What charitable organizations do you support, and what percent of your annual income is donated to them?
FI, I answered that with as much specificity as I desire to upthread.
How much money will it take to fill the hole in your heart?
I can’t speak for Rand Rover, but it my case, it has more to do with living with my girlfriend in 600 sq ft and taking a bus to work every morning.
What bothers you the most about being so rich?
I can certainly understand your desire to remain vague on the subject.
That people feel like it’s OK to take money from me because I have more of it than them.
Do you worry about pricing yourself out of the market? If you are making 400k a year, do you worry that your clients will just find someone else to do it instead?
Do you worry about outsourcing, or the rise of english trained law graduates in places like India, or do you feel what you do is too specialized?
Do you feel your career is at risk from advances in software, or again is what you do too specialized to really be at risk of that right now?
Sort of going back to one of my previous questions. Do you think that you are rich because of great personal accomplishment or simply because, due to the vagaries of the political/economic system, your job happens to pay more.
How do you REALLY feel about people who make significantly less money than you? I’ll be honest in saying that I find it a little uncomfortable and tedious to be around people who have to nickle and dime everything or who go into “class warfare” tirades.
Where do you buy your clothes?
Aside from the joke or two, no one here is ever going to take any money from you. That’s bullshit. No one here thinks anyone else here has the right to take money from you.
What you are whining about (“whinging” in leetspeak) is whether a government has the right to tax and whether the government has the right to tax rich people at a higher marginal tax rate than poorer people. As a tax lawyer, you should be the person most aware that the law in this area is settled. It’s legal.
What you are not actually addressing is whether it is good policy for the people through the government to have a progressive graduated income tax to fund its various purposes. Those purposes consist of defense spending, debt service and patronage bureaucracies. Social programs are paid for as they go along through payroll taxes, which actually fall less heavily on high income people than middle to poor income. Gift programs for poor people constitute less than 1 percent of the government budget.
So is it okay for the government to tax you? Sure. But the fact is, that Warren Buffet pays a lower marginal tax rate than his secretary. He and I are both of the opinion that such is not only wrong, but evil.
You are here promoting the position that it is more wrong to tax wealthy people than less wealthy people: that it is wrong to take as high a percentage from you as from a bus driver. And you whine about it as though you are a better human being. It doesn’t engender a lot of sympathy from me. I’m not crying for the rich tax lawyer who wouldn’t have a pot to piss in if people weren’t taxed. If people weren’t taxed, you would have no marketable skill at all. A lawyer 8 years out of law school is worthless except in the area of expertise he/she has carved out. You happened to carve out an area of expertise that is entirely artificial and entirely depended on intricate rules benefiting the rich. If you actually got your way, your tax department would fold up and you’d be a poor people. And you wouldn’t be any better or worse a human being.
The practical difficulty with Randian “Philosophy” is that it assumes we are not interconnected in any way. It ignores Hobbes’ point that life without government is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” There is no government in Somilia to tax you. But there are no tax lawyers either.
Bankers, lawyers (of which I am one), actuaries, bean counters, etc. require a population of people doing other activity. We are not John Galt, who, without all these other people doing their jobs is the poorest person out and could not have got where he was except as a fictional device. Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Warren Buffet could not have created the value they did without the civilization in place and people they could hire.
If you are a tax lawyer and want to be richer, you should be for more taxes with more complications so that there is greater demand for your services.
Not really. We just recently lost a client for certain types of their work because they want to use a firm that will undoubtedly charge more than we do.
What I do requires a great deal of expertise (at several different scopes as far as subject matter) and involves keeping up with a constantly changing playing field, so I’m not so worried about either of those things.
My job pays more because I provide more valuable services than do those in jobs that pay less.
I love some of them. I have sex with one of them on a regular basis. I hate some of them.
The Gap and J Crew account for a very large percentage of my wardrobe. We are corporate casual at work, and I don’t like wearing suit pants (i.e., wool pants) when not wearing a suit (i think it looks like the person is wearing a suit without the tie and jacket and therefore looks sloppy). So, I wear Gap original khakis with a button-down shirt and a sweater over that in the winter.
How do you sleep at night? I’m presuming you live in a rich (North Atlantic) country.
Don’t you know that you can save a life by giving $50 to Oxfam? I bet you spent that on trivialities in the past week.
(Oh and in comparison with saving a life, almost anything but food and shelter are trivialities).
pdts
I do not question its legality–I question its desirability.
This is incorrect. I am fine with progressin income taxes–I buy into the ability to pay norm, which is based on the declining marginal utility of each additional dollar of income. Progressive taxation doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is the absolute level of taxation–I think in the US right now it is too high because it is going to fund programs that are not legitimate activites of the government.
This just simply isn’t the case.
Every bit of this could not be any more incorrect. I think everyone’s taxes are too high because there is simply too much money flowing to the government.
I would not be poor if there was suddenly less tax. First of all, the people for whom I do most of my work are prime targets for tax (i.e., non-US investors in US real estate), so their tax rates will NEVER be reduced. Second, if all taxes went away for some reason, I would do other work (I would probably not be as well paid for a while due to lack of expertise in that area, but i would not be poor, as you say).
I realize we are interconnected and that we are all part of a society. I just disagree on how to order that society and on how we are interconnected. You are mistaking a difference of opinion for a lack of knowledge on my part.
Also, re: Somalia, I want a more limited government, not no government.
What about celebrities who make $10 million a year? Do you feel they provide 20x more valuable services than you are providing due to their incomes being 20x higher?
Do you feel you provide more valuable services than 20 graduate students who are working on advances in science, technology, medicine, communication, etc? They make 20k a year each generally.
This is one of my beefs with conservative economic philosophy. The value of services is not the same as compensation for those services. I’m not ragging your services or income, but I don’t think an actor or athlete provides 20x more valuable services than you do. And I don’t feel you provide 20x more valuable services than scientific researchers who are working in academia.
They are paid more than me, so their services are apparently more valuable than mine. NB: I don’t think the relationship is abosutely linear, so I don’t know about “20x” more value, but I’m definitely sure about “alot” more value.
I’m talking about value in the sense of “what something is worth as an economic matter under normal circumstances.” You seem to be talking about value in a more esoteric sense, such as something’s moral worth or its contribution to humanity, or something. So, we don’t disagree, we are just talking apples and oranges.
What about you? Let’s suppose you earn $20k/year.
Do you think you provide services worth (at least) 20x more than starving people in poor countries who earn far less than $2k a year?
pdts
How much you charge for your labor is just price. If you performed a $50 service that you charged $5, for, that would be generating $45 of value. When you charge $49 for a $50 service, you generate less value than someone who charges $7 for a $10 service. Price and value are not necessarily the same.
And now we have a third definition of “value” for this discussion. Thanks.
A Zen *koan *for this thread: What is the sound of one Rand crapping?
**msmith **- what are you trying to achieve? If **Rand **was even remotely capable of the introspection you try to evoke, he would never have started this thread in the first place…
It would be great if the idea of value were simple. But it’s not. And it’s also a loaded word. It must be nice to pretend that everyone else’s view is just esoteric, but it takes a some sleight of hand to do it.