The risk of the government taking away your inventory and giving it away uncompensated is unprecedented. You can’t evict and you can’t collect rent because of a government decree — that’s effectively a seizure of property which is illegal without due process. Even eminent domain requires fair compensation to the property owner. If you accept this as acceptable, then what’s to stop the government from taking all of your income and giving it away? Why is your income supposed to be safe from seizure but someone else’s isn’t?
The risk they accept usually means that they might have to find new tenants or replace stuff. Your tenant won't pay what they agreed to? Now you have to find a new tenant.
But right now we want them to not kick out people who can't pay. We want them to provide free housing to tenants who need it. Those are the landlords we want to bail out. Asking them to just take that as a loss is shitty.
(I assume that the landlords who don't forgive rent don't get to claim this loss on their taxes.)
This is a pretty reasonable thing to suspend at a time when landlords are essentially forgiving huge amounts of rent. It's super reasonable that they be able to deduct those losses on their taxes in an unlimited fashion.
That would probably be better, but isn't happening. I think these landlords should have planned ahead and had six months of emergency funds saved up, just like McDonald's employees are supposed to.
Definitely, that would be a better outcome. However the rent isn't being forgiven - it will possibly be sold to a collections agency, who would hound the renter to get something back from some of the renters.
Where have you heard that landlords are forgiving rent? That's not the case at all. You still owe all of that rent. This kind of attitude is increasing bizarre in the current world.
If I am understanding this correctly, there is no money flowing to rich Americans, but they will have additional opportunities to deduct losses on their 2020 taxes (basically paying less in taxes after a major stock market rout) that would normally need to be spread over future tax returns indefinitely.
However, this will only occur if they took losses, so it is really a discount of ~35% on negative income. This would also apply to someone who is not rich, i.e. a software dev sole proprietor who cashed out big losses in March in the stock market and then applied those losses against their normal income to end up reporting 64k in income instead of 100k (normally 36k in losses would have to be stretched over 12 years of tax returns).
I understand this doesn't fit the narrative, but please comment if it is incorrect instead of downvoting.
Or just make it cost karma. Anyone that down-votes too much would wind up at the threshold for down-voting and be rate limited by their ability to make up-voted comments. It would also render ineffective the strategy of having a bunch of accounts with enough karma to downvote and using those accounts all at once to make comments you don't like dead (the presence of corporate or state controlled accounts employing this strategy has been suggested multiple times).
The way to game that is to just upvote random comments that you don't care about in stories that you don't care about, just to have made enough upvotes to enable you to downvote again.
Oh. That's harder, but not much. You just need two accounts. Make some innocuous comments on account 1, upvote them with account 2. Now you can downvote from account 1.
Slashdot had (still has as far as I know) a daily limit on up and down votes, and quite a small one at that (I think 5?). It also prevents you from voting and commenting on the same topic.
I agree that downvoting should be mainly for either a mean post, a post that adds nothing ("me too" or "lol"), or a poor argument like an ad hominem or incorrect premises. Instead it's used for feelings, as if we could collectively vote on reality. Maybe dang/mods could put some ever-present reminder someplace in the comment 'reply' page.
That’s not scalable. But maybe a 1/N probability of being required to do so, for reasonable N.
(Edit: something like slashdots categories could work but you’d need some incentive to be truthful rather than trust them to separate a “troll” from a “disagree”.)
Plus, if anything, I’d say it’s more common for there to be a bias against downvoting relative to upvoting.
The limit is about three comments every couple of hours or so. Downvotes on the other hand, are limitless. That should not change while there is a limit on comments. Voting is really the only major way to interact with this site. Three comments every few hours leave no room for actual discussion.
That's because your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. We're happy to take the rate limit off (and often do) when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to do that.
Edit: I took a look at your account's recent comments because often we just remove rate limits when the problem has been corrected. Unfortunately, in this case the opposite is true. Would you please stop using HN primarily for political and ideological battle? It destroys the curious conversation that HN is intended for, so we have to ban accounts that do it.
