If you are really that close to being truly rich, you don’t have to worry about either your future or your children’s. I’ve got enough money so that I’m retired and don’t have to worry about having enough to last us our entire lives, with probably enough for our kids. But they won’t need it when they get it, just like we didn’t need money we got from our parents.
As for cutting spending, we probably won’t ever do that on an absolute basis since the population is growing. But why treat spending as monolithic? There is spending we can agree is useless - Iraq War II, Trump’s salary, and money that would pay big benefits, like infrastructure repair which everyone wants to do but which never seems to happen. We need to distinguish high return spending from low return spending.
The rich aren’t monolithic either. Lots of the rich think their taxes should be raised.
But some of the rich want to spend their money to give themselves breaks. There are some CEOs who deserve every penny. Then there are CEOs who destroy stockholder value and get fired with 8 figure parting gifts. That adds a lot of value.
Senator Inhofe is pretty rich. He has a big house in an exclusive community on a lake, and he likes the water level in the lake to be high to aid in boating. Fine, except that making the water level high causes floods several times a year in the town below. Monster? I’d say so. If Scooby Doo did that story, you’d think the villain was too evil to be real.
During the bubble I made a lot of money on stock options and didn’t mind getting bumped to a higher bracket at all. Actual options shouldn’t be taxed because they are too speculative. When they become stock, the stock should be taxed - if it is above a certain level. The average Amazon worker is not going to have to pay a penny under any proposal I’ve seen. If Bezos has to pay, fine. If someone gets rewarded with enough options to go over the threshold, and they cash them in, they should definitely pay.
BTW, cashing in options and not selling the stock is dangerous. During the bubble people who did this were liable for tax on the difference between the option price and the exercise price. Some kept the stock, the stock tanked, and they didn’t have enough money to pay the tax. I never made that mistake at least.
Hey as long as there is agreement that there is some limit to what the state should snatch I’d agree. But in this thread we have people implying that we owe everything to the Man.
Voyager, I agree with most of this. All spending isn’t bad, but spending on ANYTHING that isn’t agreed upon by both political factions is counterproductive.
If there was a need then both political factions would be willing to spend money, then agreement could be reached (just like it used to) but currently everyone has a direction different from the other. And you know why? Because either the people are too stupid to realize that politicians don’t give a wrinkled cats tit for them, or they haven’t been informed well enough by the opposition that this benefits them. Or, it just doesn’t benefit them.
The rich cut off I’ve seen, in order to cut anything from our currently (IMO) bloated budget, easily the 1% gets hit but more likely the top 10%.
We currently have around 50% of our populace not having any skin in the federal game, they are paying in $0 to the federal kitty. I don’t see that ever working out.
This is not about them being able or unable to pay, this is about skin in the game. If I pay, I care. If I don’t pay why should I care?
Oh but they do you say, they vote. And what do they vote for? Why they vote for themselves, they vote to give themselves more. And the politicians listen.
Income from capital — in the form of profits, dividends and capital gains – is taxed if it’s realised. If I buy a million shares of stock worth $50/share at the beginning of the year, and $60/share at the end of the year, I’ve made $10 million in unrealised capital gains. If I sell 100,000 shares, I’ve realised capital gains of $1 million and I should and will pay taxes on that. If before the sale, a cash dividend of $1/share is issued, I’ll receive another $1 million in income and pay taxes on it. No one’s arguing against that. The question is what do I owe based on the 900,000 shares worth $60/share I still own? Warren says I owe somewhere between $40,000 and $1,620,000 on that stock, even though I haven’t sold it. I disagree. I should pay taxes when I sell the stock, but not have my investments whittled away simply because I’m a successful investor. (Not that I’m ever likely to own $54 million in stock.)
Maybe your cat’s breath wouldn’t smell so bad if you stopped feeding it garbage?
Lemme get this right. The Rich pay politicians to create loopholes and favorable tax laws. The Rich use those loopholes and laws to become richer. Wealth disparity in our country grows wider every year, with a larger and larger piece of the pie going to the very wealthiest among us.
But we shouldn’t blame the rich?
You just described a situation where the rich literally engineered our laws to enrich themselves, but they are blameless for using those very laws to enrich themselves?
