Should we allow individuals to hold billions of dollars in their pockets?

[wolfpup]

@Ruken

It shows that Bezos’ wealth was not transferred from Amazon’s revenue.

And what does it show when an entrepreneur who pays himself a salary of $1 a year drives out of his $50 million mansion in his Rolls?

@Ruken

It came from the same place that the 50 trillion increase in household and non-profit net worth came from since the last recession. The pie got bigger. A dollar increase in Amazon’s market cap is not required to correspond to a decrease in wealth or market cap elsewhere. The money you and I spend at Amazon for the most part goes right out the door to pay their bills and not into Bezos’ pocket.

You either added an extra zero there or are using some creative statistics. The reality is that from the GDP peak preceding the 2008 recession to the present day, the GDP has added about $4.3 trillion. And the other reality is that much of that increased wealth (most of it, in fact) has gone to the 1% (cite: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century).

@Ruken

So now you’ve moved the goal posts from actual jobs lost (“millions of their employees that it has put out of jobs”) to jobs that might have existed. We have more people employed in retail trades than ever before …

I’ve moved nothing. The retail sector overall is stagnating and lagging far behind the overall economy, much like the middle class, but within that a small number of oligopolies are performing strongly, Amazon foremost among them.

Incidentally, I like Amazon for the most part, and think that Jeff Bezos is a decent guy. I don’t blame Bezons for being fantastically wealthy, I blame the unfettered capitalism infesting the US for its social ills.

@Absolute

You have a fundamental misunderstanding what Bezo’s wealth is. You seem to think he’s sitting on $140 billion in cash that he’s extracted from Amazon’s customers and redirected from his competitors - cash and resources that he’s sucked out of the economy and is selfishly hoarding for himself.

You, OTOH, have a fundamental misunderstanding of how rich Bezos really is. You know that 9% of leftover money that I said he would have, hypothetically, if he gave each of those 16.7 million malnourished kids $8000 apiece? That amounts to more money than any normal human could possibly know what to do with? The paltry leftover after that massive donation exceeding the GDP of many countries, the leftover change that could buy 60 Boeing 787 Dreamliners? Well, he’s got more than that in cash and assets that are NOT Amazon stock. In fact it looks like he could buy about 70 787 Dreamliners with that pocket change. He could start a large airline or have the world’s largest super-luxury private jet charter fleet with the stuff he’s got just lying around that has nothing to do with Amazon, the kind of stuff you and I dig out of our couch cushions. It seems, though, per the link, that he’d prefer to just develop a spaceship.

@Absolute

Yes, in isolation, Bezos could sell some stock to other wealthy investors, and generate some cash to feed some kids. But what do you think would happen if you suddenly required every wealthy person in the US to sell 2% of their assets in order to fund this tax? Where to do you think the actual cash to buy these assets (and feed these children) will come from, if every wealthy person is scrambling to raise cash themselves to pay the tax?

I think the US would have at least a shot at becoming more like most other first-world democracies, with greater social solidarity, universal health care, healthier and better educated children, and a more peaceful and equal-opportunity society. And yes, probably a slowdown in GDP growth rate. And there’s the rub, ain’t it?

@Ruken

Seems more likely to me that they needed to hire over 100k seasonal employees in one of the tightest labor markets we’ve seen in a long time.

Which might be all the harder when you treat your employees like shit.

[octopus]

Billionaires bother me less than politicians who push through counterproductive policy that leaves millions un or underemployed in order to buy votes from the ignorant. How does Bill Gates selling Windows and Excel negatively impact me?

What Microsoft did was create value aka wealth. They expanded the economy and increased productivity. I’d take 100 corporations like Microsoft over 100 socialist or communist politicians that create nothing and are probably going to be actually destructive.

I, for one, don’t want to fight my fellow comrades for the hindquarter of my local zoo’s warthog.

[Mijin]

@octopus

Billionaires bother me less than politicians who push through counterproductive policy that leaves millions un or underemployed in order to buy votes from the ignorant. How does Bill Gates selling Windows and Excel negatively impact me?

