When the show was scheduled to end, I saw an article that said that NBC offered him $5 million an episode to renew it for one more season. At 22 episodes, that would have meant a $110 million payday. He turned it down. Now with the various streaming services, anyone with an ownership interest in a popular show is making big bucks, beyond the original broadcast, DVD sales and syndication rights.
If you don’t want to be picked on, you colossal asshole, you shouldn’t have made that idiotic comment about how all rich people will bugger off and abandon their countries if faced with a progressive taxation system.
Sorry reality is not how you wish it to be.
Two things.
First, some months ago, I posted about this incredibly annoying debating tactic. See here.
Second, the Laffer curve? Seriously? I suppose that the Laffer curve is real in the sense that there is a point on a curve that represents the tax rate that will produce the maximum revenue.
However, as generally used by conservatives, which is to mean that the lower tax rates are, especially on the rich, the higher tax revenues will be, the Laffer curve is absolute bullshit that has been shown to be nonsense, and nobody with a brain believes it, not even those who profess to believe it. It’s just a line of bullshit to convince the credulous that the rich are the job-creators, and if we dare to tax them fairly, they’ll take all their jobs away from us and we’ll starve.
I can’t disagree with what you wrote.
I suspect that any time people are left in charge of or have access to vast amounts of money, some of them will find a way to divert it into their own pockets. But that holds true for government agencies, charities and NGOs too. I’d probably have a little more faith in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when it comes to helping the poor than (for example) the World Health Organization, despite the WHO doing good work as well.
I wonder about the effect of confiscating, say, half of Seinfeld’s money and distributing it among “worthier people”. What percentage of it would find its way to worthy causes?
Ultimately, focusing exclusively on the obligations of “the 1%” involves considerable denial of reality. For instance, in order to properly finance health care, education and other federal and state programs in the U.S., taxes are going to have to be raised markedly on a wide swath of the population, not just the ultra-rich (although they’ll properly be asked to pay more on an absolute and percentage basis). But politicians playing to crowd resentment pretend that we can have everything we want and need solely by whacking the wealthy.
It’s not going to work.
But the potentially scary thing is that the Gates Foundation is already richer than the WHO (or even really most governments) and as more of Gates’ and Buffett’s money moves to it, it’s going to be even more ridiculously wealthy. And without whatever oversight the WHO has. It’s basically Doctor Evil’s wet dream.
Yes, he is rich and arrogant. On a side note, I really enjoyed Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee.
What percentage of his income would he need to give away for you to consider him a philanthropist?
For my part, I’d be good with him giving only a very small percentage - say 1%, as long as it was given to me directly.
What percentage of your income have you donated to charity?
While the individual can obviously choose whether or not to answer for themselves, I think the aggregated numbers are an interesting answer to that question:
[I wish I could have easily linked to/posted the chart in the article, but …]
Let’s see if this works.
And note that the OP was criticizing Jerry Seinfeld for not contributing more of his supposed billion-dollar net worth to charity. So even if you’re giving a fraction of your income to charity, what percentage of your net worth are you giving? Because on a global scale, most people here are in the one percent.
You have mad skills.
ETA: Ah. I see how you did it. I was regrettably lazy 
This. I haven’t read the whole thread, but the reason entertainers, whether actors, musicians, athletes, authors, etc. make so much is because they provide a service to 10s or 100s of millions of people. A teacher can only teach one classroom of students at a time. A doctor or nurse can only attend to one patient at a time. A firefighter can only fight one fire at a time. The farm worker can only pick one avocado at time, and so on. Jerry Seinfeld, on the other hand, can reach millions of people with one rerun of his show. Tom Brady reaches millions of people when they watch the Super Bowl, and so on. I don’t begrudge either one their money. They put in the hard work and they deserve it.
The owners, whether of the farm, TV network, football team, record company, or whatever, are a different story. They’re the ones who collect money without having worked for it, and they are the ones who should bear the brunt of paying for the social safety net.
Well, how do you know he’s not? Really, is Foundation Guide all that accurate a source? Do they have access to his accountant’s files?
And the guy doesn’t actually have a billion dollars in a bank account.
No baseball player has ever made $100 million a year, but if one has the opportunity to make another $30 million, hell, they’d be crazy not to.
But what’s funny about this is that the guy you’re pitting did EXACTLY what you seem to think he should have done. He was offered over $100 million a year to keep doing the show, and decided to call it quits.
Why is a sitcom worth less than a couple of albums?
It’s a valid point that popular entertainers can produce immensely valuable products because of the nature of their medium, which lets them sell the same product to millions of purchasers simultaneously.
But I don’t think that means they “deserve” any particular sum of money for it. They put in some work to make the product, yes, and it may in many cases have been hard work. But it remains the same amount of work whether ten or ten thousand or ten million people decide to buy the product. If the money that people “deserve” is based on how hard they worked. a popular entertainer doesn’t deserve any more money than a less popular one who worked just as hard.
Goodness knows I’m no knee-jerk defender of capitalist elites, but even I know it’s ridiculous to assume that owning a farm, or a TV network or whatever, doesn’t entail any work. Being an executive who manages the activities of performers and makes the high-level decisions about what those activities should be counts as work.
Which is why I don’t think we should indulge in bullshit speculations about which rich people “deserve” however much money for what they do or whether they’ve “worked hard” enough for it or what type of work they did for it. Let’s just tax people according to the amount of money they have, and not get into the weeds of how much money any of them “deserves” and why.
Yes, this. I agree with you 1,000%.
Yes, but you could also look at it from another angle: If a TV show (or a bestselling novel, or a hit record, or a sporting event, or…) makes a certain large amount of money, who deserves that money? What percentage of the profits should go to said popular entertainer, as opposed to going to someone else who may deserve it less, or more?
The whole concept of “deserve” is ridiculous, and should be put out to pasture.
It’s completely subjective. If I don’t like professional sports (I don’t), I might think that Michael Jordan didn’t deserve the fortune he made. I might think that Gilbert Gottfried is funnier than Seinfeld, so he “deserves” more money.