If you want an end to poverty, it’s going to depend, among other things, on globalisation, innovation, and investment, not wealth transference. Some of that innovation is being done by start-ups with young smart people who hope to become rich. Some is being done by mega-corporation with investors who are already rich and want to become richer. The investment is going to be done by people who believe there are profits to be made in emerging markets, or companies that can connect to global markers. Globalisation is going to provide the networks to connect the poor people who want to make their labour more productive and more exchangeable for goods and services with the corporations who are going to provide them with jobs, goods and services.
Is a wealth tax of 1%-3% above $50 million going to stop the above from happening? No. What it will do is take money out of the system which will limit the investments and the money going into the R&D that produces the innovation. Check out Fiverr, a company that had its IPO back in June. (It’s Israeli based, but listed on the NYSE.) Their goal is to create a gig economy for professional services by connecting freelancers to companies with demand for those services via the Internet. If they’re successful, and if they connect to a supply market of freelancers in the developing world, they’ve got the potential to generate a lot of positive activity, both economic and social. However, despite their stock price, it might be years before they generate a profit. They’re not going to be paying a dividend any time soon. Although their initial investors may have diversified a bit, most of them are maintaining their stakes. It’s a company that depends on long-term investors. And if any of its investors, such as the venture capitalists who enabled the company’s expansion to where it could have an IPO, are wealthy US investors, then a wealth tax on shares is going to eat away at their holdings. They’ll be having to cash out before they want to, which discourages further investment, and will demand dividends to pay that wealth tax earlier than the company is ideally ready to pay them.
So here’s a company that’s poised to help the developing world that could potentially have its growth decelerated by a wealth tax. It’s more complicated than “rich have money and poor don’t have money; let’s switch.” That’s why conservatives don’t like wealth taxes.
Just by writing that you’re showing how untrue a statement it is: for decades, nobody in America has said this. In fact, for decades, all the propaganda has said the opposite, which of course is what you really mean: “don’t trust government”. Right?
And then they use their money to get people to write articles and tell stories and make movies about how wonderful they are and how smart and how brave and how morally upstanding and good-hearted they all are for having all that money! Success all around! Everybody wins! Right?
No offense but Fiverr sounds like a bunch of fucking assholes who are not going to “help the developing world” so much as “take advantage of people who need work and/or money” and “help other people take advantage of people who need work and/or money”. Uber isn’t “helping the developing world”; Uber is taking advantage of people who need work and/or money.
Also no offense, but I have had a lot of people take advantage of my need for money by giving me work. As a matter of fact, it is happening as I type.
I am a consultant. My company finds the work, I do the work, the company takes some of the money and provides me with health care and benefits and some for profit, and I keep the rest of it. Everybody’s happy.
If you think Fiverr or Uber should find work for other people out of the goodness of their hearts, that kind of a deal, IME, is not as sustainable as one where everybody makes a buck. YMMV, but most of the rest of the world’s doesn’t.
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Of course; by you omitting the “mind you”, that explains that I’m indeed pointing at the inheritance tax as one way to approach this, you want to give the impression that that is not part of the answer.
Maybe you will sound less aimless if you had stopped to notice that what you said is not in opposition to what I said, it was a very, very bland description to what everybody can agree with (yes, one needs to have profitable enterprises so workers at the high end can be part of the tax revenue), hence the saying about the cat’s breath, it is just repeating what was already common knowledge and you think you made a great counter when it was just very underwhelming.
Not my problem that you grab that meme and demonstrate to others that you miss what that meme is about.
I was easily in the top 10%, and I could have paid more, so I’m fine with this.
I’m all for them having skin in the game, but I’d like to do it by reducing income inequality so they have more, not taking from those who can barely get by today.
Republican politicians are doing all they can to try to discourage these people from voting, so they are hardly listening to them. And lets be serious - do you think politicians listen more to those in areas the politicians hardly ever visit, or the lobbyists and fat cats who drop by with big checks for their reelection campaigns?
As Larry Gonick from his funny “Cartoon history of the universe” (relax: he does document his stuff) mentioned:
That was 4500 years ago and some people never learn, It is good to remove the tax excess, but the real problem comes when the cows get fat and there is no government that will not do the sensible thing and then raise taxes to beat an evil axis, control the deficit, reform health care or other good things that can be done to keep a civilized country going on.
