Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires • Hacker News Board

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#101

Post by yayr » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #82

yayr wrote: post #45

This may be unpopular, but the hard thing in this discussion is to differentiate between consumption and investment. It does not help much to take wealth in terms of equity paper money away from people who know how to invest it efficiently and distribute it. On the other hand, there are minimum basic needs for consumption of food, health services, shelter, education etc. I agree that the system to finance those servi…

Traditional investing doesn’t make billionaires, they needed to be good at running a business, inherit it, etc. Which doesn’t correlate to being a great investor. So when you actually look at investments made by billionaires they tend to underperform. Part of this is simply seeking low risk diversification, but another part is many people assuming that because past risk taking worked so will future risk taking. This…

but they apparently still have built a useful organisation. So why take away their power over their organisation if the share price increases?

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#102

Post by vlunkr » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

eightysixfour wrote: post #71

yayr wrote: post #45

This may be unpopular, but the hard thing in this discussion is to differentiate between consumption and investment. It does not help much to take wealth in terms of equity paper money away from people who know how to invest it efficiently and distribute it. On the other hand, there are minimum basic needs for consumption of food, health services, shelter, education etc. I agree that the system to finance those servi…

While I think you hit the nail on the head, I think what we're seeing is a belief that the money being invested by billionaires is not doing anything useful, that's why people are calling for it to be taken by the government and redistributed.

Probably because people view billionaires as mustache-twirling villains and have absolutely no idea what they do with their time or money.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#103

Post by colpabar » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 3:47 PM UTC

Does anyone seriously believe that if the US gov levied this tax that it would actually use the revenue in an efficient way? Remember when they "lost" 2.3 trillion dollars? $2,300,000,000,000. Whoops!

As an aside, this [1] was extremely depressing to read. I was aware of the 2.3 trillion around 9/11 (what a coincidence!), but had no idea about the more recent discrepancies.

[1]: https://www.city-journal.org/html/americas-missing-money-157...

edit: i forgot some zeroes!

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#104

Post by andreilys » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

hobs wrote: post #94

andreilys wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need more than $20million to build a reusable rocket company, a cold fusion reactor, or any number of other deep tech startups that require enormous investments which will likely never come from risk-averse governments.

Nuclear explosions and energy were initially developed because of military purposes. Rockets were developed for military purposes. I dont think the history of those things indicate we need rich individuals to make them.

NASA has developed into a bureaucratic machine with risk averse incentives.

The power of the state when it throws its weight behind something is awe-inspiring but the power of decentralized innovation leads to tinkering and unexpected breakthroughs that a government run project wouldn’t permit (due to the number of unnecessary bureaucracy and box checking)

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#105

Post by bwestergard » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

yayr wrote: post #45

This may be unpopular, but the hard thing in this discussion is to differentiate between consumption and investment. It does not help much to take wealth in terms of equity paper money away from people who know how to invest it efficiently and distribute it. On the other hand, there are minimum basic needs for consumption of food, health services, shelter, education etc. I agree that the system to finance those servi…

"It does not help much to take wealth in terms of equity paper money away from people who know how to invest it efficiently and distribute it."

This assumes what needs to be proven. Namely, the degree to which the wealth of billionaries under the status quo regulatory, financial, and tax regime reflects their outsized contributions to welfare.

If we make a number of assumptions (e.g. perfect information, perfect competition, equal initial endowments, etc.) it's tautologically true that great wealth would reflect outsized contribution to preference satisfaction. But these assumptions are wildly unrealistic, and conflict with both everyday experience and historical reflection.

More to the point, we all want our economic system to do more than merely satisfy preferences. Opioid manufacturers cultivated and satisfied preferences to the tune of billions of dollars. The impacts on well-being of users and their communities were, to put it lightly, mixed.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#106

Post by hardtke » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

While likely legal since the US Constitution only prohibits ex post facto criminal statutes, retroactive wealth confiscation is probably not a good precedent to set. A universal wealth tax would be much more palatable than a tax on wealth gained by certain people during a certain period of time.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#107

Post by ben_w » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #64

bigyikes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Policies like this will cause the rich, who have extreme mobility, to leave your country. Maybe to some people this sounds nice, but generally it will lead to worse companies and less innovation.

