Wealth, especially generational wealth, is a complicated problem in many aspects.
The biggest 'challenge' is once you get to various echelons... of all places, I heard it best described on reddit; It's like the reverse of MMO mechanics; Rather than low levels giving you lots of growth and higher levels requiring a lot of 'grind', the farther you get the easier it is to make more money, even 'doing nothing'.
A -huge- factor nowadays is property values as well, which doesn't help.
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There is also the concern of 'other ways' people get into that echelon.
I think of those who exploit labor, flount the law, and honestly in some cases (maybe they aren't the 1% but) those who use their power of 'celebrity' to get people to spend waaaaaay too much money on 'signature' goods or whatever else they endorse (Air Jordans come to mind as an example.)
This seems awfully confident. I mean, have you interviewed every single billionaire? I doubt it. I'm sure there's many patterns or things linking them together.
All I know is that I, and also everyone else I know, would never let themselves have a billion dollars. That money would be long gone before they reach 1 billion. Impulsively spent on whatever they think is good for other people.
Could money be an addiction, like alcohol? Where some are predispositioned to want more and more and some don't care for it?
I don't think a forbes article is enough to claim with 100% certainty that every billionaire is completely different from the others.
It's such a wild and obviously incorrect claim I don't know how you could possibly make it. I mean, even me - there are things in common between me and random people.
> what actions would you take
Nice try, but if I tell you you'll just use that to discredit anything I say. That's not relevant to the conversation so I won't be answering that. Feel free to speculate.
Sure it is. Just scroll through the list and you see very few similarities. If anything might be in common, is that many of them were from rich families to begin with (e.g. Gates, Zuckerberg, Donald Trump) but there's many that weren't (e.g. Phil Knight).
> I'm sure there's many patterns or things linking them together.
That's awfully confident. What knowledge do you have that inspires such confidence?
The answer is obvious, we put up gates to prevent competition. Every industry has so much red tape and list of approved products that it is impossible. Have a new product to solve house building in a timely fashion, hopefully you have hundred of thousands to pay for certification and then wait years for some government agency to approve your product for building.
It's rather disgusting how we grid locked ourselves with regulations. There used to be thousands of ISPs, banks, grocery stores, etc and we added red tape after red tape to restrict and allowed them to be all bought by the company that did the best.
Now we got like 3 banks, 3 ISPs, and 3 grocery stores with different names.
Thomas Piketty's book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", has a bit to say on this. It argues that historically, and increasingly so today, the return on capital exceeds the return on labour. This means wealth is a positive feedback cycle: wealth earns more wealth, at the expense of those who only have their labour. Once someone hits a net worth threshold it snowballs from there. Agree with it or not, the book is quite readable.
If we're talking about US specifically, if you go back several generations, the answer would be slavery and Native american genocide (then taking their land and natural resources)
The new money is mostly from tech/oil and exploiting globalization in smart ways.
It is not money in first place... Wealth is kinda imaginary, a dream that most people believe in. Whole financial system is set up so that as long as numbers keep going up there is more money appearing... Unrealized gains. Commercial real-estate and home values. All of these are wealth. Most of them still go up in value thus in "wealth".
A common objection is that the rich will 'just move' to avoid taxes. However, he goes in depth in his response, pointing out that the source of the wealth can't move, you tax that at the source.
If a corporation "moves" oversees to avoid taxes, they aren't allowed to reap the benefits of the country whose taxes they wished to avoid.
If a billionaire moves to avoid taxes, they and their assets are cut off from the system whose taxes they wished to avoid. Oh, you want to move overseas but keep your money in banking institutions propped up by the US government? Too bad. You want your corporations to keep the full protection of the US government (intellectual capital protection, copyright, etc...)? Too bad! You want your company to take full advantage of all the US has to offer (great education system, a large consumer base, secure capital markets, a relatively stable government)? Too bad!
Most of these folks are just greedy fucks who know how good they have it...but somehow they want more, yet expect that people with exponentially less wealth will pay for it. I don't like that.
Note - the government isn't always the best at allocating capital or resources...but neither are private citizens or corporations.
His most important point though is that things will not get better until a sufficient mass of public political pressure is brought to bear on the issue.
I'm a little confused on this. What is the evidence that it didn't work in the 60s/70s? My understanding is that, though we definitely had "stagflation" and other problems, none of them were caused by higher taxes at the top end.
Now, granted, I don't know that I have ever seen it put forth that they were ideal levels or anything. I just have never heard the top end tax rate blamed for that. Biggest thing I have seen it blamed on would be employer tied insurance and the like.
In some countries, certainly the UK in the 1960s with its 90% top tax rate, the government would've collected more tax if the rate were lower because there would have been more economic activity to tax -- or so say a lot of economists. "Laffer curve" is a good thing to search for if you want to learn more.
I mean, this is largely to my point, though? Last I looked, it seemed research into the Laffer Curve largely found most countries set their rates below the ideal. Agreed that a 90% rate would almost certainly be too high, but the general feel was 40-60 would certainly cover the maximum rates. Some folks saying as high as 70, no?
Unhoused is a term that has been used for a number of years. Just because you dont bother keeping up to date doesnt mean the world needs to cater to you.
You can keep up with the times or you can make angry posts on the internet about people being “woke” or “pc” or whatever insult you decide to hurl because things are different now.
The words become less fake over time and everyone, even the most conservative of conservatives, recognizes that.
There plenty, many, words you won't use because they've changed. That's how progress goes, it's always the way it's been. You can fight that, but it won't work. And then in 40 years you will sound like an insane person.
I'm not saying that "unhoused" is good or will be a largely used word. But I am saying that fake words are real and you will keep up or be left behind. We have people alive, right now, who have been left behind. Guess what, they sound insane.
I mean what I said. Sometimes people end up on the streets as a result of unstable living situations. They may still have homes while not being housed. And as far as I know, these not-quite-homeless people are the most likely of that category to have cell phones, so it is actually fairly relevant to my comment that I use that particular word.
It reflects poorly on you to choose the least relevant part of my comment to reply to, poorer still when doing so makes it clear you're missing the point.
Seems to be more when the low end isn't getting enough to live on. The element that gets violent just because someone else is doing well doesn't seem that large.
There are people in the SF Bay Area who have full time service jobs and can only afford to live in their cars. It should worry everybody when there is a large - and growing - segment of society that follows the rules and can’t scrape by. That doesn’t last for long.
You don’t need to worry about the crack heads, worry about the people who can hold a 9-5 and aren’t getting a living wage. All they need is a charismatic leader to organize them, and they’ll actually get shit done.
This has very little to do with income or wealth inequality, and everything to do with bad local government policy leading to insanely expensive housing. Anyone on a full time service job in the Bay Area is very rich on a global standard!
What's a "living wage"? Its easy to shift the goalpost! I'd bet even those service workers who can't afford absurd Bay Area housing still have a living wage by the standards of 1900!
Does it not? The entire developed world seems extremely destabilized right now. Old-line Conservative, Labour, and Liberal parties have either been defeated by, or are under serious threat from, populist-nationalist and leftist parties throughout the West [1]. The only thing these latter groups have in common is populist rhetoric and a sense of "I'm not getting my fair piece of the pie".
The existence of the modern welfare state owes its genesis to this idea, courtesy of (amazingly) Otto von Bismarck of all people, probably the most consummate and effective conservative of his time. Bismarck was not at all subtle about his reasoning:
> Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy, assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old. If you do that, and do not fear the sacrifice, or cry out at State Socialism directly the words “provision for old age” are uttered,—if the State will show a little more Christian solicitude for the working-man, then I believe that the gentlemen of the Wyden (Social-Democratic) programme will sound their bird-call in vain, and that the thronging to them will cease as soon as working-men see that the Government and legislative bodies are earnestly concerned for their welfare.
