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California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

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Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#671

Post by tsimionescu »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #531
tsimionescu wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important point of taxing the top ~1% is to simply bring their wealth more in line with their contributions, and to reduce their outsized power on the political system. Jeff Bezos isn't "worth" a million times more than his warehouse workers, and he shouldn't have that kind of money either as a matter of principle, or as a matter of democratic power. It's not a matter of punishment, but a matter of ensuring…

> reduce their outsized power on the political system Why do you want to take away decision-making power from people who know how to make [a lot of] money?

Because they use that power to make a lot of money for themselves and their friends, at the expense of everyone and everything else. They also often have strange ideas about what's good for people, especially when they start viewing them just through the lens of money - that's how you got slavery, eugenics, debtors prison, forced sterilization, and others.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#672

Post by tsimionescu »

NoRagrets wrote: post #487
tsimionescu wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important point of taxing the top ~1% is to simply bring their wealth more in line with their contributions, and to reduce their outsized power on the political system. Jeff Bezos isn't "worth" a million times more than his warehouse workers, and he shouldn't have that kind of money either as a matter of principle, or as a matter of democratic power. It's not a matter of punishment, but a matter of ensuring…

Jeff Bezos is worth more than his warehouse workers because he creates jobs for the workers to survive. if the warehouse workers were worth the same, they would have come up with AMZN. that amazon doesnt give out as much dividends and ploughs back all the profits to create new companies and new jobs shows that jeff bezos is more socialist than any self declared socialist. its going to back as wages! and benefits of s…

You're describing the failed dream of trickle down economics or Ayn Rands objectivism fever dream. Jeff Bezos' money is not working out for anyone else as much as it is for Jeff Bezos. 40-60 years ago, people could support a family off a single factory worker salary. Now, a good 10 or 20 percent of Jeff Bezos's employees can't even support themselves and need food stamps to live. Global warming is making the entire world go to shit faster and faster. And you think people are better off?

Not to mention, at the rate people's productivity has gone up, we should probably be working 3 or 4 day weeks at most, or earning almost double our wages. Instead, all of this extra productivity has been pocketed by Jeff Bezos and his ilk.

> Jeff Bezos is worth more than his warehouse workers because he creates jobs for the workers to survive. if the warehouse workers were worth the same, they would have come up with AMZN.

First of all, I didn't say he wasn't worth more to the company than 1 warehouse worker - of course he is. Is he worth more than all the warehouse and IT and sales workers combined? No. And please don't attribute to personal worth what is mostly a product of good luck - the fact that Jeff Bezos's move from books to everything else happened to be wildly successful doesn't mean it was a guaranteed success or that no one else could have done it. And after it started snowballing, pretty much anyone could have run Amazon and it would have still become a big success - especially anyone who doesn't care about the welfare of their workers, willing to cut corners, willing to extract massive subsidies from the state more or less directly (food stamps, the Amazon HQ bidding), willing to use their position and information to destroy their competitors, and so on.

If Amazon didn't exist, it would have been replaced by a thousand other smaller enterprises that would have hired more people. Centralization and concentration of wealth and power are always a net negative for everyone who isn't very near the top of that concentration.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#673

Post by tsimionescu »

graderjs wrote: post #670
Can_Not wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bezos wasn't in a privileged position when he started. According to wikipedia: > He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon. I know literally zero people whose parents could afforded to have given this type of loan, let alone willing to.

If you're telling yourself, "the only difference between me and Bezos" is his "privilege", and "If I had that 300k I would do the same", I think you're missing out on how important his personal choices were, and your own. If you don't see the choice factor, I think two things happen: 1) you stay where you are because you think, nobody is in fact successful, they only had it given to them, and 2) and you think it does…

Your attitude is a very good one when it comes to your own life. Taking responsibility for your own life is extremely important, and more peoe should think this way.

However, when taking political and social decisions and analyzing the world around us, we must also look at how people are influenced and how their chance of success or failure is affected by conditions outside of their personal agency. The fact that we are each responsible for our own happiness should not preclude us from observing that there is no downwards mobility and increasingly little upwards mobility in European and US society. It should not preculde us from observing that while productivity is increasing at all levels, wealth for middle and low income families has been stagnant for decades, while the top earners have exploded in their wealth.

Basically, each of us in our own lives should seek to be the best we can be. But we should also realize the limits of our individual powers and seek to collaborate and organize to achieve more than we can alone. And we shouldn't care just about our own personal well being, about climbing up to be the next Jeff Bezos, but about the well being and success of everyone around us. You can't build a cathedral alone, but you can inspire many people to build one with you.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#674

Post by nec4b »

Privacy846 wrote: post #626
nec4b wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your explanation sounds something like when a racist says that he doesn't hate people because of the color of their skin but because they bring diseases, take away jobs and are not cultured.

That’s quite an unhinged simile.

