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Just Be Rich

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Re: Just Be Rich

#981

Post by roytries »

jiriknesl wrote: post #979
Mulpze15 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you did not need to pay when you need healthcare, if education was free with equal opportunity, and everybody had enough to eat and a half decent place to live, I would entertain discussing this. You could have this today in the US, it exists elsewhere. Yes, it would probably cost a bit more for the wealthiest people. Until then, I believe we should not try to justify inequality based on irrealistic theoretical ar…

When you are building wealth, you are likely to be young (so often healthy) and there is so much information online, libraries cost nothing. So I don't think this is a valid argument.

Note that when you're poor your surroundings are usually also poor. So even if you are young and not yet burdened by health care costs and maybe even have free/good education you might need to drop out or at least spend a lot of your time and money to take care for your relatives.

Only when everybody you care about has a stable health/housing/food/(work) situation you get a chance to do something for yourself. Only if people around you are privileged enough to they have time to invest in you. You can start to build wealth. I don't mean with investing money. Maybe just by

- Lending you their garage - Allowing you to work without income for a few months - Taking care of your kids while you work a few times a week - etc...

TDLR: if all you and your surrounding is doing is directly aimed at surviving you cannot build wealth.

Re: Just Be Rich

#982

Post by kgantchev »

nindalf wrote: post #482
kgantchev wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the existing investors are the ones whose wealth is being taken and being put up on the market. :) So who is going to buy the existing investor's wealth? Are they just going to buy each other's wealth?

Most stock is held by people worth less than $50m. All of those large pension funds and institutional investors invest on behalf of the "little guy" who are worth $10k-10m. That's a massive amount of wealth. If the super rich have to sell shares to afford their taxes, then these investors will buy. For example, no single individual holds more than 0.1% of Apple stock, while 15% is held by Vanguard and Blackrock alone…

> Most stock is held by people worth less than $50m. All of those large pension funds and institutional investors invest on behalf of the "little guy" who are worth $10k-10m. That's a massive amount of wealth. If the super rich have to sell shares to afford their taxes, then these investors will buy. For example, no single individual holds more than 0.1% of Apple stock, while 15% is held by Vanguard and Blackrock alone.

Why would they buy?! You're saying it as if the market-wide sale of a share of every billionaire's stocks that year would just be absorbed by the market without any negative economic consequences (at best) or without a massive economic crash.

> Another example is McKenzie Scott selling billions in Amazon stock. There's no shortage of buyers for that.

That wouldn't be the case if every "McKenzie Scott" is selling billions worth of stocks simultaneously. There would certainly be a shortage of buyers.

Re: Just Be Rich

#983

Post by kgantchev »

twic wrote: post #650
kgantchev wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the existing investors are the ones whose wealth is being taken and being put up on the market. :) So who is going to buy the existing investor's wealth? Are they just going to buy each other's wealth?

Where do VCs get the money to invest in follow-on rounds? Same place.

They get it from the rich people who are now expected to sell their stocks. So are those rich people going to buy their own stocks?!

Re: Just Be Rich

#984

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

TearsInTheRain wrote: post #977
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #965

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - that type of job shouldn't exist. Automate them, offshore them, let the business models that depend on this type of exploitive labor fail. Eventually, this sort of job is going to disappear anyway. If paired with robust social safety nets, we can absolutely require jobs to pay a living wage.

There are people willing to take those jobs. You would be taking a job away from a willing worker and doing what? Tell them to take welfare? Not everyone in the workforce is a sole breadwinner for their family. Regulating those jobs makes all of those workers worse off and is an economic loss to the system.

They're willing to take the jobs because that's (presumably) all they can do now. The social safety safety nets I'm proposing would include robust access to quality education for the economically displaced.

I firmly believe that any currently "unskilled" worker can re-tool and become much more productive if given the opportunity.

Re: Just Be Rich

#985

Post by mikulabc »

I find that there is so much that we are missing from the articles posted, ie. - An analysis of how happiness increased or decreased since 1980, are people nowadays happier than they were before? - Do people "feel" like they have more opportunities now than they had before? ie. Do they know they could be doing more and better but just don't and continue procrastinating? This is missing from the calculations, the mental, psychological, internal battle of humans.

Re: Just Be Rich

#986

Post by Agenttin »

refurb wrote: post #754
Agenttin wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then go. If the price of having them here is that they get to not pay their fair share while taking advantage of our infrastructure and workforce, they can pound sand.

