12,000 millionaires left France last year because people thought they could just tax the rich.
No, you can’t have billionaires in a Communist society.
Not that any currently in existence really meet the criterion.
If people don’t want any billionaires - stop making them! Don’t watch sports, movies or TV. Don’t buy products.
Otherwise, just shut the fuck up.
Seinfeld and Larry David are in enviable positions. They (or their agents) did right by them by making sure they reaped the royalties from their craft, which continues to pay them in reruns, DV sales, etc. Keep in mind that the success of that show was in serious doubt right from the get-go. They were smart, unlike a lot of artists who have been robbed of what was rightfully theirs. Both Seinfeld and David have continued to work and so continue to draw paychecks from that, as well. I do agree that people who make that sort of income should pay back their good fortune in some degree, but I really don’t think that Seinfeld deserves to be flamed.
389 billionaires in China.
Yes, thanks to the data collection algorithms built into Windows and MS Office! 
Ok, you say a lot of inane shit sometimes, but THAT was pretty much perfect
Maybe. Maybe it’s possible for billionaires to be good people with good intentions. I have my doubts, since that leaves out what it takes to become a billionaire, which appears to me to be a Bezos-style sociopath.
But whether or not billionaires are, in some abstract way, “good people,” they are extremely heavily invested in a system that produces billionaires. They are likely, in a weird variant of the anthropic principle, to perceive such a system as good, because, after all, it produced them, and just look how much good they’re doing. The system produced them, and clearly they are the best people.
QED!
Meanwhile, Whole Foods (and yes, Bezos should be held responsible for the policies of his businesses) cuts some workers’ breaks from fifteen minutes to ten.
… a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.
That’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and as I get older, I’m finding that kind of thinking increasingly hard to argue with.
Yes, entertainers are in a special category, but there’s something seriously wrong with a system that makes a comedian a billionaire.
So, sure, fuck Jerry Seinfeld.
Eh, I watched Seinfeld and enjoyed it from the first mid-season replacement episodes. It was different at the time. A slue of rip-offs (incredile dreck like Friends – they don’t deserve the money they got) afterwards tried to bandwagon, but they were always softer and soppier.
I’m much more angry at people like the Kochs or the DeVoses or Mnuchin who make so much money and are genuinely evil. Fuck them.
I agree with the sentiment, but surely it is more productive to say “fuck the system” then “fuck Jerry Seinfeld”.
Absolutely. I was saying “fuck the system,” essentially. I wasn’t entirely serious when I said “fuck Jerry Seinfeld.”
I mean, Seinfeld seems to be a bit of an asshole. But that’s probably independent from his being a billionaire.
But fuck him anyway.
Moral: Do not tax rich assholes. They should be worshipped as gods. They are not self-serving bloodsuckers at all – the are the bedrock of the economy, the wind beneath our wings, and the Creators of Jobs™.
On a less ridiculously sarcastic note, thanks to @Grrr for mentioning “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. I’ve read the Piketty book, but didn’t know a film had been made based on it. Looking forward to watching it.
Seinfeld makes that money because he generates a profit for the people who pay him to perform. In other words, the market sets his pay. Why should YOU be the one to decide what he’s paid & how much of it he’s allowed to keep. You really have no idea how much money Seinfeld has given to charity – maybe he gives millions without asking for publicity.
And why do YOU get to decide who’s worthy of wealth? Bill Gates didn’t invent much of anything, he just took the inventions of others and marketed them brilliantly, or maybe he was just in the right place at the right time. So why exactly is he entitled to be rich? Because he gives it away at a level that YOU approve of?
So you’ve decided that a guy who’s a great marketer deserves wealth, but a guy who makes people laugh doesn’t. Or maybe your criteria is a guy who’s very generous deserves wealth, but a guy who chooses not to give his money away (assuming Seinfeld doesn’t, which you have no idea about) shouldn’t have any in the first place.
Hopefully, you’re just trolling, but frankly, you’re not very good at it – you’ve given this zero thought, just a knee jerk reaction to limited information topped with heavy judgement.
I wanted to see if anyone could see the results of “tax the rich”.
Seems simple minded to think the rich will just go “Ok, take my money “.
The simple solution is to tax the rich when they make money in your country. You want to leave? Fine- someone else will step in and serve the market you were serving. Want to make money off the market? Then you gotta pay your share.
Exactly; inherited wealth is even less “deserved” than that achieved by creating something that a huge number of people enjoyed and the corporations made billions off of. Republicans try to get people up in arms about what they like to call “death taxes” but even before Trump, only a tiny number of extremely wealthy people were affected by them. I’m totally in favor of increasing estate taxes,
I have no idea what Jerry Seinfeld is like in real life, but in general, this is not a safe assumption.
I suspect it’s more often the assholes who insist on playing heroic lovable wonderful human beings on stage/screen.
Are you a far-right moronic troglodyte, or just pretending to be one?
There is obviously a level of taxation that at some point becomes punitive and counterproductive. No such level of taxation currently exists, to my knowledge, in any advanced industrialized democracy in the modern world.
What does exist, on the contrary, is a system of extraordinarily low levels of effective taxation and massive loopholes for the super-rich in some countries, and nowhere more than in the US. The US has one of the largest gaps between the rich and poor of any industrialized nation in the world, as shown by a large and growing Gini coefficient.
That being the case, super-rich individuals who abandon their native countries because they think they’re being taxed too much are self-serving assholes who don’t give a shit about either their nation or its citizens, and probably never have and never will.
Yeah. No. Seinfeld remains a gifted comedian. His father was a painter. He came up with a great show which entertained for nearly a decade. Had the grace to quit rather than water it down. I can’t think of any single episode which is bad. Many will hold up well decades from now.
Yes, he should donate a portion of his wealth to charity. No, have no ideas what his numbers are, nor his foundations numbers. Be willing to bet he has done a lot of unpaid promotions, though. And if he donates later rather than sooner, that’s better than nothing too.
If those numbers were true, and no great reason to think so, what would you do?
It’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”. I admit it was mildly interesting in its own way, but he could only do it by exploiting his existing fame and wealth. Suppose you or I had got the idea that we should invite famous celebrities for coffee, and then pick them up with a rare exotic car that we felt suited to their personalities? We’d have no takers, and couldn’t get the cars. So much for that idea! Seinfeld was just uniquely positioned to pull it off. I don’t consider it any kind of accomplishment. I eventually got bored by it and haven’t been watching it. Not even sure if it’s still being made.
IIRC, Seinfeld was approached several times about doing a sequel to the Seinfeld series. He correctly concluded that he just couldn’t do it. The series was a confluence of remarkable circumstances and luck – the kind that we would call “a fluke”. And it was aided considerably by many writers much more talented than either Seinfeld or Larry David.