Please don't break the site guidelines. They ask you not to post like this for several good reasons, one of which is that it takes time for the voting on comments to settle. Often unfair downvotes get canceled by users who come along, see the situation, and make a corrective upvote. Meanwhile complaints like this one linger on in the thread, gathering dust and adding inaccuracy to offtopicness. They don't garbage-collect themselves.
The guidelines also, for several good reasons, ask you not to post about "brigading" and the like. These perceptions are nearly always imaginary, as the current example illustrates. Everyone sees something they don't like and says "aha! brigading!". Nobody sees it change to the opposite and then says "oh! guess I was wrong about that." I've looked at the data on this closely for years, and the conclusion is that with rare exceptions (and I do mean rare) it is all cognitive bias of the purest form. Cognitive bias plus randomness equals narrative. It also equals noise in HN threads—and it evokes worse from others who have the opposite bias and take it as flamebait against their side.
My understanding is "losses" is kinda vague if you own one of these "pass through" entities you can pay yourself a salary, have the "pass through" business loose money then pass that loss off against your personal income. I'm not a accountant so I might be wrong.
I know a CPA and they have noted that there have been calls from wealthy clients looking for loopholes to save money on taxes, based on the stimulus.
Money not payed in taxes isn't quite the same as getting it back, but in the end its a fair amount of money kept by an idividua and not being sent to the government . Seems kinda shady to me, to put something like this in a bill that's trying to help lower to moderate income individuals financial survive a pandemic.. But I'm old and cynical.
I believe if you elect to be a pass-through LLC (eligible for this rule change), you cannot pay yourself a salary in the same way as if you were a non pass-through LLC or S-Corp. It isn't as easy to cheat the system as most people think, but there seem to be more opportunities to finagle things the more assets you own.
The fundamental way our tax code is broken is not loopholes, but the actual publicly known tax bracket rates. They should be higher for capital gains, the progressive rate graduation should be steeper, and 500k shouldn't be the highest tax bracket when there are people who make 10,000 times that in a year. It's unbelievable that this isn't the focus of the issue and people are instead harping on wealth taxes and loopholes.
yes, please. sign me up for all of the above. let's get a fairer, more dynamic economy that discouraging rent-seeking and encourages risk-taking and innovation. wealth concentration is a symptom of a broken, plutocratic system, not a capitalistic one.
Concentration of wealth characterizes all Capitalist economies - limited concentration as a pre-condition, and an increasing degree of concentration as an ongoing phenomenon and consequence.
> My understanding is "losses" is kinda vague if you own one of these "pass through" entities you can pay yourself a salary, have the "pass through" business loose money then pass that loss off against your personal income. I'm not a accountant so I might be wrong.
Say your pass-through entities has 100k in revenue. You could pay yourself 140k and mark down 40k of losses but that's financially disadvantageous because you're tax rate on the income will be higher than the tax rate on the losses. You're paying 13k in extra taxes to avoid paying 8k, donating an extra 5k to the IRS.
Most companies try to shift revenue from income to profits because it will reduce your total tax burden.
Edit for definitional clarity: My use of the term socialism here is exactly equivalent here to the term "systems that enable wealth redistribution through legislation" no more, no less. Im not commenting on anything like the ownership of the means of production in society or anything like that.
It seems like the whole world is chomping at the bit to enact more socialism but do you think it's homeless people and cashiers that are defining the rules of the system and legislation? Of course not, it's lawyers and politicians. So are you really naive enough to believe that they write perfectly fair legislation that doesn't favor their interests at all?
Friedrich Hayek nailed this on the head almost 100 years ago. The problem with socialism isn't that its not an admirable goal, it's that even if you want it, by nature you aren't going to get the version of it that you wanted, you are going to get the version of it the a bunch of politically connected insiders design and while they may not be totally self serving, they are usually going to figure out how to be on the winning end of the game.
Crass said it well:
"But no one ever changed the church by pulling down a steeple
And you'll never change the system by bombing number ten
Systems just aren't made of bricks they're mostly made of people"
The systems you get are the ones the people who design them make. Thinking otherwise is foolish. The people who should be the most scared of redistribution systems like this are the ones who want to look out for the interests of the little guys.
"The people who should be the most scared of redistribution systems like this are the ones who want to look out for the interests of the little guys." - Interesting, can you elaborate?