I might not think this is the right reason to be concerned about inequality, but he's right about the realpolitik: a state whose subjects feel the state does not act in their interest have little reason to defend or support the state and all the reason in the world to attack it, or at least that is going to be their perception.
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[1] Yes, even the recent UK and French elections are an example. Labour's vote share was not very high - but the Conservatives, in the process of being supplanted by the more-nationalist Reform, split the right-wing vote such that Labour could win a share of seats far exceeding what you'd expect for its minimal vote share. In France, Macron's centrists still lost to a left-wing party, and that was after an extraordinary alliance of parties to block Le Pen's RN, which would likely have been the largest party without such maneuvering.
Yes, but what will the government do with the money. We could already build Eden on earth if it weren't for wars. Governments keep spending money on wars, so what's the point of taking more in taxes. It will all go to shits anyways.
And by the way, if you think that governments are accountable to the public you are sadly mistaken. They are accountable to that 1%.
But our system has a serious problem. We've increased the debt by $11 trillion in the past four years, which was our total debt for the first 200 years the country was around.
The only point here is the problem is significantly harder than you're making it sound, and that's if we had a straightforward way to just stop all the wars. Unfortunately, no one's been able to come up with a way to do this yet.
This… I would be for higher taxes if they were used responsibly- maybe even have a contentious objector option that allows people to opt out of funding wars. Being able to defend yourself is important but most of the US military operations since WW2 have been pointless and awful.
Maybe there's something disfunctional about an economic system that lets ordinary people set up complex product and distributions systems, and then take all the money from them forever.
There's something in Europe called VAT that addresses this.
It's important to come up with some kind of solution. When the current system reduces to a single purveyor for every product sector, which we're heading for at breakneck speed right now, there will be only a few people owning the whole shebang, and nobody to buy the products because nobody else is needed/has a job at all.
I’d like a discussion around hard caps well beneath the “teens on a private island” level. It seems like we could determine the curve of corrosion that the idea of increasing wealth has on the brain with a few really unkind experiments.
What is value-add? Selling something for more than it cost you to make it, "adding value" as measured by revenues minus costs.
What are other words for that? profit, income
What are taxes on that? income taxes.
from the point of view of the govt, the VAT is just an ordinary income tax.
but instead of being paid by the businesses, it's paid by the consumers, discouraging them from buying high margin items, encouraging them to buy low margin items.
What is nice about VAT is that you can tax different goods differently. You can have low VAT on essentials, which everyone - poor or rich - needs, but have higher tax on luxury items. In that respect, it is similar to a progressive tax, except harder to avoid - even an ultra rich who has "no income" buys stuff.
Except of course there are gaping loopholes, for example businesses are effectively exempt from VAT, also you can buy stuff abroad where VAT is lower.
VAT is essentially flat-tax. Which like all consumption tax works against those that spend higher proportion of their income on buying things necessary for living...
I'll take the fairer one please. After all, we can't know how many extra doodads and shiny things we might have had, in an unfairer world. So we won't really miss them.
On the other hand, I'd like to live in a society where more people feel bought in and live less stressful lives.
Why we believe that the government is the most efficient capital allocator when evidence tells us otherwise?
Put the incentives to increase entrepreneurship and education in poor areas, like lower taxes and lower barriers of entry.
There are three major reasons why, with very few exceptions, wealth doesn't last centuries:
1. Descendants of really successful people tend to fritter away that wealth, thinking they're as gifted as their forebears. Look no further than the Vanderbilts;
2. Families have a tendency to die out over generations. The Roman Republican originally had 45 patrician families. By the time of Gaius Julius Caesar (who was from a patrician family), there were 15 IIRC; and
3. The ultimate form of wealth redistribution is war and revolution.
Most long-lasting family wealth tends to be monarchies of some kind.
Therea are a bunch of arguments you'll hear why taxing the rich more can't or shouldn't happen. They're all lies.
1. Capital flight. The rich will leave. Great. You lose the ability to sell to customers in our country then;
2. Taxing unrealized stock gains is impossible and/or unfair. We do this to property just fine. Companies produce tax statements of unrealized gains just fine;
3. The dreaded slippery slope arguments. "If they go after Bezos, next they'll come after me with my $42,000 a year job and 2011 Camry".
A stable society and political climate is completely necessary for this wealth to exist. Having the wealthy pay for the society that makes their wealth possible while avoiding their heads ending up on pikes or in guillotines is entirely just, possible and moral.
> 2. Taxing unrealized stock gains is impossible and/or unfair. We do this to property just fine. Companies produce tax statements of unrealized gains just fine.
Wait till you find out what someone with a home nominally valued $2m in San Francisco pays on his property taxes compared to you.
You conveniently forgot to make an argument against your second point #3. That is understandable, since there is none. USA income tax started by attacking only those making over $3000 when median yearly pay was $670, but over time it grew to afflict everyone. It will expand and it will one day hurt you..
Everyone thinks that redistribution is great, because they look at the wallets of those better off and cannot wait to get a slice, forgetting that below them there are many looking at their wallets...
My question for you is: why don't you vote in your interests? Instead, you're voting in Bezos's interests. You are not Jeff Bezos. You will never be Jeff Bezos. You will never benefit for the policies you seem to be defending.
But no, it's "if Bezos has to pay 10% taxes, they migh tcome next for my $120,000".
It's wild to me that the slippery slope argument manages to somehow trump arguments of both self-interest and morality.
> I honestly, truly believe that limiting the size and reach of government is voting in my own self interest.
I guess you don't like roads, bridges, courts, fire departments, GPS, the Internet, modern medicine or stable food prices then.
This whole "limited government" fantasy is such a uniquely American delusion. It's crazy. It's propaganda sold to you by wealthy people who want to be able to poison your drinking water because it increases their personal wealth from $30 billion to $31 billion.
It borders on libertarianism, which, if that's what you're talking about, is such an incredibly naive and ridiculous political philosophy.
I am actually curious though: how exactly is big government creating "negative consequences for [you] and your family"?
I'm from Europe, I pay 50% in taxes and I can assure you that even here you can get rich. I can also attest that there's nothing wrong with the government having money for universal healthcare, infrastructure, security, mitigation climate change and housing.
I am... I just understand history, and you seem to either not, or pretend not to. Right now they promise to only steal from those worth over $100M (which sadly indeed does not affect me), it will be down to $10M within my lifetime, which would affect me. And thus my interest is to vote against it...
It doesn't even require an appeal to a slippery slope. All I need to do is to look at the historical inflation rate and its pretty obvious that my grandchildren will require a net worth greater than $100M simply to retire.
I'm not interested in redistribution, I'm interested in public goods. I want public transit, public housing, public health, and public internet.
Why? Because it benefits me when other people have housing, can get around without cars, and aren't unnecessarily catching and spreading communicable diseases. These things aren't "worth" it on a purely financial basis, but they're absolutely worth it on a social basis.
How do you defeat the prisoner's dilemma? You make a binding, enforceable pact. How do you prevent the tragedy of the commons? You cap the amount people can graze their animals on public land, and remove privileges from those that violate the cap. How do you improve the quality of life of literally every person in the country? You make policy and infrastructure, and then you fund it and maintain it.
The US is a democracy. Unpopular laws are not enacted. Why do we need any other argument for why an unpopular version of this popular law wont be enacted?
It's less a question of should or shouldn't but rather can we.