Except humanity and emotion kick in. People generally don't like to leave their country. I'd be confident in calling out the rich on this bluff.

Money makes things easier, and Musk isn’t originally an American. Even $1 million would’ve made me moving to Berlin completely trivial, $100 million means you can offer to bring your friends with you without any trouble, $musk-as-cash is “buy the entire sovereign nation of Cyprus and have $70 bn afterwards” levels of money.

(But, as I said on another comment, his theoretical net worth isn’t real money, it’s how much other people reckon they could extract from the companies he controls).

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#108

Post by Retric » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

yayr wrote: post #101

Retric wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional investing doesn’t make billionaires, they needed to be good at running a business, inherit it, etc. Which doesn’t correlate to being a great investor. So when you actually look at investments made by billionaires they tend to underperform. Part of this is simply seeking low risk diversification, but another part is many people assuming that because past risk taking worked so will future risk taking. This…

but they apparently still have built a useful organisation. So why take away their power over their organisation if the share price increases?

Nothing about what I said was tax policy, I am simply trying to counter a common misconception.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#109

Post by dcolkitt » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

david927 wrote: post #79

dcolkitt wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imposing a wealth cap like that is a fantastic way to assure that those basic needs will never be met. Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty. Approximately zero percent of that came from the redistribution of existing wealth. All of it came from raising economic productivity. And that vast majority of those productivity gains had foundations built by entrepreneurs seeking gre…

> came from entrepreneurs seeking to build great fortunes $20 million per person is a great fortune. Show me any innovation that came from someone wanting more.

Elon Musk was worth more than $20 million before taking over Tesla and SpaceX. Jeff Bezos was worth more than $20 million before Amazon started AWS. Sergey and Larry were worth well more than $20 million before Google launched Gmail. Jack Dorsey was well more than $20 million before starting Square. Stephane Bancel was worth much more than $20 million when he became CEO of Moderna. Steve Jobs was worth much more than $20 million before starting NeXT or Pixar, or returning to Apple to build the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Andrew Carnegie was worth more than the equivalent of $20 million before US Steel. John Rockefeller was worth more than the equivalent of $20 million before starting Standard Oil. Edison was worth more than $20 million before starting General Electric. Howard Hughes was worth more than $20 million before starting his aviation business. Carl Bosch was worth more than $20 million before commercializing nitrogen fixation.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#110

Post by dcow » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 3:51 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #32

david927 wrote: post #3

Until there's a wealth floor -- until everyone is fed, sheltered and has access to education, there needs to be a wealth cap. We, as a collective humanity, should not allow anyone to have more than, say, $20 million, until the basic needs of others have been met.

The problem with that is not really to do with equality, it's to do with who runs companies and where investment in the economy comes from, and how everyone's basic needs are met. This would take the ownership of huge swathes of the companies in the world out of the hands of the people who created them and operate them and into the hands of random executives with little or no track record. You're not going to meet an…

I agree, the problem is much more intricate and solutions need to be far more nuanced than “tax everyone down to 20m”.

I was thinking the other day about companies and the impetus behind patents. I agree we want Elon and Jobs and Bezos to have ownership and run the show, like they do now, and with as much “wealth” and power as they have, exclusively, for some amount of time. But I’m not sure if we want the mass of power they accrue to sit around indefinitely. Once the head leaves, as you saqy, the company is entirely different. Society does not really benefit from a scenario where say Jobs accrues tons of wealth doing great things and then leaves this zombie beast of a company lying around continuing to suck money out of people and transfer it to shareholders.

So I think something like a limited exclusive right to profits might work. You (a company) can profit no questions asked for say 14, extendable to 28, years if more time is needed and/or you’re still under a certain size. After that a company gets turned into a non profit. It may still operate and pay employees and staff and whatnot, but it may no longer pay owners out the wealth that it accrues. It either has to spend that wealth, pay taxes, or lower prices so that it’s not taxing people, essentially. Obviously this needs more ironing out but I think it is possibly a compromise that is radical enough to combat the large and dangerous wealth vacuuming machines that companies turn into while still preserving the incentives structure that drives capitalism.