831–840 of 1001 posts
I do see and agree with the dangers of AI, but it would have been a bit less selfish if we'd been this concerned when other jobs got replaced by automation.
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That's a non sequitur. Just because something is dangerous doesn't mean that governments should be able to regulate it. Often the "cure" is worse than the disease and the last thing we need is more intrusive government power.
Just because something is dangerous doesn't mean that governments should be able to regulate it. That is...literally the point of government... If you meant, that something shouldn't be banned just because it is dangerous, most people would agree with you. But almost everyone would agree that regulation of dangerous things is essential.
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> The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time. Are you talking about taxing unrealized capital gains? Because for the situation where capital is directly replacing labor, the income generation is taxed regardless of the whether it’s generated by a human or machine. If I hire people to make an…
> One can’t spend any of the money until it becomes personal assets. The oldest trick in the book is to use unrealized gains as collateral for loans - we even have banks specializing in this. Oh, and the US has a law that erases the tax bill for dead people - you'd be stupid not to use this trick.
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Ultra-wealthy individuals legally minimise their tax liability by: Receiving a relatively low official salary (Bezos's Amazon salary was $81,840 for many years). Not receiving dividends, so the wealth remains in stock that is not taxed annually. Borrowing money against their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle. Loans are not considered income and are therefore not taxable, and the interest on the loans can sometim…
If you don’t receive income then it obviously shouldn’t be taxed. Otherwise you’d be taxed on owning a car or a house, despite not selling it.
Right, but you're ignoring the loop-hole OP mentioned where you borrow un-taxed money then deduct it. Kill the loop holes.
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The top 1% of earners in the US pay 40% of all income taxes. https://usafacts.org/articles/who-pays-the-most-income-tax/
You're missing the point. The effective tax rate of many billionaires is lower than ours. "Musk with a fortune of $244 billion, paid an average effective tax rate of 24% from 2018 to 2020". In other years it was as low as 3%[2]. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-taxes-billionaire-tax-ra... [2] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
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What if I build and manage a dark factory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing) ) and it produces gizmos. Since all my competitors are also running dark factories, we compete essentially on source materials + energy (assuming we have similar design/quality). Margin would be eventually razor thin. The dark factory does not make much capital gains, even as it produces 1,000 gizmo per second. The ca…
Who buys what you make if you need no employees?
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Ultra-wealthy individuals legally minimise their tax liability by: Receiving a relatively low official salary (Bezos's Amazon salary was $81,840 for many years). Not receiving dividends, so the wealth remains in stock that is not taxed annually. Borrowing money against their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle. Loans are not considered income and are therefore not taxable, and the interest on the loans can sometim…
If you don’t receive income then it obviously shouldn’t be taxed. Otherwise you’d be taxed on owning a car or a house, despite not selling it.
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So why would anyone start businesses or continue doing business in such a country? You’re literally just describing an end to private property, where a privileged government representative can take anything you have. The “government job” will become so lucrative that the position would be passed down within families, father to son. It is already known how these economic systems function, I think.
I am describing a system where the government can take anything you have over a certain amount . (Or more precisely perhaps can take a proportion of what you have that asymptotically approaches 100% as your total wealth increases.) In my conception this money would then immediately be redistributed (as direct cash payments) to people with less. Government employees doing as you describe would also be subject to sever…
One interesting aspect of trying to quantify wealth and tax based on that — is that it gives enormous advantage to bearers of wealth that is difficult to quantify. For example, political followers is wealth that you can't tax, but one can turn into profit very easily and in many sneaky ways. Also power in general (power to collect taxes, power to control law enforcement and army, or people with guns in general) is wealth that isn't quantifiable in monetary amounts. So in this system powerful people will be much more powerful because they will start accumulating all other forms of wealth, and very difficult to restrict — why would they use their power to restrict themselves? They would use their power to remove any restrictions at the highest priority.
So instead of the current system (people willing to invent new things and work overtime for years to bring value to millions of people for a chance of outsized returns — and sometimes earning them) you get a system where political class seizes all power, removes all checks and balances, redistributes wealth production to themselves, and unleashes violence to rule forever. It has been tried many times.
> Government employees doing as you describe would also be subject to severe penalties
This only works in capitalistic open societies where wealth doesn't concentrate with government employees.
> The purpose of policies like the ones I describe is to encourage people to start small businesses and keep them small
Not all businesses can be small. How can a small business construct an airplane? Organize a nation-wide or international postal delivery service? Build millions of cars with spare parts available for decades? Make food, clothing, and shelter for millions? These things require economies of scale to be affordable. And yes, government-managed big businesses have also been tried, they tend to be very unproductive, and produce expensive and low-quality items (with tendencies to significantly decline over years).
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I don't get it. Can you explain in simpler terms? My understanding is that you say that taxing things denominated in a foreign currency is difficult? But why? I already pay taxes on my capital gains denominated in a foreign currency (for example dollars). There are official government exchange rates for tax reasons, published daily. I don't see anything to hand wave here, because there's no problem.
Not parent-poster, but I imagine the most difficult cases involve non-public stocks or non-fungible physical assets. Consider the problem of: "Someone purchased an irreplaceable ancient urn for $1m and put their parents ashes in it, what's that in taxable wealth today?" It's too easy for people to offer hypothetical prices they'll never have to execute on. You could establish a price by forcing people to sell anythin…