Not convinced there is either the collective willpower or ability to enforce this, never mind both in sufficient quantities spread across the globe in a manner to ensure coverage to prevent the wealth simply moving
I make 750k a year, give or take. I think I paid 150k in taxes, more or less, last year.
I would gladly pay 600k a year in taxes if it meant healthcare, education, housing, and food were secured for all.
Let me keep 20% of my work for luxuries I like, but the fact that I'm only paying like 20% is fucking criminal while people are starving in this country.
I recognize I'm differently wired and have different values than most, but like, there has to be a line between 20% and 80% tax rate that we can live with.
The original poster clearly defined the terms that they would be willing to pay extra taxes. The user I replied to ignored that and said "give it away". The comment was obtuse.
It's also not mutually exclusive. I can and do give away huge sums until those taxes go up.
I'm buying land and putting it into conservation, giving to community land trusts, and other ways that essentially make permanent changes towards the world I want to live in.
One person giving away their money just means they don’t have the money and society still doesn’t have, say, Medicare for all. It takes a collective effort to get the collective gains we need to see.
There's a coordination issue here. I'm astonished that so many people fail to see it. The result of one person donating $600k to charity / the treasury is completely different than ten thousand equally-wealthy people all paying $600k.
This person is saying "I will cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma, if and only if I can arrange a binding agreement by which others cooperate too", and a bunch of people are replying "then go ahead and cooperate; let the rest of us be free to defect"!
(By the way... uh... what do you do to earn $750k? As someone earning about 1/20th of that amount, I'm curious for some pointers).
It should be taxed differently, but the core problem is that the ultra-wealthy never realize gains. They borrow against the value and then their inheritors pay off those debts with the assets which have now had a reset tax basis.
The sanest solution is to simply preserve cost bases for inherited assets.
I’m generally with you, though I live in CA so my effective tax rate is around 50%.
I am very troubled when people who proclaim to be liberal move here—an area with high potential—to “strike it rich”, do so, and then immediately fuck off to another state where they can sell their vested shares without paying CA tax rates. CA does try to claw back avoided taxes from the worst offenders of this, but mostly they only go after people who move out on paper but still lead lives here.
One of the biggest problems though is that bumping marginal rates doesn’t affect the ultra-rich, who use tax-avoidance schemes like loans against invested assets to live off extreme wealth with nearly zero taxable income.
Probably because CA politicians want to spend tax money on things like providing $150k of housing loans to undocumented migrants
Losing out on a house bid as an American citizen to an undocumented migrant thanks to this policy, truly the type of stuff only a CA politician could come up with.
I do. I provide housing units at the cost of maintenance. I believe profiting from rent is deeply unethical. My renters have paid basically for their share of heating, electricity, water, sewer, and wear and tear on the building itself.
But I cannot house the thousands of unhoused people in my city alone. I can provide housing for 2-5 of them at any given time.
That said, do you know what offering housing for a couple hundred bucks a month does for a struggling family? It fundamentally changes their ability to establish themselves. Build savings, escape poverty.
Edit: I'm not trying to signal or whatever by posting this. I have ethical beliefs about supporting one's local community and try not to be hypocritical about it. When people challenge me, suggesting I might be hypocritical ("why don't you spend your own money on it!") I try to respond with, "I do. And I see the changes it makes in real human lives."
But always as a response to someone trying to call me out, never unprompted.
No, pay for all of it, not what it costs you to maintain while your properties balloon in value far more than any rent you could have collected on them. You are no more ethical than any other landlord so please stop pretending to be. You and real estate investors like you are contributors to the homelessness problem.
I put the land I buy into a trust that removes my ability to profit from it. The trust cannot take actions that would cause them to profit from selling the land.
Any equity the trust holds is from me or others putting in funds that are held solely for the purposes of providing housing for the community at cost.
My personal mortgage I do pay for, and I will be ceding whatever land I hold to that trust upon my death so that it can provide housing in perpetuity.
The only reason the land is not currently in the trust's hands is because I need the ability to move freely. I could arrange to sell the house to the trust, and lease it from the trust, but because there's a bank involved with my mortgage that gets more complex.
Thanks. So many people are like, "sure, I'd love to live in a world like X, but there's nothing I can do about it". Well, you can model it, make the change. Maybe someone will be inspired by you.
I read about someone who paid all his tenant's rent back to them after he became an anarchist or whatever. I crunched the numbers, and found out that for like 15k I could pay back every penny I had collected over maintenance, plus the appreciation of the principal. I sent out checks with amounts between $1500 and $4500, along with a note saying I didn't believe in rent any more.
I saw someone else do it, so I did it. Maybe someone on Hacker News will see my posts and do it too. Odds are small, but non zero.
I can tell you it made a material positive change in the lives of those people. That's a much better legacy than, "I died $15k richer" or "I went on vacation at a resort an extra time".
The thing I discovered is that it's highly variable depending on location. Step one is talk to a lawyer who knows real estate and landlord tenant laws in your specific area.
Alternatively, search for a "community land trust" in your area and discuss with them how you can manage your property upon your death.
> The program is currently available to low- and middle-income first-time home buyers in California and Arambula’s bill aims to open it up to tax-paying, undocumented immigrants.
This drops about fifty tiers down the stack of things I can manage to get myself seriously worked up over by actually reading the article.
I’m finding it pretty hard to find a lot of outrage over “taxpayers now eligible for government services”.
They're being offered loans, which they'll have to pay back. This won't cost taxpayers anything. And anyway, these undocumented migrants ARE TAXPAYERS THEMSELVES. I fail to see any reason to be outraged about this.
Offering loans to people that couldn't otherwise get one increases the pool of buyers, driving demand and increasing prices. I don't raise that as a reason not to have the program, but you are missing second order effects if you consider there to be no cost to the broader public.
More importantly, how exactly is an undocumented immigrant paying taxes? Do they somehow have a tax ID or SSN without documentation? Or are you just referring to things like sales and fuel taxes?
It used to be that immigrants would simply invent a fake SSN in order to get a job. The e-verify system may have complicated that, but I imagine it's still pretty much the same for smaller businesses. And especially agricultural work, meat processing plants, etc. All the businesses that rely on undocumented labor.
So the immigrants are paying into the SS/medicare system, but they don't receive any of the benefits.
I think the solution to the housing problem is to increase supply. Not to try to prevent a whole group of people from being able to buy homes.
> I think the solution to the housing problem is to increase supply. Not to try to prevent a whole group of people from being able to buy homes.
That seems totally reasonable if there's demand for more houses and the ability to build more.
Phrasing it as though people who already can't to buy a home are being prevented simply by not providing government assistance is a big disingenuous though. Preventing them implies that they could otherwise buy the home, and if that were the case a government program wouldn't be needed.
They aren’t being handed $150,000 in unmarked bills. It’s loan assistance for a house which is pretty fucking difficult to throw into the back of a truck and haul over the border.
If everyone that wealthy was left with 150k, there would be no businesses, and no jobs. We'd go from a mostly employed country to a mostly unemployed country and the governing class would become the 1% overnight and the previous 1% would be part of the 99% instantly.
It's communism. You should keep your 600k. No government is going to spend it better than you. They're going to erase it, it will go directly to military generals and their projects.
There's lots and lots and lots of kinds of communism. It's actually more socialism (which there are also lots of types of) than communism to advocate for raising taxes like this.
It's not communism, nobody actually knows what communism is. Working in the private sector, earning a salary, and then giving some of your salary to the government in exchange for some services is not communism.
Communism is more radical than that, meaning cut out the middle man - no private sector at all. The government, or more accurately the people, own the economy collectively. Or that's the idea, implementation varies especially when you sprinkle in dictatorship.