It's a system of wealth redistribution. The problem is, when these systems are gamified by lawyers and people in the financial world, and they win, the wealth ends up being redistributed in the opposite direction as many people intended and the little guys lose.
Looking at the 10 years following the great recession it looks like this is what happened (although those redistributions were more explicitly directed towards the top of the pyramid upfront) but look at at how inequality statistics have moved since that event. It certainly doesn't seem to have favored those who are financially disenfranchised in our society.
The problem is the nature of society permanatly skews these events in the favor of the the people who have the most existing resources to figure out how to game the system.
If you want a much more in depth breakdown of how that happens structurally, read Hayeks the road to serfdom as I mentioned above.
>The problem with socialism isn't that its not an admirable goal, it's that even if you want it, by nature you aren't going to get the version of it that you wanted, you are going to get the version of it the a bunch of politically connected insiders design and while they may not be totally self serving, they are usually going to figure out how to be on the winning end of the game.
This is how we need to educate the left.
Yes we know the pretty fantasy, but the outcome is not what you fantasize. How many more examples of bankrupt economies do we need before people realize "this time (won't) be different"
Do any of these statements apply in particular to socialism? Seems to me you could find/replace "socialism" here with any political system and make the same argument.
You're not advocating for more limited government. Your intended government enforces private ownership of the means of production, with police, courts, and a military when necessary.
You're only advocating for a different representation of class interests in the state, i.e. it would do most of what capital is interested in, but little or none of what labor is interested in. Not that a more interventionist state is pro-labor - it's just somewhat less unbalanced.
You're telling him what his position is?!? Unless you can demonstrate your opinion of his position from his comments, you're putting words in his mouth, which is very much a jerk move.
To me, it also looks like you're putting words in his mouth that are very much not his position...
1. It's not clear to me that system complexity always correlates with manipulability. One may easily construct circumstances where the inverse is true -- dead simple political systems which are neatly gamified or exploited, and sophisticated systems that are fairly robust. To me, what counts is how well the system is designed, not necessarily its complexity level. But suppose it's true that a more involved government always implies more manipulation.
2. Are we better off by optimizing for minimal political manipulation over anything else? For hyperbolic examples: in complete anarchy, we'd have zero system manipulation, and yet I would unhappily die in The Purge. Likewise, in some Roaring '20s capitalistic caricature, I might have my small business destroyed by a monopoly, or die a child laboring away in unsafe conditions. Optimizing for being manipulatable seems far less palatable than living in modern day Denmark or something.
1) Yes this could be true in some cases but a lot of the way in which the "haves" exploit these kind of systems is by throwing man hours of attorneys and accountants at them because the rules are super verbose and complicated and so you hire profesional loop hole finders. If I simple piece of legislation is obviously exploitable, that will be more obvious from the get go and will less heavily favor the peoe who can pay the loophole finders.
Also you cant exploit things that don't exist.
2) no, I agree you have to draw your line in the sand somewhere. I'm not an anarchist. I could take your argument in the same direction to absurdity as well. If redistribution solves all problems, let's create comittees to redistribute on a person to person basis until we reach a fair utopia.
We don't do that because we acknowledge that the cost benefit of doing that gets hyperbolically negative at a certain point. What I'm advocating is that the line where that happens is actually much earlier, and that the last 10 years have shown that we are already on the wrong side of that line and that our approach to legislating away complex issues can at best handout money to certain interest in a fairly dumb way, and those groups are always going to be the ones that have a say in the legislation process via lobbying or direct involvement.
So no, I'm not arguing against child labor laws, I'm arguing against complicated redistribution programs. Nothing less, nothing more
You’re intentionally mislabeling “not using a crisis to hand out billions in tax breaks to rich people” as “socialism” to extend people’s historic aversion to socialism to this situation.
Do that often enough and you’ll find people quite willing to give this “socialism” thing a chance.
First, personal attacks are out of bounds on HN, and your "intentionally" comes pretty close.
Second, I think you're being unfair to anm89 in another way as well. His post I could just as easily take as saying that this is an illustration of how it goes when you try to reform the system (such as, say, introduce socialism).