But, the point there about “owning everything” is mostly philosophical, even I can understand the difference of what things should be vs what can be done in practice.
“Everything should be devoted initially to getting greater productivity,” said Warren Buffett at Columbia University in 2017. “But people who fall by the wayside, through no fault of their own, as the goose lays more golden eggs, should still get a chance to participate in that prosperity. And that is where government comes in.”
Wow, what an innovative concept Fiverr has. Except that I’ve found freelancers in Russia and India five years ago. Just a me-too company who clearly has sold you a bill of goods.
The Trump tax cut dumped a ton of money into corporations and the rich. Look up what it has done for business investment some time. Answer - not much. Lots of stock buybacks though. That really helps innovation and R&D. With low interest rates we’ve been awash in investment money for some time - it has driven up the stock market. Saying that taking some away is going to tank R&D is absurd.
Plus, the increased tax money is not going to be flushed down the toilet. Maybe it can pay for advanced research that is the basis of industrial R&D? Maybe it can pay to repair our infrastructure which has a high ROI. Maybe it can help do something about climate change which has an even higher ROI.
Who do you think staffs these start ups? Answer: young smart people who could afford to go to good universities, either here or abroad, and often to good grad schools here. If you want to increase the number of people who can work in start-ups you do it by improving the education and environment of smart kids who might not have access to computers and books today. Would free college help these kids? Probably a lot. Reducing the cost of state schools would help if you can’t make them free.
Don’t believe in the impact of free college? Check out City College in NY in the '30s. My mother could never have afforded an expensive college, but got a degree from Brooklyn College, Tons of poor kids got a great education there.
I’ve worked as a freelancer. For me, it was easy money to use my skillset in the evening or over a couple of days to do work I generally enjoy rather than watch TV, read, or mess around on the Internet. I probably won’t be signing up to Fiverr because I work in a niche profession. I doubt they have a market for me. There are also issues of data confidentiality with my job. But could some of the project tasks I’ve been assigned to work on be accomplished by an outside resource more cost-effectively and better? Sure.
As an example, my French is terrible and my German is non-existent. Yet I’ve tested both French and German application web pages. My task was to test the English pages, and then see if I could follow the same procedures on the French and German pages. Somewhere else, someone checked those pages to ensure the spelling was accurate. Could those tasks have been accomplished more efficiently by an outside resource fluent in those languages? Absolutely. So if there was a practical way to outsource that testing to Moldova or Slovakia, would I recommend my clients take advantage of that avenue? Absolutely.
You don’t believe that the Fiverr owners and investors want to become billionaires?
I’m ignoring the fact that Fiverr is an international company, because we’re discussing philosophical viewpoints, rather than specific tax systems. However, I think the discussion of an Israeli wealth tax versus a UK or US wealth tax is inconsequential to the overall point.
So, sounds like you’ve missed an opportunity. Oh well. That’s capitalism. You have to take risks to succeed. Too bad you didn’t recognise a situations where you could fulfil an opening in the market.
Elsewhere, and many times before, I made the comment that many conservatives have a very bad time when dealing with timelines or the march of time. In this case you seem to grossly ignore that the tax will not take place until they do manage to become multimillionaires.
So you think that unrealised capital gains should be passed down through inheritance, and you’re in favour of closing unfair tax loopholes? Is that the liberal position on taxing unrealised wealth? Because that sounds pretty mild. But hey, if you’re backing a centrist position, that sounds alright to me.
Is the meme, the “element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means” a reference to unrealised capital gains, or to stinky garbage-smelling cat’s breath? I’d be astonished if it was the former. Given the nature of the Internet, the latter wouldn’t surprise me, but Google doesn’t recognise it as a meme.
You know there is also the old adage that goes “Stop digging your own hole”
The meme, as it is clear you do not even see how it applies, comes from the Simpsons as the most lame example of a reply to more educated subjectsmade by the kid of Chief Wiggum.
So it is indeed referring to your lame attempt at trying to make hay about how the employees at Amazon make money, as pointed before that is not the issue, so your point about garbage is still a dumb one. The issue is that when they make money they are taxed based on their income, and the point made before still stands, when we talk about executives and CEOs it is clear that at some levels some are not paying what they should.