That's not what OP says. You're talking about an absolute $150k, that is communism (everyone gets paid the same amount). He's talking about a fair percentage of taxes, paid by everyone, regardless of their income.
This way, people that are left with little can be helped, and people that are left with a lot can still enjoy their wealth.
I think 50% is fine, but taxes should be fair, no taxing already taxed goods or assets, and the ultra rich should not have ways to avoid paying their share like they do now.
Well you pay for this stuff, your money goes to semi-private institutions like universities (healthcare, education) instead of bouncing through taxes first. This is non-tax compulsory payments (NTCP), no?
> housing, ...
Real estate is California's #1 industry, biggest sector in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and according to everyone, community regulations and tax-adjacent policies like Prop 13 are the biggest influence on housing prices. So you kind of do pay taxes, you are obligated by law to play by the housing rules there.
> food, ...
Government subsidies are the #1 source of profits for agribusinesses. Similar to saying Tesla's main source of profit was carbon credits. Kind of a junk analysis by one interpretation, kind of central to the business by another.
Anyway my point is the average person, according to some people, pays closer to 40% like many Europeans do, when you include orthodox defined NTCP. If you think deeply about how much you are forced to pay for by law or similar mechanisms, maybe it's higher.
You live in the world you want right now. NTCPs go to regular people too. University health systems are many states #1 employers. They are socialized in a way that matters. Maybe it isn't funded through taxes but do you see how that's kind of a moot point?
I think housing should not be a commodity. Medicine and education shouldn't be run for profit. (Ideally, commodity food would be grown for the common good, too.)
But also, I'm posting here in recognition that my politics aren't exactly common here. And that's ok!
I wouldn't say so, what's he's speaking about is nationalizing many industries. Healthcare, food industry, housing. I mean, this is socialism. Not communism, but socialism.
Granted our media knows fuck-all about politics, but we have close to zero socialist politicians in the US. Nationalizing industries is wildly, wildly unpopular - practically unheard of.
Every industry listed does, actually, turn a profit in our current system. They are, truly, private - although regulated.
UCSF is San Francisco's largest employer, UPMC is Pittsburgh's largest employer, UMMC for Baltimore, ... They are a complex web of entities, inexorably linked to the government in each community. A plurality of middle to upper income people work for the hospital-educational-state system, and a plurality of middle to upper income people living there use its services. It gets a mix of funding from governments and private payers, but for some of those people, their income is from UPMC.
They might not be monopolies, they might not be nationalized, but functionally, they are like really effective monopolized community corporations.
Think about it from the other side: define nationalized corporation. What would make it last a long time? What would make it provide services effectively and competitive against imported goods and services? You get something that looks like university hospital systems, state university education systems, the real estate lobby, etc.
Nationalization in some reductionist sense doesn't work in the US for these industries because of the open market we live in - you can, after all, drive to another place for medicine and educations, and many people do. But the levers that are used to incentivize people to choose their local semi-private provider, and the way the communities are themselves employed / derive income from the provider, is holistically nationalization.
"healthcare, education, housing, and food were secured for all."
Ah yes all of this provided to you by Big Government, who can at a whim withdraw these services if you are found to engage in WrongThink.
We already have seen Western governments like Canada financially banning grandmothers who donated to a trucker protest or the UK imprisoning people for tweets.
Do you really want a bunch of DC politicians to have the power of life and death, not to mention access to swaths of capital that they will inevitably use to engorge and enrich themselves?
Your 600k in taxes will go into the pockets of various interest groups that markup their goods and services because they know Uncle Sam will foot the bill.
I would ultimately prefer a system of small, local, community managed democratic syndicalism. But, if I have to live in a capitalist world I'd prefer to live in one where the people in power at least try to take care of people.
Ideally, no, it would be centralized in neither the wealthy nor the government. But I think "raise taxes" is an easier path to net good than "let's seize the factories and run federations of democratically run industries in the interest of the wellbeing of all".
I think you're missing that the suggested path is not "let's seize the factories", but instead a return to "distributed charity" like we had before the Great Depression.
> You're quite free to voluntarily send all your money to the Treasury.
Taxes should be fair for everyone of course. The original question was whether billionaires should pay more, and they should. The amount of money they have allows them to dodge the amount of taxes they truly owe. This gives them an unfair advantage over the rest of us, which only increases over time.
I don't think people like you should pay more taxes. The problem is at the much, much higher levels. The concentration of wealth like Musk, Bezos, and others have, should simply not exist.
Here's the criteria: Your wealth level isn't enough for you to have an oversized power over society. People like Musk have and they are not elected by the people. This threatens democracy itself.
> People like Musk ... are not elected by the people.
Untrue.
Everyone who bought a Tesla voted, with their dollars, to give Musk this wealth. Everyone who owns Tesla stock voted, with their dollars, to give Tesla this wealth. And everyone who voted, with their votes, for representatives that gave EV tax breaks voted to give Musk this wealth.
The man is rich because of economic and political cause and effect. Don't pretend the world that made Musk eye-bleedingly wealthy is somehow disconnected from the world of our collective actions.
The issue isn't their economic power by itself. It is their outsized political power that derives from that economic power. The more political power the oligarcs have, the less power all the other citizens have.
Put your excess money where your mouth is and leave coercive government out of it.
You, personally, you can provide these things for people in need.
For example, I am in a similar financial situation. My family took in a Ukrainian refugee. We house, feed, clothe, and educate this refugee to provide one individual with exactly the things you bemoan others not having.
In your and my income bracket, it takes only caring enough and the true will to do something tangible for others.
For $300K of otherwise unused income you could support 4 people. So go support 4 people. And keep your hands and your politicians' hands off my finances.
He can't do it as efficiently as an organization can as it can see the bigger picture of what is needed where. He also probably doesn't want to spend hours of his life figuring out which people to give it to. Why duplicate effort?
Please read the thread. I'm offering housing, securing forestland for conservation, and setting up or working with trusts to ensure those things continue in perpetuity.
I'm also passionate about growing food and giving it away.
Don't say, this person doesn't care/doesn't actually believe until you have evidence of that.
He can probably do it significantly more efficiently than an organization can. Governments and non-profits are not known for their efficiency, only their scale. Many non-profits are famously, scandalously inefficient.
What's often ignored is whether or not these are Realized Gains
I wouldn't be surprised if a huge majority of that $42T wasn't realized gains (sold and attributed as a Capital Gain).
It's hugely unfair to tax non-Realized Gains ... because that would be like you having the pay Income taxes on the appreciation of your home - even though you still live in your home and haven't "realized" those gains (to pay the capital gain taxes)
Isn't that the very principle of property taxes? And it has no relation to income, it's the very possession of property (or in this case, financial assets) that triggers it.
The larger problem in my mind is that a lot of asset purchases bestow a lot of tax deferment privileges because of how the tax code is presently written.
Consider someone who holds a lot of capital with unrealized gains but nonetheless needs cash flow. A common practice is to borrow against those unrealized gains, which itself doesn't count as income even though it nevertheless tends to result in a greater accession of wealth.
The play, hence, seems to be that we consider the borrowing against unrealized gains to be the taxable event, not a wholesale tax on all held assets.
One idea I read on Reddit is to only let people borrow against their cost basis, rather than the gains. If you want to borrow more, you're forced to sell your stock.
Alternatively, you could continue to allow them to borrow against the current price of the stock, but doing so causes gains to become realized for the sake of tax purposes.
If you want to be especially charitable, allow the stock owner to choose which of the two options to use when applying for the loan.
I think taxing corporations and removing loopholes will make a much more immediate impact. Tax code is too complex and too many business have ways to dodge.