Only if you think inciting hate and violence toward successful people is normal and not despicable in the same way as hating people for their skin color.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#675

Post by 411111111111111 »

NeutronStar wrote: post #635
Fnoord wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The URL does however not reflect this, while it could. URLs are supposed to be informative.

Nobody outside of tech reads urls, nobody.

People in tech usually don't either.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#676

Post by tsimionescu »

ericd wrote: post #669
tsimionescu wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I do believe that the amount of wealth people get from a company should be proportional to their contributions to that company. Of course, this is very hard to give a clear number to. Still, one way to go about this is to assume that workers and employers are rational economic agents and look at their incentives and bargaining power. Obviously, an employer will never employ anyone for more money than they believ…

With 0 Jeff Bezos’, ~none of those 800k people would be working at a company called Amazon. Not sure who else at Amazon you can say that about.

With 0 warehouse workers, the same is true. The bigger question is if Jeff Bezos were replaced with someone else, how much different would Amazon be? Unfortunately, we don't really have any tools to scientifically answer this type of question. My belief is that Amazon wouldn't be a thousand times smaller if Jeff Bezos were replace with another reasonably competent manager.

Also very important would be to ask how many of those 800k people would have similar or better payed jobs if Amazon didn't exist at all. Would there be an Amazon-shaped hole in the market, or would there actually be more economic activity if instead of one giant corporation there would be thousands of smaller ones? I believe the second is more likely to be true.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#677

Post by tsimionescu »

hansvm wrote: post #321
tsimionescu wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that changes nothing about his right to the wealth he created. I'm not talking about his worth as a human being, but exactly about his contribution to the wealth he now owns. His individual contribution to that wealth is not 188 billion times greater than that of any of his employees. It's just that the entire economic and political system as it exists today allows him to extract much more wealth from the enter…

> His individual contribution to that wealth is not 188 billion times greater than that of any of his employees. It's all in the realm of "numbers to big for our primate brains to comprehend" anyway, but Amazon as a whole only pulls in as much _revenue_ as 13 million warehouse workers, 14 thousand times less than you're implying. Beyond that, Amazon has over a million employees. Using a simplistic model of their cont…

I see two problems with your argument.

One is that I don't think it's anywhere close to true that Bezos is completely irreplaceable while all of his workers are not. I have little experience on the differences between a good warehouse worker or manager and a bad one, but I know that at least for software, the difference between a good software engineer and a bad one; or between a good software manager and a bad one; can make or break a business. I'm sure the same is true in many others domains of Amazon's activity (B2B sales is another obvious ones, as are marketing and market research; but I'm sure there are many less obvious ones).

The other point where I think your analysis is flawed is basing the "fair" compensation only on replace-ability. Even if 2 warehouse workers are perfectly replaceable, as long as they are doing the job and their work is absolutely required for the business to function, they should also be getting a large proportion of that business's success. This is where Unions can really improve things - by allowing collective bargaining, they help people who are interchangeable but whose jobs are crucial to get their fair share of the pie they are contributing massively to.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#678

Post by Can_Not »

ericd wrote: post #666
Can_Not wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a runaway trolley barrelling down the railway tracks. There are people tied to tracks as far as you can see. You can pull the lever at any time to stop the trolley from killing people, but that would not be fair to everyone who has already been ran over by the trolley. Which is the right thing to do?

That's not an apt metaphor. I wasn't talking about it being unfair to those who paid off their debt already/got "killed by the trolley", but those who didn't go to college because it was too expensive, or lived at home, went to community college for two years, and then transferred to a state school so that they didn't have to take on debt. Now their tax dollars would go to help pay off the debts of everyone who went…

> but those who didn't go to college because it was too expensive, or lived at home, went to community college for two years, and then transferred to a state school so that they didn't have to take on debt.

So, basically, just more trolley victims, or people that decided to risk not being hired for the best jobs that usually required at least a 4 year track-tying, because there was a trolley running people over.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#679

Post by BurningFrog »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #597
BurningFrog wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truth is I should make less, as should you. That some people make a lot of money is a good thing. The bad thing is those who make too too little money.

I agree with your bad thing. I disagree with your good thing.

Is this from a zero sum assumption?

We can all get wealthier at the same time.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#680

Post by fortran77 »

notacoward wrote: post #33
eloff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In America in general it's about 40% [1]. When put that way, California taxes seem about right as they are. [1] http://papers.nber.org/tmp/7707-w24085.pdf

This point needs to be hammered home every time the rich (or their "hope to be rich" enablers) talk about what percentage of total revenue they pay. It's almost as if they think a poll tax would be fairest. They pay a higher dollar amount because they have more of what is being taxed, which in turn is largely because of a system that actively drives "rich get richer" disparities. You have to look at the rates not the…

> or their "hope to be rich" enablers

I'm no "hope to be rich" enabler. I'm a realist who understands that if California drives away all the wealthy people, the economy and business climate will be worse, not better.

You can have your utopia where every man earns the same meager living working in the commune, I choose to live in the real world.

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