What Microsoft did was create value aka wealth. They expanded the economy and increased productivity. I’d take 100 corporations like Microsoft over 100 socialist or communist politicians that create nothing and are probably going to be actually destructive.

I, for one, don’t want to fight my fellow comrades for the hindquarter of my local zoo’s warthog.

Yeah and as I said upthread, this is the unfortunate framing of the OP.

I have nothing against Amazon, in fact you can consider me a fan. Well done Bezos!
However that doesn’t mean everything is fine and dandy and there is no issue with corporations being able to dodge paying their fair share of taxes, or give their employees a reasonable wage and working conditions, and other issues (e.g. the need for environmental regulations).

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@D_Anconia

Cite please.

Mea culpa. I think I must be misremembering from wirtschaftsunterricht in high school. It strikes me as utterly bizarre that a tax on your profits can be considered an expense - it literally cannot ever put you into the red.

Tax avoidance and tax fraud are entirely different things. Did you know that?

I didn’t just mean tax fraud!

Look, what you said was utter nonsense. Taxation is an important aspect of a society with a functional government. Tax avoidance, shirking that duty to give back to the society that enabled you, is antisocial in the extreme.

[JB99]

@Cheesesteak

aaaaand, we have to waste yet another post to correct your reading comprehension, or correct your deliberate misinformation.

AOC did not say that it was immoral to try and become rich, or to be rich, or that rich people were evil. She did say that it is wrong to have while so many were struggling to make ends meet.

Not sure which one of us you are addressing, but my response was directed at the statement:

@Barack Obama

So is it a net positive for us overall to allow billionaires to exist? The way I see it is, is that it’s unethical for there to be billionaires while there is still poverty in the US.

When one uses words like “allow to exist” and “unethical” it certainly makes it sound as if they are applying a moral judgment to the mere existence of billionaires.

[JB99]

@HurricaneDitka

That’s exactly what Democrats have been doing lately:

@Barack Obama

…The way I see it is, is that it’s unethical for there to be billionaires while there is still poverty in the US…

So your response to me is to quote the line I originally quoted in my first post, as if it was new information to me?

[Cheesesteak]

@JB99

When one uses words like “allow to exist” and “unethical” it certainly makes it sound as if they are applying a moral judgment to the mere existence of billionaires.

By my reading the moral judgment isn’t about the billionaires as people, but about the system that allows such stark divisions in wealth to arise.

We can hypothetically turn the statement around:

“Is it a net positive for us overall to allow poverty to exist? It’s unethical for there to be people so poor they can’t buy shoes, while there is still tremendous wealth in the US.”

It doesn’t suddenly say that poor people are immoral, it says that the system that allows poverty is immoral.

[Ruken]

@Mijin

Unemployment is not *that much *lower than last year or the year before so why didn’t that logic apply then?

Also, I’m not sure if you’re arguing against a living wage, but saying that a company making billions of dollars of profit per year eventually was forced by the market to pay a reasonable minimum wage is not a very good argument against legislating they pay that all along.

IME across-the-board increases like that are temporally chunky rather than smooth. Some exec eventually realizes they’re having trouble with retention and makes the call. Like with Walmart.

I have made no arguments about a living wage one way or another in this thread. But since you ask, I am generally against wage floors and would rather you tax me to help only those who need help. And I don’t think a company’s profits are relevant to the discussion.

[Ruken]

@wolfpup

And what does it show when an entrepreneur who pays himself a salary of $1 a year drives out of his $50 million mansion in his Rolls?

It shows you can cross revenue and rents extracted from customers off the list of potential sources of said entrepreneur’s wealth.

@wolfpup

You either added an extra zero there or are using some creative statistics. The reality is that from the GDP peak preceding the 2008 recession to the present day, the GDP has added about $4.3 trillion.

If you don’t like the numbers, take it up with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. It’s series FL152090005.Q . Wealth is not accumulated GDP. If I pay for a massage, GDP goes up but wealth doesn’t. We had positive GDP during the recession, yet wealth went down. If the DJIA doubles today, wealth goes up some 7 or 8 trillion without budging GDP.
That you’re even bringing up GDP here suggests you still don’t get it. The pie isn’t fixed and the increase in wealth doesn’t have to come from anywhere else.