Communism is not the same socialism. In communism everyone gets the same pay. In socialism, everyone pays the same percentage of their income to help the people who are worst off and pay for the conveniences everyone can beneft from like healthcare, Infrastructure and housing.
UK top marginal tax rate right now is 45%. Many people pay it: doctors, lawyers, architects, not just greedy evil bankers with their big bad bonuses.
I don't want the ultra rich to have some special mega-tax to tax them for their obscene wealth. I want their effective income to be taxed the same as all these middle class people pay. As it keeps cropping up, they pay much less, via offshore wealth, accounting tricks etc.
I don't know enough about accounting to suggest how this should be done, but to me this ought to be the objective, not some punitive tax, referring to starving children in poor countries.
The point should be to reduce what doctors and carpenters alike to what the billionaires pay to “the crown”. A 42% tax rate is obscene. A 32% tax rate too. 10% should be the target.
I have moved from a high tax society(Sweden) to a low tax society and I prefer it.
I'm not defending the tax rate. I don't like tax, would happy pay less, equally someone has to pay the bill.
My point is rather that I want the millionaires to pay the same tax, not some special different one. We already have a social contract saying what people are supposed to pay.
Because capitalism is unbalanced, it was inevitable that it would eventually destroy itself and corrupt our public institutions in the process. The problem is, the people who capital has power over, labor, which is most people on the planet, will be the ones who get hurt the most in the process. And that’s not even considering the cost to earth and its nonhuman inhabitants.
A lot of the proposals like unearned capital gains taxes or wealth taxes all come with a lot of downsides. Including not actually generating much revenue in practice.
The countries are at something of at a Nash Equilibrium. Everyone wants the golden eggs, nobody wants to kill the gooses. Nobody wants their billionaires' money to flight.
> Oxfam described the summit as a ‘real litmus test for G20 governments’, urging them to implement an annual net wealth tax of at least eight per cent on the ultra-wealthy.
All the governments should agree and play along. As soon a few don't, the wealth will flow there. It's seems trivial, to just increase the tax from 7% to 8%, what's the big deal, just 1% more. But there is a country which for some reason thinks it can profit more from the wealthy moving their money there so they set their rate at 7.5%.
The critical part is that wealthy lobby (i.e. bribe) politicians and have enough resources to drum up support from the public via various interest groups and so on. In public they'll agree with the need for more taxes, and more environment protections, all the feel-good topics. But behind the scenes, they'll put the finger on the scale in their favor.
Real question is why are countries cooperating on tax rates? I’m glad the US is not cooperating. Each country is free to implement whatever rules they want as long as they are willing to deal with citizens leaving for other countries.
It’s a great way to prevent poor countries from enticing rich people to move there
You're generalizing all governments of all times. Surely there are people in governments that do spend money to benefit the majority?
In a democracy, you get to vote for the people you trust most to do so, and vote out the people that don't.
In the U.S. there's only two options on a national level, but that is a different problem.
> Billions to build a few miles of rail in California
Literally no private company will do it though because trains are too efficient. You make MUCH more money selling cars and gasoline, and then sprawling cities over decades. Trains make no sense if you're trying to make money. So the gov has to do it or it will never be done.
> How many billions on wars
Straight to defense contractors, who are purposefully lazy and incentivized to suck as much as possible. But they hire a lot of people.
> almost nothing to show for the average citizen
Yeah, besides your education that is the only reason you can even write this comment. Or the roads. Or the internet you're writing this on. But no, I'm sure if you were illiterate and banging rocks together that's fine.
I'm being a little hyperbolic but you get the point.
The government is literally the reason the rail costs so much. They created the regulations that force the cost so high.
Your argument appears to be sure, the government spends a ton of money on useless things and overpays massively for the end result on the ok things but hey at least that's something?
Which is a fine argument I guess if you think that wasting tax payer money for poor quality outcomes is ok because its better than nothing.
> They created the regulations that force the cost so high
Yeah, after enough people got blown up. Something something free market...
> wasting tax payer
Look, the entire point of government services is they are a COST. They are different from a business because they don't have to profit and often it's better if they DON'T profit. Businesses can't operate that way, which creates some perverse incentives for some domains.
For example, providing universal healthcare would only burn money. Nobody, except doctors and whatnot, makes money. There's no profit there. And, well, that's the entire draw! If there were a profit, which we have now, then there's some fucked up stuff that happens.
> because its better than nothing
yeah, it is better than nothing. No rail results in thousands of automobile deaths and unbelievable amounts of pollution. Companies won't do it because they can't profit, and also land is stupidly expensive, and automobiles are an obvious money maker. So somebody has to, to break this cycle of automobile abuse in the US. It was fine in the 70s. It's gotten really out of control now and everyone is pissed off at spending 2 hours a day in traffic and also driving 30 minutes for water. Also now everyone is obese and dying. So yes, it legitimately is better than nothing.
209 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadThe biggest 'challenge' is once you get to various echelons... of all places, I heard it best described on reddit; It's like the reverse of MMO mechanics; Rather than low levels giving you lots of growth and higher levels requiring a lot of 'grind', the farther you get the easier it is to make more money, even 'doing nothing'.
A -huge- factor nowadays is property values as well, which doesn't help.
----
There is also the concern of 'other ways' people get into that echelon.
I think of those who exploit labor, flount the law, and honestly in some cases (maybe they aren't the 1% but) those who use their power of 'celebrity' to get people to spend waaaaaay too much money on 'signature' goods or whatever else they endorse (Air Jordans come to mind as an example.)
It's all kinda gross to me tbh.
All I know is that I, and also everyone else I know, would never let themselves have a billion dollars. That money would be long gone before they reach 1 billion. Impulsively spent on whatever they think is good for other people.
Could money be an addiction, like alcohol? Where some are predispositioned to want more and more and some don't care for it?
What patterns do you see and, more importantly, what actions would you take?
It's such a wild and obviously incorrect claim I don't know how you could possibly make it. I mean, even me - there are things in common between me and random people.
> what actions would you take
Nice try, but if I tell you you'll just use that to discredit anything I say. That's not relevant to the conversation so I won't be answering that. Feel free to speculate.
> I'm sure there's many patterns or things linking them together.
That's awfully confident. What knowledge do you have that inspires such confidence?
It's rather disgusting how we grid locked ourselves with regulations. There used to be thousands of ISPs, banks, grocery stores, etc and we added red tape after red tape to restrict and allowed them to be all bought by the company that did the best.
Now we got like 3 banks, 3 ISPs, and 3 grocery stores with different names.
The new money is mostly from tech/oil and exploiting globalization in smart ways.
Highly recommended.
https://youtu.be/jFHGiq063rA?si=N64KIhk8ezl7tEEm
https://youtu.be/t9l7AYl0jUE?si=LUU_8mUpxw0upPk4
https://youtu.be/pnoLAMHwf2I?si=SApa_u3PGUZ-Y150
If a corporation "moves" oversees to avoid taxes, they aren't allowed to reap the benefits of the country whose taxes they wished to avoid.
If a billionaire moves to avoid taxes, they and their assets are cut off from the system whose taxes they wished to avoid. Oh, you want to move overseas but keep your money in banking institutions propped up by the US government? Too bad. You want your corporations to keep the full protection of the US government (intellectual capital protection, copyright, etc...)? Too bad! You want your company to take full advantage of all the US has to offer (great education system, a large consumer base, secure capital markets, a relatively stable government)? Too bad!
Most of these folks are just greedy fucks who know how good they have it...but somehow they want more, yet expect that people with exponentially less wealth will pay for it. I don't like that.