Now, you could argue that socialism isn't relevant at all to the article. And you'd be right. Why socialism as opposed to labor reform, or UBI, or tax reform, or whatever? But the reason to pick socialism out of that list is the current relevance. Bernie Sanders was explicitly socialist, and he came rather close to the Democratic nomination.
I'm certainly not advocating tax breaks for anyone here. In fact I'm advocating getting rid of the framework that is used to implement those tax breaks.
You're reading into my words to say things that simply aren't there.
Seems unfair this well thought out comment is getting downvoted so heavily.
At any rate, this has always been my issue as well. People decry the capitalist system and when you ask why, they point to humans behaving badly. Well, no matter what economic system we have, we'll have that problem. There is no lack of corruption and self-dealing in non-capitalist systems.
> Of course not, it's lawyers and politicians. So are you really naive enough to believe that they write perfectly fair legislation that doesn't favor their interests at all?
But not all politicians and lawyers are serving the financial elites, whenever there's a stereotype or claim made I would like to see how this compares to Nordic countries.
In addition almost every major first would country has a socialist healthcare system, just not the US.
Unfortunately, this isn't even slightly surprising. Tax breaks is essentially the de facto way the country rewards the rich as it's not 'giving handouts' (but it is).
111 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadMany conservatives view income as "earned" and then taxes as appropriation ("taken away"). Under such a perspective it is only a return of what was originally theirs in the first place.
This country is run on deficits/debt so 1.7M less from rich people is not marginally 1.7M less to poor people.
Someone who was going to pay a million in taxes and now has 1 mil less is not going to put their money into the economy the same what that 1000 people with moderate income, like say restaurant workers getting $1,700 would. Those people poorer will spend all that money. I'm fortunate to be a well compensated software engineer, and I pay a huge amount of taxes. I'm not out there begging for more money (via tax reductions) and then claiming it was already my money, not a gift. That's a dishonest argument.
Wealthier people spend or invest all of their money. Only drug dealers hoard cash, and that's only because they have difficulty laundering it.
I agree, but it doesn't make any sense. Investing is literally putting money to work. Storing it in a mattress is not putting it to work.
For example, what happens to the money when people buy real estate? The seller of that real estate gets the money. They don't hoard it, they also spend/invest it.
What happens to the money you put in your bank account? The bank loans it out to people who spend/invest it. (Banks don't make money hoarding cash, they make money loaning it out.)
Think about it another way. Wealthy people in general are not stupid with money, if they were they wouldn't be wealthy very long. They put it to work. That means spending it or investing it to people who spend it.
All of my well-paying tech jobs have been funded by VC money from rich people and/or IPO money from rich people. Same goes (indirectly and partially) for all the people who have been selling me goods and services over those same years.
> Same goes ... for all the people who have been selling me goods and services over those same years.
No, it doesn't. Unless you only buy services from VC-financed startups?
I buy things using my salary which trickled down from the VCs and shareholders.
And then where does the money go that was spent on the investment?
Consider that a high ROI means the money is used for something useful. For example, investing into a financial vehicle that loans money to people buying a house.
Let's say the rich person buys a yacht. The yacht construction employs a large number of people. The money goes into the pockets of the people who made the yacht.
> Giving money to the rich does not trickle down to people.
For this to be true, it would follow that if all the rich people were made not-rich, it would have no material effect on the rest of the people. But that isn't how historical examples played out. Getting rid of rich people made everyone else worse off. Every time.
That’s such a naïve statement. Those financial vehicles actually do things: provide capital for other businesses. Provide market liquidity so that capital can flow to the areas that are in demand. Grandma saving money under the mattress does a lot less than a “rich” person investing in REITs.
So when I pay 35% tax and keep 65% of what remains, did the gov't give me that 65%?
There is nothing special about current tax rates that say any reduction in taxes is "giving people money". In reality, you're "just taking less money from them".
If so - lol for now.
If not, why is this mental gymnastics?
Damn, must be nice.
Could go to healthcare for all, fixing my roads and access to education, creating a strong resilient nation for all of us.
But this is so much better.
Everywhere a candidate’s name is printed.
it is already called "Republican".
And arguably, had we done that then we wouldn't be dealing with this now.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/14/coronavir...