I keep hearing about a “fair share” which is vague. What is the exact percentage that is a “fair share” for say someone with $10M? Maybe if we can all agree on a number then we can figure out how best to collect it.

I'm not concerned with people with that little money. If you've got $10M, you're rich, but you're not part of the problem rich. The three walmart heirs are worth $180B between them. Jeff is worth that by himself. This isn't "being good at business" it's hording. I'm concerned with Billionaires. 800 people who control $3.4T in assets. I don't want to make them poor, I am completely happy if they remain obscenely rich, but you just can't have that much of the pie.

Re: Just Be Rich

#987

Post by spyckie2 »

mhalle wrote: post #480
spyckie2 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think calling it a wealth gap really misses the point - it's a stability gap. Most upper-middle individuals pass on socio-economic stability to the next generation. Most middle and lower class pass on instability. Wealth is a small part of it.

I was agreeing with your comment until the last sentence. Wealth is stable access to money, which is a fungible resource. Used appropriately, it can provide access to stability that would otherwise be inaccessible. Without such a resource, other factors of instability more likely to be chronic or even inescapable.

Education is actually much more important than wealth. So is city and community infrastructure, a positive family environment, etiquette / upbringing, values passed down, positive / helpful relations, mentorship, trauma free environments/mental health, and good social practice. Wealth is a very small part of stability.

Re: Just Be Rich

#988

Post by feoren »

greyhound wrote: post #973
feoren wrote: post #944

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right: our only two options are (A) extreme libertarianism where the Government exists only to protect the interests of the rich, and (B) the government literally exterminating its own citizens. We better be careful not to increase taxes on the rich or we risk immediately turning into (B)! Also, didn't I just say that eugenics was a horrible thing that was in-vogue in the early 20th century? Isn't that exactly…

This is a textbook example of a straw man.

Are you referring to your GP comment about how I must be ignorant about governments killing their own citizens because I dared suggest that governments can help the poor? If so, I agree: a straw man and lots of other fallacies to boot.

Re: Just Be Rich

#989

Post by feoren »

babesh wrote: post #179
feoren wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New technology could create new wealth for everyone, but instead it mostly creates wealth for the people who already own everything. If you own a bunch of factories, and someone combines a bunch of open-source technologies and concepts developed in public universities with a couple good new proprietary ideas to create a robot that replaces all your workforce, congrats! Someone else just made you a billionaire and now…

That new technology benefited someone besides the entrepreneur. All the consumers of that technology benefited from it. Some of that technology was directed to providing services for the wealthy but a lot benefited people widely. That is blindingly obvious: smart phones, covid vaccines, cheap screens, etc... A wealth tax of 100% has been tried before. That definitely disincentivized wealth creation. We have run that…

When technologies like my example come about, we get to choose how widely people benefit from it. Automation replacing factory workers certainly could and should benefit people besides the factory owners, but my entire thesis is that the American economy is currently set up to almost entirely benefit the factory owners and shareholders, while being unbelievably heartless to the people being replaced. Sure, prices might fall for everyone, but monopolies and principal-agent problems make that harder. Note that the factory owners likely did nothing to reap that enormous benefit; they simply waited for technology to advance. Universal basic income is about recognizing that exponentially increasing automation is an amazing, unprecedented benefit to society and trying to make sure that benefit is widely shared instead of being hoarded by existing capital owners.

And can you please not replace my comment about taxing the rich more with some hyper-extreme 100% wealth tax? Nobody is suggesting that, so you're arguing with a straw-man. 100% is clearly insane. What are you even referring to, the French Revolution?

Re: Just Be Rich

#990

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

llamataboot wrote: post #874
AlexandrB wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally don't believe that an unskilled worker in the US deserves to be paid 10X what an equivalent worker in Bangladesh makes just because they were lucky enough to be born here. So you're saying we need a 100% estate tax? Because the same applies to those lucky enough to be born into rich families.

Yes, without getting into all the practicalities (and there are many deep dives into all of them), the general argument is go ahead and get rich off a mixture of your luck, work, and all the benefits that society collectively owns (well-educated workers, roads, etc etc etc) and enjoy it. Be a multi-millionaire. But after you die, whatever is left goes back into the common pool for all kids to have, for example, savin…

I think zero inheritance is probably not gonna work. You'll just incentivize a black market (think jewels, cash in mattresses, gold, whatever...people will get creative). You want to find the level where the benefits outweigh the costs. That's probably some significant amount of inheritance, but also a very hefty tax. I don't know where exactly it is, and it'll probably vary with a lot of factors.
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