Note - the government isn't always the best at allocating capital or resources...but neither are private citizens or corporations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4daYJzyls
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwqQvrqunp8
His most important point though is that things will not get better until a sufficient mass of public political pressure is brought to bear on the issue.
Now, granted, I don't know that I have ever seen it put forth that they were ideal levels or anything. I just have never heard the top end tax rate blamed for that. Biggest thing I have seen it blamed on would be employer tied insurance and the like.
There is nothing ironic unless you are living in the year 1995.
I think you can criticize wealth while having it.
Also, the unhoused have cell phones too.
You are hurling insults by intentionally misrepresenting the reasons people create new terminology.
There plenty, many, words you won't use because they've changed. That's how progress goes, it's always the way it's been. You can fight that, but it won't work. And then in 40 years you will sound like an insane person.
I'm not saying that "unhoused" is good or will be a largely used word. But I am saying that fake words are real and you will keep up or be left behind. We have people alive, right now, who have been left behind. Guess what, they sound insane.
It reflects poorly on you to choose the least relevant part of my comment to reply to, poorer still when doing so makes it clear you're missing the point.
That is the end game of extreme inequality.
You don’t need to worry about the crack heads, worry about the people who can hold a 9-5 and aren’t getting a living wage. All they need is a charismatic leader to organize them, and they’ll actually get shit done.
What's a "living wage"? Its easy to shift the goalpost! I'd bet even those service workers who can't afford absurd Bay Area housing still have a living wage by the standards of 1900!
The existence of the modern welfare state owes its genesis to this idea, courtesy of (amazingly) Otto von Bismarck of all people, probably the most consummate and effective conservative of his time. Bismarck was not at all subtle about his reasoning:
> Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy, assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old. If you do that, and do not fear the sacrifice, or cry out at State Socialism directly the words “provision for old age” are uttered,—if the State will show a little more Christian solicitude for the working-man, then I believe that the gentlemen of the Wyden (Social-Democratic) programme will sound their bird-call in vain, and that the thronging to them will cease as soon as working-men see that the Government and legislative bodies are earnestly concerned for their welfare.
I might not think this is the right reason to be concerned about inequality, but he's right about the realpolitik: a state whose subjects feel the state does not act in their interest have little reason to defend or support the state and all the reason in the world to attack it, or at least that is going to be their perception.
-----
[1] Yes, even the recent UK and French elections are an example. Labour's vote share was not very high - but the Conservatives, in the process of being supplanted by the more-nationalist Reform, split the right-wing vote such that Labour could win a share of seats far exceeding what you'd expect for its minimal vote share. In France, Macron's centrists still lost to a left-wing party, and that was after an extraordinary alliance of parties to block Le Pen's RN, which would likely have been the largest party without such maneuvering.
And by the way, if you think that governments are accountable to the public you are sadly mistaken. They are accountable to that 1%.
Bottom 50% of taxpayers pay 2% of all taxes. The “poor” not only pay nothing, they’re given money via credits.
Not true. National defense is about 13% of our federal budget. Medicare, Medicaid, healthcare, and Social Security are 50%.
https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/where-does-all-the-m...
The 1% earn 26% of all income, but pay 46% of all income taxes. The bottom 50% of earners pay 2% of income taxes.
https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/do-the-rich-pay-thei...
But our system has a serious problem. We've increased the debt by $11 trillion in the past four years, which was our total debt for the first 200 years the country was around.
The only point here is the problem is significantly harder than you're making it sound, and that's if we had a straightforward way to just stop all the wars. Unfortunately, no one's been able to come up with a way to do this yet.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_IGU_7alJ80
There's something in Europe called VAT that addresses this.
It's important to come up with some kind of solution. When the current system reduces to a single purveyor for every product sector, which we're heading for at breakneck speed right now, there will be only a few people owning the whole shebang, and nobody to buy the products because nobody else is needed/has a job at all.
What is value-add? Selling something for more than it cost you to make it, "adding value" as measured by revenues minus costs.
What are other words for that? profit, income
What are taxes on that? income taxes.
from the point of view of the govt, the VAT is just an ordinary income tax.
but instead of being paid by the businesses, it's paid by the consumers, discouraging them from buying high margin items, encouraging them to buy low margin items.
Except of course there are gaping loopholes, for example businesses are effectively exempt from VAT, also you can buy stuff abroad where VAT is lower.
On the other hand, I'd like to live in a society where more people feel bought in and live less stressful lives.
1. Descendants of really successful people tend to fritter away that wealth, thinking they're as gifted as their forebears. Look no further than the Vanderbilts;
2. Families have a tendency to die out over generations. The Roman Republican originally had 45 patrician families. By the time of Gaius Julius Caesar (who was from a patrician family), there were 15 IIRC; and
3. The ultimate form of wealth redistribution is war and revolution.
Most long-lasting family wealth tends to be monarchies of some kind.
Therea are a bunch of arguments you'll hear why taxing the rich more can't or shouldn't happen. They're all lies.
1. Capital flight. The rich will leave. Great. You lose the ability to sell to customers in our country then;
2. Taxing unrealized stock gains is impossible and/or unfair. We do this to property just fine. Companies produce tax statements of unrealized gains just fine;
3. The dreaded slippery slope arguments. "If they go after Bezos, next they'll come after me with my $42,000 a year job and 2011 Camry".
A stable society and political climate is completely necessary for this wealth to exist. Having the wealthy pay for the society that makes their wealth possible while avoiding their heads ending up on pikes or in guillotines is entirely just, possible and moral.
Wait till you find out what someone with a home nominally valued $2m in San Francisco pays on his property taxes compared to you.
Everyone thinks that redistribution is great, because they look at the wallets of those better off and cannot wait to get a slice, forgetting that below them there are many looking at their wallets...
My question for you is: why don't you vote in your interests? Instead, you're voting in Bezos's interests. You are not Jeff Bezos. You will never be Jeff Bezos. You will never benefit for the policies you seem to be defending.
But no, it's "if Bezos has to pay 10% taxes, they migh tcome next for my $120,000".
It's wild to me that the slippery slope argument manages to somehow trump arguments of both self-interest and morality.
Not the person you asked, but I can respond for myself.
I honestly, truly believe that limiting the size and reach of government is voting in my own self interest.
I'm completely uninterested in class warfare stuff. I admire very wealthy people, I hope to be one someday.
Meanwhile, increasing the size, scope and power of the federal government has nothing but negative consequences for me and my family.
I guess you don't like roads, bridges, courts, fire departments, GPS, the Internet, modern medicine or stable food prices then.
This whole "limited government" fantasy is such a uniquely American delusion. It's crazy. It's propaganda sold to you by wealthy people who want to be able to poison your drinking water because it increases their personal wealth from $30 billion to $31 billion.
It borders on libertarianism, which, if that's what you're talking about, is such an incredibly naive and ridiculous political philosophy.
I am actually curious though: how exactly is big government creating "negative consequences for [you] and your family"?
That's a pretty tired old straw-man you're dragging out. Like, because I believe in limited government I somehow hate bridges.
You can do better.
BTW, roads etc... account for about 6% of state budget, and states provide 3/4 of the total funding [1].
> ... libertarianism .. is such an incredibly naive and ridiculous political philosophy.
Why?
>how exactly is big government creating "negative consequences for [you] and your family"?
- Censoring social media [2]
- Driving up inflation and the cost of food [3]
- Poisoning my kids with junk at school lunches [4]
- Bankrupting the nation with debt [5]
- Permits for everything! I can't add a railing to my front porch or remove a dead tree from my yard without permits.