@wolfpup

I’ve moved nothing.

You wrote that Bezos’ wealth comes not from the pie growing but from millions of retail employees that Amazon has put out of jobs when, in fact, we’ve had net job growth in this sector. And when the pie has grown substantially.

I’ll say it again – simply becoming or being wealthy does not require you to have taken that wealth from others. Because the pie isn’t fixed.

[2Bits]

@WillFarnaby

Most entrepreneurs and capitalists do not get help from the state.

I’m pretty sure a case could be made that ALL “entrepreneurs and capitalists” get help from “the state” (in the U.S. at least). It’s built into our system of tax laws, rules of incorporation, bankruptcy laws etc.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Ruken]

Agreed. Assistance may be direct but is often indirect.

[Slash1972]

@HurricaneDitka

Agreed.

Hmmmmm…agreement. One of us must have missed something.

[Ruken]

If there’s too much agreement, we will be forced, by ancient law, to journey to the Pit and call each other poopheads.

[puddleglum]

@wolfpup

What an astoundingly irrelevant factoid! Unless you’re telling us Bezos made his money by working at that salary for 1,707,317 years!

So he somehow created $140 billion out of thin air? Nice trick! No, the money came from the valuation of Amazon, which in turn came from all the hundreds of billions being spent there by you and me, which in turn was money that wasn’t being spent somewhere else. None of which is intrinsically, in itself, a problem. The problem is the incredible concentration of wealth that was allowed to be amassed by a single individual to the benefit of almost no one, in a place that has one of the highest levels of economic inequality in the developed world. But I’m just repeating myself; I said it already in post #118.

Look closer. After a big dip post-2008, retail sector employment improved only modestly, and considering the rate of economic growth and the rate of increase of other sectors (the BLS “company management” sector grew by about 20% since 2008), the retail sector was practically stagnant. All the more pathetic considering that strong performers like Walmart and even McDonald’s are part of this picture. In fact the alleged “increase” in retail employment over the past decade is so modest that Amazon employment alone accounts for almost all the difference, so the sarcastic quip “maybe they all work for Amazon now” is almost literally true. Obviously with a few very strong players in the retail sector and the relative stagnation of the sector overall, a great many of the smaller retailers are struggling or verging towards bankruptcy. Or are you really trying to deny that the retail sector is in serious trouble and undergoing major transformations, and that Amazon is a big part of their troubles?

So in your view, everyone is doing just fine? Except, as I mentioned, the 43.1 million Americans living in poverty, including about 16.7 million children living in what are considered “food insecure” households. In 2013 UNICEF ranked the US as having the second highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world. The US also has one of the highest rates of income disparity in the developed world.

The USDA provides slightly different but similar numbers: 40 million Americans are “food insecure”, including 12 million children, due to a lack of sufficient financial resources to provide “consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life.” That’s about as basic as it gets. And don’t even get me started on the lack of health care.

Obviously Amazon is impacting the retail sector just like Ford impacted the horse and buggy part of the transportation sector, and Apple impacted the music and communications sectors. This is how progress and economic growth works. One company comes up with a better way of doing things and customers flock to that company. People made the same arguments against JC Penney one hundred years ago that people you are making against Amazon now.

Not everyone is fine, but the economy is doing better than just amount anytime for the last fifty years. The poverty rate is near historic lows despite massive amounts of immigration.
Food insecure does not mean malnourished, it means someone in the household was worried about affording at least one meal for the year. According to the USDA most of the food insecurity was missing meals but reducing quality or variety. The US is second in the world in per capita calories consumed.
Unemployment is at 50 year lows. Real Median personal income is at an all time high.

What problem are you trying to solve? If you want to help poor people, the current economy is doing well at that. If you are worried about rich people being too rich the answer is another recession. During the great recession the top 1% lost 27% of their income, by far the highest percentage of any income group. Yet despite this massive decrease in wealth by the rich, the poor did not benefit at all. Poverty and unemployment jumped up at the same time the rich were losing all that money.

