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Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

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Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#41

Post by nicoburns »

sprafa wrote: post #8
aritmo wrote: post #2

It is ironic that Britain is already close to a tax-heaven than they admit.

The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder. I.e. I met a software guy from Sachs who told me about what he did there. Essentially he built automated software to flag “suspicious transactions”. So ie if 200…

> The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder.

It's the one single thing that makes me most pro-EU. I don't see how we can fight tax evasion on a country-by-country level. But a economic and geographical bloc as big as the EU has enough clout to have real enforcement power.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#42

Post by einhverfr »

sjogress wrote: post #24
einpoklum wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a positive thing about Brexit would be that it makes it easier to declare war on the Faroe islands... Only need to fend off the British not all Europeans.

I'm afraid the Faroe Islands is an autonomous region within Denmark, not Britain.

And the Faeroes have never been part of the EU or Schengen. But being part of Denmark for defense purposes, I think they are in NATO.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#43

Post by anovikov »

nicoburns wrote: post #35
anovikov wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of. They are just workers making somewhere in the mid-6 figures - doctors, lawyers, small mom-and-pop business owners, best coders, etc. And they pay the majority of taxes, actually. Bottom half of Americans pay nothing and top 1% pays 35-40% of all taxes. You are not fair to those educated, strong, hardworking people.

IMO people earning 6 figures should still be paying more taxes than they are (I earn less than that, and I'm pretty sure I should be taxed more than I am), but they're not the people that are really the problems. It's the multi-millionaires and billionaires that are hogging a disproportionate share of the worlds resources.

This is just the inifinite scalability of success in the digital world, right? How can we complain if we are all actively working on the same thing?

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#44

Post by patrickk »

sprafa wrote: post #17

Moneyland is a good book on this topic. Rich people (top 1%) don’t live or earn money “anywhere” anymore. There’s so much ease to global movement of capital they just move it around so they pay - no taxes - have no accounts with their name on it - launder all their money legally (if need be) - buy up property and invest without any interest in any country in particular. It’s a depressing read.

If this is a topic of interest, I can recommend this independently created documentary 'The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire'. It's the story of how Britain's elite created a financial web spanning the globe, replacing the old empire with a new financial one, running from the Commonwealth countries back to London. That's why so many overseas British territories are associated with money laundering and tax evasion. Free to watch on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_ylvc8Zj8

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#45

Post by buttcheese »

anovikov wrote: post #30
sprafa wrote: post #17

Moneyland is a good book on this topic. Rich people (top 1%) don’t live or earn money “anywhere” anymore. There’s so much ease to global movement of capital they just move it around so they pay - no taxes - have no accounts with their name on it - launder all their money legally (if need be) - buy up property and invest without any interest in any country in particular. It’s a depressing read.

Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of. They are just workers making somewhere in the mid-6 figures - doctors, lawyers, small mom-and-pop business owners, best coders, etc. And they pay the majority of taxes, actually. Bottom half of Americans pay nothing and top 1% pays 35-40% of all taxes. You are not fair to those educated, strong, hardworking people.

On what do you base that claim?

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#46

Post by can3p »

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #25
alfromspace wrote: post #3

Imagine if instead of constantly building horrific low-income housing projects to (fruitlessly) retroactively "solve" the problem of middle and lower-class people being unable to afford housing in major metropolitan areas, we didn't poison the market in the first place by treating housing as foreign investment vehicles.

The cycle works like this: - we have people who live in subpar conditions - let's build some cheap houses and rent them at discount to those in need - actually not that cheap: why is that only rich people deserve to have a balcony? - within a decade the houses turn into a ghetto - oh, but there is a research which suggests if people actually owned the houses instead of just renting them, they would stop throwing garb…

It doesn't always work like this. In the Netherlands you can find big parts of the cities built by housing corporations with people renting them for decades, yet very few of them you can define as ghettos

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#47

Post by veritas20 »

anovikov wrote: post #30
sprafa wrote: post #17

Moneyland is a good book on this topic. Rich people (top 1%) don’t live or earn money “anywhere” anymore. There’s so much ease to global movement of capital they just move it around so they pay - no taxes - have no accounts with their name on it - launder all their money legally (if need be) - buy up property and invest without any interest in any country in particular. It’s a depressing read.

Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of. They are just workers making somewhere in the mid-6 figures - doctors, lawyers, small mom-and-pop business owners, best coders, etc. And they pay the majority of taxes, actually. Bottom half of Americans pay nothing and top 1% pays 35-40% of all taxes. You are not fair to those educated, strong, hardworking people.

This statement is often used and is misleading without the context of income of this 1% as a percentage. So, if this 1% earns 80% of all income, then 35-40% is relatively low. I'm not sure if your intent was to mislead or just reiterate stats that you saw from some where, but please give the appropriate context and data to support you claim that this is unfair.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#48

Post by anovikov »

save_ferris wrote: post #40
anovikov wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of. They are just workers making somewhere in the mid-6 figures - doctors, lawyers, small mom-and-pop business owners, best coders, etc. And they pay the majority of taxes, actually. Bottom half of Americans pay nothing and top 1% pays 35-40% of all taxes. You are not fair to those educated, strong, hardworking people.

> Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of. I disagree, they have vastly more capital than the 99% of earners below them. Unless you're comparing those 1%ers to someone like Zuckerberg specifically, there's really no way to square this statement. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the earnings threshold to be in the top 1% of earners in 2017 was $718K.[0] That's a pretty incredible am…

It's not threshold. It's an average value. Threshold is a lot, lot lower, must be around 350K. The table say those in top 1% but not top 0.1% make $492,311 on average so clearly threshold of 1% is a lot lower than even that. No figure in your sources but my bet would be it's ~$350K

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#49

Post by petre »

einhverfr wrote: post #5
alfromspace wrote: post #3

Imagine if instead of constantly building horrific low-income housing projects to (fruitlessly) retroactively "solve" the problem of middle and lower-class people being unable to afford housing in major metropolitan areas, we didn't poison the market in the first place by treating housing as foreign investment vehicles.

Yeah. I am in favor of a high tax on absentee ownership of real estate. Deduct the property where you live and where you work. Everything else gets taxed heavily.

It's pointless. One can have multiple temporary residences. The Swiss have already solved this. You pay the same amount of tax regardless if you keep the property empty, live in it or rent it. It's calculated as a percentage of average rent in that area which gets updated with market prices every 6 months or so. They also have low VAT and corp taxes.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#50

Post by goatinaboat »

anovikov wrote: post #30
sprafa wrote: post #17

Moneyland is a good book on this topic. Rich people (top 1%) don’t live or earn money “anywhere” anymore. There’s so much ease to global movement of capital they just move it around so they pay - no taxes - have no accounts with their name on it - launder all their money legally (if need be) - buy up property and invest without any interest in any country in particular. It’s a depressing read.

Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of. They are just workers making somewhere in the mid-6 figures - doctors, lawyers, small mom-and-pop business owners, best coders, etc. And they pay the majority of taxes, actually. Bottom half of Americans pay nothing and top 1% pays 35-40% of all taxes. You are not fair to those educated, strong, hardworking people.

To be global 1% means earning $32k/year (source: investopedia). It’s a catchy phrase but ironically basically any Westerner using it is part of it. The archetypal Occupy protestors clutching their latest-model iPhone in one hand and a Starbucks in the other
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