- Ruinous taxation
That's hardly an exhaustive list, just some things that come to mind.
[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/26/zuckerberg-meta-whi...
[3] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/federal-spendi...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2023/lunch...
[5] https://www.usdebtclock.org/
I am... I just understand history, and you seem to either not, or pretend not to. Right now they promise to only steal from those worth over $100M (which sadly indeed does not affect me), it will be down to $10M within my lifetime, which would affect me. And thus my interest is to vote against it...
Why? Because it benefits me when other people have housing, can get around without cars, and aren't unnecessarily catching and spreading communicable diseases. These things aren't "worth" it on a purely financial basis, but they're absolutely worth it on a social basis.
How do you defeat the prisoner's dilemma? You make a binding, enforceable pact. How do you prevent the tragedy of the commons? You cap the amount people can graze their animals on public land, and remove privileges from those that violate the cap. How do you improve the quality of life of literally every person in the country? You make policy and infrastructure, and then you fund it and maintain it.
Not convinced there is either the collective willpower or ability to enforce this, never mind both in sufficient quantities spread across the globe in a manner to ensure coverage to prevent the wealth simply moving
I would gladly pay 600k a year in taxes if it meant healthcare, education, housing, and food were secured for all.
Let me keep 20% of my work for luxuries I like, but the fact that I'm only paying like 20% is fucking criminal while people are starving in this country.
I recognize I'm differently wired and have different values than most, but like, there has to be a line between 20% and 80% tax rate that we can live with.
>I would gladly pay 600k a year in taxes if it meant healthcare, education, housing, and food were secured for all.
Don't be obtuse by saying "give it away".
It's also not mutually exclusive. I can and do give away huge sums until those taxes go up.
I'm buying land and putting it into conservation, giving to community land trusts, and other ways that essentially make permanent changes towards the world I want to live in.
This person is saying "I will cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma, if and only if I can arrange a binding agreement by which others cooperate too", and a bunch of people are replying "then go ahead and cooperate; let the rest of us be free to defect"!
(By the way... uh... what do you do to earn $750k? As someone earning about 1/20th of that amount, I'm curious for some pointers).
If some of it is assets (stock), I firmly believe that should be taxed differently than earned cash wages.
The sanest solution is to simply preserve cost bases for inherited assets.
I am very troubled when people who proclaim to be liberal move here—an area with high potential—to “strike it rich”, do so, and then immediately fuck off to another state where they can sell their vested shares without paying CA tax rates. CA does try to claw back avoided taxes from the worst offenders of this, but mostly they only go after people who move out on paper but still lead lives here.
One of the biggest problems though is that bumping marginal rates doesn’t affect the ultra-rich, who use tax-avoidance schemes like loans against invested assets to live off extreme wealth with nearly zero taxable income.
Losing out on a house bid as an American citizen to an undocumented migrant thanks to this policy, truly the type of stuff only a CA politician could come up with.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/california-democrats...
We shouldn't have to decide between which of two humans gets housing. House all my neighbors.
But I cannot house the thousands of unhoused people in my city alone. I can provide housing for 2-5 of them at any given time.
That said, do you know what offering housing for a couple hundred bucks a month does for a struggling family? It fundamentally changes their ability to establish themselves. Build savings, escape poverty.
Edit: I'm not trying to signal or whatever by posting this. I have ethical beliefs about supporting one's local community and try not to be hypocritical about it. When people challenge me, suggesting I might be hypocritical ("why don't you spend your own money on it!") I try to respond with, "I do. And I see the changes it makes in real human lives."
But always as a response to someone trying to call me out, never unprompted.
Any equity the trust holds is from me or others putting in funds that are held solely for the purposes of providing housing for the community at cost.
My personal mortgage I do pay for, and I will be ceding whatever land I hold to that trust upon my death so that it can provide housing in perpetuity.
The only reason the land is not currently in the trust's hands is because I need the ability to move freely. I could arrange to sell the house to the trust, and lease it from the trust, but because there's a bank involved with my mortgage that gets more complex.
I assure you, I am not profiting from housing.
I read about someone who paid all his tenant's rent back to them after he became an anarchist or whatever. I crunched the numbers, and found out that for like 15k I could pay back every penny I had collected over maintenance, plus the appreciation of the principal. I sent out checks with amounts between $1500 and $4500, along with a note saying I didn't believe in rent any more.
I saw someone else do it, so I did it. Maybe someone on Hacker News will see my posts and do it too. Odds are small, but non zero.
I can tell you it made a material positive change in the lives of those people. That's a much better legacy than, "I died $15k richer" or "I went on vacation at a resort an extra time".
Alternatively, search for a "community land trust" in your area and discuss with them how you can manage your property upon your death.
This drops about fifty tiers down the stack of things I can manage to get myself seriously worked up over by actually reading the article.
I’m finding it pretty hard to find a lot of outrage over “taxpayers now eligible for government services”.
More importantly, how exactly is an undocumented immigrant paying taxes? Do they somehow have a tax ID or SSN without documentation? Or are you just referring to things like sales and fuel taxes?
So the immigrants are paying into the SS/medicare system, but they don't receive any of the benefits.
I think the solution to the housing problem is to increase supply. Not to try to prevent a whole group of people from being able to buy homes.
That seems totally reasonable if there's demand for more houses and the ability to build more.
Phrasing it as though people who already can't to buy a home are being prevented simply by not providing government assistance is a big disingenuous though. Preventing them implies that they could otherwise buy the home, and if that were the case a government program wouldn't be needed.
Also have you talked to any Gen Z or millennial? Most cannot afford housing, why in the world would you introduce even more demand for scarce housing?
And supporting migrants isn't introducing new demand, it's just exposing the demand that's there. Like, the migrants are there and they need housing.
The us vs them attitude is an artificial division. We can, and should build housing for all.
Communism is more radical than that, meaning cut out the middle man - no private sector at all. The government, or more accurately the people, own the economy collectively. Or that's the idea, implementation varies especially when you sprinkle in dictatorship.
A fantastic system, just ask the Soviet Union.
Well you pay for this stuff, your money goes to semi-private institutions like universities (healthcare, education) instead of bouncing through taxes first. This is non-tax compulsory payments (NTCP), no?
> housing, ...
Real estate is California's #1 industry, biggest sector in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and according to everyone, community regulations and tax-adjacent policies like Prop 13 are the biggest influence on housing prices. So you kind of do pay taxes, you are obligated by law to play by the housing rules there.
> food, ...
Government subsidies are the #1 source of profits for agribusinesses. Similar to saying Tesla's main source of profit was carbon credits. Kind of a junk analysis by one interpretation, kind of central to the business by another.
Anyway my point is the average person, according to some people, pays closer to 40% like many Europeans do, when you include orthodox defined NTCP. If you think deeply about how much you are forced to pay for by law or similar mechanisms, maybe it's higher.
You live in the world you want right now. NTCPs go to regular people too. University health systems are many states #1 employers. They are socialized in a way that matters. Maybe it isn't funded through taxes but do you see how that's kind of a moot point?
But also, I'm posting here in recognition that my politics aren't exactly common here. And that's ok!
Granted our media knows fuck-all about politics, but we have close to zero socialist politicians in the US. Nationalizing industries is wildly, wildly unpopular - practically unheard of.
Every industry listed does, actually, turn a profit in our current system. They are, truly, private - although regulated.
They might not be monopolies, they might not be nationalized, but functionally, they are like really effective monopolized community corporations.
Think about it from the other side: define nationalized corporation. What would make it last a long time? What would make it provide services effectively and competitive against imported goods and services? You get something that looks like university hospital systems, state university education systems, the real estate lobby, etc.