[Mijin]

@Ruken

I have made no arguments about a living wage one way or another in this thread. But since you ask, I am generally against wage floors and would rather you tax me to help only those who need help. And I don’t think a company’s profits are relevant to the discussion.

You’ve basically bitten the bullet here so I am not sure what I can really say other than I disagree.

I think it makes zero sense for society to set the rules such that a corporation can make billions in profits per year while requiring society to pick up the tab for its lowest-paid workers.

[octopus]

@Budget_Player_Cadet

Mea culpa. I think I must be misremembering from wirtschaftsunterricht in high school. It strikes me as utterly bizarre that a tax on your profits can be considered an expense - it literally cannot ever put you into the red.

I didn’t just mean tax fraud!

Look, what you said was utter nonsense. Taxation is an important aspect of a society with a functional government. Tax avoidance, shirking that duty to give back to the society that enabled you, is antisocial in the extreme.

If the tax avoidance is legal I think you have a pretty strong obligation to self and family to avoid that tax. If it’s a stupid loophole then a case can be made to change the law. But to ask people to donate money to an inefficient and many times counterproductive government? I don’t see that gaining traction.

[octopus]

@Mijin

You’ve basically bitten the bullet here so I am not sure what I can really say other than I disagree.

I think it makes zero sense for society to set the rules such that a corporation can make billions in profits per year while requiring society to pick up the tab for its lowest-paid workers.

Actually it makes a lot of sense. Since a factory can close here and open in China tomorrow or agricultural can be picked by illegal labor building a wage wall no longer works.

[Ruken]

@Mijin

You’ve basically bitten the bullet here so I am not sure what I can really say other than I disagree.

I think it makes zero sense for society to set the rules such that a corporation can make billions in profits per year while requiring society to pick up the tab for its lowest-paid workers.

We’ve had many threads on the topic. Maybe it’s time for me to summarize all my past arguments and make a new one. I’d certainly rather argue with you about it than with some of the less informed participants here.

[XT]

@Mijin

You’ve basically bitten the bullet here so I am not sure what I can really say other than I disagree.

I think it makes zero sense for society to set the rules such that a corporation can make billions in profits per year while requiring society to pick up the tab for its lowest-paid workers.

I disagree with your disagreement. First off, it’s society that is setting the bar of what what level we think people should be at. If we, as a society say that people who live in our country should have some baseline services, then it is up to us to provide those through general taxes, not impose that on corporations that work in our society. The basic reason for that beyond the fact that it’s our requirement, not some fundamental truth is simply that corporations required to do so will either automate or move to somewhere else. We see this dynamic happening all the time in fact, so this isn’t some theoretical thing. Companies basically have a priority of making money for their investors. Full stop. It’s not up to them to fix a perceived societal issue…that’s on society to do if it feels it must. A corporation basically has to work within the framework of the labor market…if they CAN get the labor they require at price X, then that’s what they will do. We, as a society can certainly put additional constraints on the business to shift that. We can, for instance, require a safe working environment as well as other regulations along these lines. These will ALREADY impose some economic constraint on a corporation that has operations in the US. Asking them to impose more because society thinks it’s necessary will just push those jobs either to robots or to other countries.

You will certainly solve the issue if you were to push on this. The only jobs left will be those that meet your artificial living wage. The rest will be done by robots or in other countries.

[BwanaBob]

@msmith537

Can someone explain to me how Jeff Bezos and his billions is responsible for homeless people? Or is the expectation that in addition to building a company that’s worth $150 billion and employing some 600,000 people, it’s now his responsibility to build homes for total strangers?

Yes, but that just proves my point as your house (presumably) doesn’t need round the clock police protection. We as a society believe you have the right to your house and all your shit. Chances are your neighbors won’t wait for you to leave for work so they can break in and rob you. In fact, they will most likely call the cops if they see someone acting suspicious around your home.

Taxes (that pay for police protection/military protection) should be viewed as an insurance. Ultra rich have a lot more to lose and ought to pay it; like the Lamborghini owner who pays a helluva lot more auto insurance than the Hyundai owner.