161–170 of 498 posts
An altogether _very_ reasonable price for what we're getting in return.
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And stop spending a trillion dollars a year on a global military empire and sprawling police state comprised of dozens of 3-letter agencies.
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I doubt SpaceX or Tesla would exist if they were controlled by a committee. Doing great things usually requires control by a single person who is able to say "screw it, we're going for X".
I'm in sympathy with that argument, but I don't think that singularly driven people are motivated by profit alone, and that they'll stop if there's some change is the underlying property ownership calculus. Also, it's worth considering that not everything great is good, so perhaps a braking or governance system (in the sense of an engine) is worth requiring on any enterprise sufficiently large to become a juggernaut.
> it's worth considering that not everything great is good, so perhaps a braking or governance system (in the sense of an engine) is worth requiring on any enterprise sufficiently large to become a juggernaut.
Yeah, let's just throw SpaceX in the trash heap. Nevermind that NASA, the organization run by committee, has failed to make space accessible and routine.
The "braking system" is already in place. It's the free market. Once the "juggernaut" fails to please the customers, it goes down the tubes.
Well, one workaround would be to treat securitization of shares (eg for a loan) as a taxable event. This is a common (and currently legal) tax avoidance strategy. Another consideration is that maybe having sole control of a massive pot of cash or financial instruments by an individual is just a Bad Thing. Consider how Zuckerberg structured FB so that while he it's a public company, the bulk of the stock is non-voting…
I suspect it would be harder to stop this strategy than it might seem, because someone could happen to make me a large personal loan at a low interest rate when I happened to have a large portfolio with them. If the numbers are big enough, it makes sense to do.
If you treated all loans as income, but got a deduction for making payments... Maybe you could make it work. Although, that's kind of rough for mortgage and auto loans.
Some observations: 1. Whatever happened to increasing tax rates, like pretty much every other country? Why these weird gimmicks? 2. A much greater cause of elite wealth accumulation is running deficits. Deficits are when you want to spend on social welfare but don't have the courage to pay for it with taxes. So you make both sides happy and increase spending while running up deficits. The reason we've seen this astro…
Taxing incomes and not wealth is fundamentally unfair to people without wealth.
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Taking away the money, though, will cripple their ability to grow the companies. No SpaceX, no Tesla, no iPhone, etc.
I don't follow your reasoning, either. Do you really think that a new tax on several hundred billionaires will discourage the hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs that are out there, that a significant amount of them will not bother since they can only make a few hundred million before they have an extra 15% of their money collected in taxes? Most entrepreneurs would be overjoyed to be a billionaire and have to pay…
Even worse, you're taking the money away from the most effective investors.
Well, one workaround would be to treat securitization of shares (eg for a loan) as a taxable event. This is a common (and currently legal) tax avoidance strategy. Another consideration is that maybe having sole control of a massive pot of cash or financial instruments by an individual is just a Bad Thing. Consider how Zuckerberg structured FB so that while he it's a public company, the bulk of the stock is non-voting…
> Well, one workaround would be to treat securitization of shares (eg for a loan) as a taxable event. This is a common (and currently legal) tax avoidance strategy. agreed. that should 100% be a taxable event and it's totally absurd that it's not. and i'm sure there's a lot of... lobbying that will never allow that kind of law to pass.
I put up $100k of stock for a $100k loan, I do nothing, turn around and pay the money back, and now I have a tax bill? If I repeat this process, I can have an infinite tax liability with no realized gain or net income. Am I missing something?
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Well I certainly do not agree with Ricardian equivalence. For it to hold, one must assume lump sun taxes which one cannot avoid by being poor. That's a ridiculous assumption. > But if you do not believe in Ricardian Equivalence, then the deficit spending is an increase in net-wealth, which again shows up disproportionately on the balance sheets of the wealthy. My whole point was that this is not necessarily true, and…
> My whole point was that this is not necessarily true, and depends on the form the spending takes place. Did you miss that? Nope, I didn't miss it, because it's not relevant. Giving money to poor tenants ends up in the pocket of landlords. Letting poorer people buy iPhones ends up in the money of shareholders and is realized as an increase in Apple stock price, etc. When you have a small group of the people dispropo…
Concretely stuff like UBI and a JG at least in the first order takes away a power of employers now amount of nominal inequality can give back. And if the limits to spending are real and not nominal, and rich people don't spend their wealth so much, taxing them hardly makes a difference w.r.t those constraints. Conversely, if they do spend it, easy to levy consumption taxes will be less recessive.
If you want to continue to the debate, I think need to you get more precise about what exactly is bad about the nominal inequality you speak of. I think that is the only way to reconcile our analytical frames.
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> Well, one workaround would be to treat securitization of shares (eg for a loan) as a taxable event. This is a common (and currently legal) tax avoidance strategy. agreed. that should 100% be a taxable event and it's totally absurd that it's not. and i'm sure there's a lot of... lobbying that will never allow that kind of law to pass.
That doesn’t make any sense, presuming you meant “collateralize.” I put up $100k of stock for a $100k loan, I do nothing, turn around and pay the money back, and now I have a tax bill? If I repeat this process, I can have an infinite tax liability with no realized gain or net income. Am I missing something?
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There are no mom and pop store billionaires.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but Walmart started as a mom and pop store, and the Walton family maintains majority ownership to this day.
I'm going by wiki data here, which says they had 18 stores and annual revenue of 9 million in 1968. If they had stayed private they were probably clearing a million dollars a year, give or take. To get from there to billions they had to raise outside money, specifically by selling stock and debt to someone else. That is by definition "not owning it anymore" because they're selling (some of) it to raise funding.
Like I said, there are no mom and pop billionaires. To get from millionaire to billionaire requires outside money. And yes, that includes tech companies. I know tech founders like to write false hagiographies for themselves after the fact about starting XYZ in a garage, but dig far enough and you usually find it was more like "garage + 25 million from Sequoia Capital," like Google.
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I fail to see how. Entrepeneurs aren't going to not build a company because of some specific tax treatment that only applies whilst they are wildly successful.
Taking away the money, though, will cripple their ability to grow the companies. No SpaceX, no Tesla, no iPhone, etc.
And Steve jobs did t inject money into apple when they were creating the iPhone.
So you’re entire point has been pretty much invalidated