Nationalization in some reductionist sense doesn't work in the US for these industries because of the open market we live in - you can, after all, drive to another place for medicine and educations, and many people do. But the levers that are used to incentivize people to choose their local semi-private provider, and the way the communities are themselves employed / derive income from the provider, is holistically nationalization.
Ah yes all of this provided to you by Big Government, who can at a whim withdraw these services if you are found to engage in WrongThink.
We already have seen Western governments like Canada financially banning grandmothers who donated to a trucker protest or the UK imprisoning people for tweets.
Do you really want a bunch of DC politicians to have the power of life and death, not to mention access to swaths of capital that they will inevitably use to engorge and enrich themselves?
Your 600k in taxes will go into the pockets of various interest groups that markup their goods and services because they know Uncle Sam will foot the bill.
Ideally, no, it would be centralized in neither the wealthy nor the government. But I think "raise taxes" is an easier path to net good than "let's seize the factories and run federations of democratically run industries in the interest of the wellbeing of all".
Taxes should be fair for everyone of course. The original question was whether billionaires should pay more, and they should. The amount of money they have allows them to dodge the amount of taxes they truly owe. This gives them an unfair advantage over the rest of us, which only increases over time.
Here's the criteria: Your wealth level isn't enough for you to have an oversized power over society. People like Musk have and they are not elected by the people. This threatens democracy itself.
Untrue.
Everyone who bought a Tesla voted, with their dollars, to give Musk this wealth. Everyone who owns Tesla stock voted, with their dollars, to give Tesla this wealth. And everyone who voted, with their votes, for representatives that gave EV tax breaks voted to give Musk this wealth.
The man is rich because of economic and political cause and effect. Don't pretend the world that made Musk eye-bleedingly wealthy is somehow disconnected from the world of our collective actions.
You, personally, you can provide these things for people in need.
For example, I am in a similar financial situation. My family took in a Ukrainian refugee. We house, feed, clothe, and educate this refugee to provide one individual with exactly the things you bemoan others not having.
In your and my income bracket, it takes only caring enough and the true will to do something tangible for others.
For $300K of otherwise unused income you could support 4 people. So go support 4 people. And keep your hands and your politicians' hands off my finances.
In these income brackets, time is the only true coin. If he doesn't spend his time then he doesn't value the outcome.
Pretending that amassing wealth to produce good societal outcomes is efficient is how we get shit like FTX.
Just jump in.
I'm also passionate about growing food and giving it away.
Don't say, this person doesn't care/doesn't actually believe until you have evidence of that.
I wouldn't be surprised if a huge majority of that $42T wasn't realized gains (sold and attributed as a Capital Gain).
It's hugely unfair to tax non-Realized Gains ... because that would be like you having the pay Income taxes on the appreciation of your home - even though you still live in your home and haven't "realized" those gains (to pay the capital gain taxes)
Example
- Let's say you bough a home for $100k - Property taxes are 1% of home value
In Year 1, you owe $1k in property taxes.
Let's say (dramatically) that property values double in Year 2.
- Now, you're $100k home is worth $200k
So your property taxes in Year 2 are now $2k.
-----
With taxing your unrealized gains at the nominal Federal & State income tax bracket.
- Your Federal Income tax rate might be 30% (dependent upon your earnings) - Your State Income tax rate might be 10%
So you have a combined 40% tax rate on "earnings"
Now in that example of your home going from $100k to $200k in Unrealized gains, you'd have to cut a check for $40K!
That's huge and most people wouldn't even have that kind of cash to pay.
Consider someone who holds a lot of capital with unrealized gains but nonetheless needs cash flow. A common practice is to borrow against those unrealized gains, which itself doesn't count as income even though it nevertheless tends to result in a greater accession of wealth.
The play, hence, seems to be that we consider the borrowing against unrealized gains to be the taxable event, not a wholesale tax on all held assets.
If you want to be especially charitable, allow the stock owner to choose which of the two options to use when applying for the loan.
It sounds like you’re suggesting banking / society to operate like a Pawn Shop.
Next question.
I don't want the ultra rich to have some special mega-tax to tax them for their obscene wealth. I want their effective income to be taxed the same as all these middle class people pay. As it keeps cropping up, they pay much less, via offshore wealth, accounting tricks etc.
I don't know enough about accounting to suggest how this should be done, but to me this ought to be the objective, not some punitive tax, referring to starving children in poor countries.
I have moved from a high tax society(Sweden) to a low tax society and I prefer it.
My point is rather that I want the millionaires to pay the same tax, not some special different one. We already have a social contract saying what people are supposed to pay.
(It's a bit more complicated, but this table is a baseline)
A lot of the proposals like unearned capital gains taxes or wealth taxes all come with a lot of downsides. Including not actually generating much revenue in practice.
The countries are at something of at a Nash Equilibrium. Everyone wants the golden eggs, nobody wants to kill the gooses. Nobody wants their billionaires' money to flight.
All the governments should agree and play along. As soon a few don't, the wealth will flow there. It's seems trivial, to just increase the tax from 7% to 8%, what's the big deal, just 1% more. But there is a country which for some reason thinks it can profit more from the wealthy moving their money there so they set their rate at 7.5%.
The critical part is that wealthy lobby (i.e. bribe) politicians and have enough resources to drum up support from the public via various interest groups and so on. In public they'll agree with the need for more taxes, and more environment protections, all the feel-good topics. But behind the scenes, they'll put the finger on the scale in their favor.
It’s a great way to prevent poor countries from enticing rich people to move there
Why take money from people who employ others and build businesses to waste on nothing?
$7.5 billion to build 8 ev charging stations? (Edit: I accidentally said 8 billion charging stations originally)
Billions to build a few miles of rail in California.
How many billions on wars?
And every year government spending just goes up with almost nothing to show for the average citizen
ev charging stations are under a dollar each? where can i get one?
Literally no private company will do it though because trains are too efficient. You make MUCH more money selling cars and gasoline, and then sprawling cities over decades. Trains make no sense if you're trying to make money. So the gov has to do it or it will never be done.
> How many billions on wars
Straight to defense contractors, who are purposefully lazy and incentivized to suck as much as possible. But they hire a lot of people.
> almost nothing to show for the average citizen
Yeah, besides your education that is the only reason you can even write this comment. Or the roads. Or the internet you're writing this on. But no, I'm sure if you were illiterate and banging rocks together that's fine.
I'm being a little hyperbolic but you get the point.
Your argument appears to be sure, the government spends a ton of money on useless things and overpays massively for the end result on the ok things but hey at least that's something?
Which is a fine argument I guess if you think that wasting tax payer money for poor quality outcomes is ok because its better than nothing.
Yeah, after enough people got blown up. Something something free market...
> wasting tax payer
Look, the entire point of government services is they are a COST. They are different from a business because they don't have to profit and often it's better if they DON'T profit. Businesses can't operate that way, which creates some perverse incentives for some domains.
For example, providing universal healthcare would only burn money. Nobody, except doctors and whatnot, makes money. There's no profit there. And, well, that's the entire draw! If there were a profit, which we have now, then there's some fucked up stuff that happens.
> because its better than nothing
yeah, it is better than nothing. No rail results in thousands of automobile deaths and unbelievable amounts of pollution. Companies won't do it because they can't profit, and also land is stupidly expensive, and automobiles are an obvious money maker. So somebody has to, to break this cycle of automobile abuse in the US. It was fine in the 70s. It's gotten really out of control now and everyone is pissed off at spending 2 hours a day in traffic and also driving 30 minutes for water. Also now everyone is obese and dying. So yes, it legitimately is better than nothing.