And now we're seeing article after article just proving me right.
Right! And that, too, is illegal under rent control in many places (NY and California).
But right now we want them to not kick out people who can't pay. We want them to provide free housing to tenants who need it. Those are the landlords we want to bail out. Asking them to just take that as a loss is shitty.
(I assume that the landlords who don't forgive rent don't get to claim this loss on their taxes.)
I assume he's confusing it with evictions being put on hold.
> You still owe all of that rent.
Indeed.
Without interest?
However, this will only occur if they took losses, so it is really a discount of ~35% on negative income. This would also apply to someone who is not rich, i.e. a software dev sole proprietor who cashed out big losses in March in the stock market and then applied those losses against their normal income to end up reporting 64k in income instead of 100k (normally 36k in losses would have to be stretched over 12 years of tax returns).
I understand this doesn't fit the narrative, but please comment if it is incorrect instead of downvoting.
I try to up vote at least twice as much as I down vote. If I down vote a a low quality comment, I try to at least up vote 2 quality ones to offset it.
(Edit: something like slashdots categories could work but you’d need some incentive to be truthful rather than trust them to separate a “troll” from a “disagree”.)
Plus, if anything, I’d say it’s more common for there to be a bias against downvoting relative to upvoting.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Edit: I took a look at your account's recent comments because often we just remove rate limits when the problem has been corrected. Unfortunately, in this case the opposite is true. Would you please stop using HN primarily for political and ideological battle? It destroys the curious conversation that HN is intended for, so we have to ban accounts that do it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The guidelines also, for several good reasons, ask you not to post about "brigading" and the like. These perceptions are nearly always imaginary, as the current example illustrates. Everyone sees something they don't like and says "aha! brigading!". Nobody sees it change to the opposite and then says "oh! guess I was wrong about that." I've looked at the data on this closely for years, and the conclusion is that with rare exceptions (and I do mean rare) it is all cognitive bias of the purest form. Cognitive bias plus randomness equals narrative. It also equals noise in HN threads—and it evokes worse from others who have the opposite bias and take it as flamebait against their side.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I know a CPA and they have noted that there have been calls from wealthy clients looking for loopholes to save money on taxes, based on the stimulus.
Money not payed in taxes isn't quite the same as getting it back, but in the end its a fair amount of money kept by an idividua and not being sent to the government . Seems kinda shady to me, to put something like this in a bill that's trying to help lower to moderate income individuals financial survive a pandemic.. But I'm old and cynical.
The fundamental way our tax code is broken is not loopholes, but the actual publicly known tax bracket rates. They should be higher for capital gains, the progressive rate graduation should be steeper, and 500k shouldn't be the highest tax bracket when there are people who make 10,000 times that in a year. It's unbelievable that this isn't the focus of the issue and people are instead harping on wealth taxes and loopholes.
edit: should also note that capitalism expects wealth concentration, but it's not a pre-condition.
If your company has $100k to play with, paying $200k salary to take $100k loss is not a good move.
Say your pass-through entities has 100k in revenue. You could pay yourself 140k and mark down 40k of losses but that's financially disadvantageous because you're tax rate on the income will be higher than the tax rate on the losses. You're paying 13k in extra taxes to avoid paying 8k, donating an extra 5k to the IRS.
Most companies try to shift revenue from income to profits because it will reduce your total tax burden.
Don't forget the previous tax break also ;)
because of additional language that applies the policy retroactively “so losses in 2018 and 2019 can be ‘carried back’ against the past five years.”
It seems like the whole world is chomping at the bit to enact more socialism but do you think it's homeless people and cashiers that are defining the rules of the system and legislation? Of course not, it's lawyers and politicians. So are you really naive enough to believe that they write perfectly fair legislation that doesn't favor their interests at all?
Friedrich Hayek nailed this on the head almost 100 years ago. The problem with socialism isn't that its not an admirable goal, it's that even if you want it, by nature you aren't going to get the version of it that you wanted, you are going to get the version of it the a bunch of politically connected insiders design and while they may not be totally self serving, they are usually going to figure out how to be on the winning end of the game.
Crass said it well: "But no one ever changed the church by pulling down a steeple
And you'll never change the system by bombing number ten
Systems just aren't made of bricks they're mostly made of people"
The systems you get are the ones the people who design them make. Thinking otherwise is foolish. The people who should be the most scared of redistribution systems like this are the ones who want to look out for the interests of the little guys.
Looking at the 10 years following the great recession it looks like this is what happened (although those redistributions were more explicitly directed towards the top of the pyramid upfront) but look at at how inequality statistics have moved since that event. It certainly doesn't seem to have favored those who are financially disenfranchised in our society.
The problem is the nature of society permanatly skews these events in the favor of the the people who have the most existing resources to figure out how to game the system.
If you want a much more in depth breakdown of how that happens structurally, read Hayeks the road to serfdom as I mentioned above.
This is how we need to educate the left.
Yes we know the pretty fantasy, but the outcome is not what you fantasize. How many more examples of bankrupt economies do we need before people realize "this time (won't) be different"
The more complicated systems that are created, the more there is to gamify.
I'm advocating for more limited government. A simple clear rule set is much harder to gamify. This is an equalizer, not the reverse in my opinion.
You're only advocating for a different representation of class interests in the state, i.e. it would do most of what capital is interested in, but little or none of what labor is interested in. Not that a more interventionist state is pro-labor - it's just somewhat less unbalanced.
To me, it also looks like you're putting words in his mouth that are very much not his position...
Any definitional gymnastics here are yours
2. Are we better off by optimizing for minimal political manipulation over anything else? For hyperbolic examples: in complete anarchy, we'd have zero system manipulation, and yet I would unhappily die in The Purge. Likewise, in some Roaring '20s capitalistic caricature, I might have my small business destroyed by a monopoly, or die a child laboring away in unsafe conditions. Optimizing for being manipulatable seems far less palatable than living in modern day Denmark or something.
1) Yes this could be true in some cases but a lot of the way in which the "haves" exploit these kind of systems is by throwing man hours of attorneys and accountants at them because the rules are super verbose and complicated and so you hire profesional loop hole finders. If I simple piece of legislation is obviously exploitable, that will be more obvious from the get go and will less heavily favor the peoe who can pay the loophole finders.
Also you cant exploit things that don't exist.
2) no, I agree you have to draw your line in the sand somewhere. I'm not an anarchist. I could take your argument in the same direction to absurdity as well. If redistribution solves all problems, let's create comittees to redistribute on a person to person basis until we reach a fair utopia.
We don't do that because we acknowledge that the cost benefit of doing that gets hyperbolically negative at a certain point. What I'm advocating is that the line where that happens is actually much earlier, and that the last 10 years have shown that we are already on the wrong side of that line and that our approach to legislating away complex issues can at best handout money to certain interest in a fairly dumb way, and those groups are always going to be the ones that have a say in the legislation process via lobbying or direct involvement.
So no, I'm not arguing against child labor laws, I'm arguing against complicated redistribution programs. Nothing less, nothing more
Do that often enough and you’ll find people quite willing to give this “socialism” thing a chance.
Second, I think you're being unfair to anm89 in another way as well. His post I could just as easily take as saying that this is an illustration of how it goes when you try to reform the system (such as, say, introduce socialism).
Now, you could argue that socialism isn't relevant at all to the article. And you'd be right. Why socialism as opposed to labor reform, or UBI, or tax reform, or whatever? But the reason to pick socialism out of that list is the current relevance. Bernie Sanders was explicitly socialist, and he came rather close to the Democratic nomination.
You're reading into my words to say things that simply aren't there.
At any rate, this has always been my issue as well. People decry the capitalist system and when you ask why, they point to humans behaving badly. Well, no matter what economic system we have, we'll have that problem. There is no lack of corruption and self-dealing in non-capitalist systems.
But not all politicians and lawyers are serving the financial elites, whenever there's a stereotype or claim made I would like to see how this compares to Nordic countries.
In addition almost every major first would country has a socialist healthcare system, just not the US.
Why is that surprising? The people that pay the most tax have the most benefit from a tax break.
It's no different than saying a family making $30,000 per year don't benefit from tax breaks, but leaving out the fact they don't pay any tax anyways.