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Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

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Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#131

Post by gonehome »

ironrabbit wrote: post #118
cassac wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It deserves cynicism. If he wasn’t a jerk he’d just pay his employees more and maybe pay some taxes. When everyone is fair upfront they don’t need to give us free turkeys on thanksgiving we can buy our own.

Genuine question because I'm out of the loop: it looks to me like the "Bezos doesn't pay taxes" argument is just pointing out that most of his wealth sits in unrealized gains in amazon stock. When he sells stock, he pays taxes. Is there more to it that I'm missing? Is the prevailing argument that we should be paying taxes on unrealized capital gains?

I don't think you're missing anything - the sense I get is that it's primarily a knee-jerk political response. I suspect people like to take cynical negative views of things because it's both easy and a common method of trying to signal wise-ness, rarely is it applied consistently though. Bezos is just extremely visible and people take the positive space stuff as an excuse to 'well, actually' be 'contrarian' and negative. Irony though is this seems to be the mostly conventional political position anyway.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...

On the specific tax stuff, you can borrow against holdings and then pass them on when you die (I think people that inherit it get the cost basis 'stepped-up' to whatever level they get it at). This means some of that tax value on gains isn't collected.

It's all tied up in unrealized gains for the most part and since it's typically associated with massive non-zero-sum wealth creation - I'm not sure why it matters.

If people want to go after inheritance rather than taking wealth from people that actually created it, I suspect there would be a lot more support.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#132

Post by okintheory »

ironrabbit wrote: post #118
cassac wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It deserves cynicism. If he wasn’t a jerk he’d just pay his employees more and maybe pay some taxes. When everyone is fair upfront they don’t need to give us free turkeys on thanksgiving we can buy our own.

Genuine question because I'm out of the loop: it looks to me like the "Bezos doesn't pay taxes" argument is just pointing out that most of his wealth sits in unrealized gains in amazon stock. When he sells stock, he pays taxes. Is there more to it that I'm missing? Is the prevailing argument that we should be paying taxes on unrealized capital gains?

This is my current understanding:

Basically, once you're this rich, you can take hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of loans to cover anything you'd like to spend. Now, you can make sure that you're actually "losing" money in any given year by having (almost) no realized income. Then, at the end, you die, having never paid taxes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/briefing/tax-jeff-bezos-w...

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-shor...

EDIT: Yes, this is a big part of why there's now a common argument that unrealized (but very large) capital gains should be taxed.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#133

Post by slg »

chroem- wrote: post #83
slg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Nazi is not the opposite of a communist. Someone doesn't become a Nazi post-WWII because they believe in fascism. They do it because they are motivated by the hateful beliefs of Nazis. Therefore there is a higher barrier to prove that the person has truly changed before they can be forgiven. However there is still a path to forgiveness.

> Someone doesn't become a Nazi post-WWII because they believe in fascism. They do it because they are motivated by the hateful beliefs of Nazis. Thank you, this is precisely my point. How can someone still support communism after the Soviet purges, the holodomor, Chinese cultural revolution, the Cambodian genocide, etc., etc.? Communism has oppressed and killed an order of magnitude more people than fascism, but in…

Would you say republicanism/democracy are immoral due to the slavery of pre-Civil War America?

That is the equivalent of what you are doing. You are blaming a theory of government for the crimes of a specific implementation of that theory. Genocide is not a central tenant of either fascism or communism anymore than slavery is a central tenant of republicanism, democracy, or capitalism. Fascism and communism are more authoritarian than other forms of government so they are both more attractive for people who seek totalitarian power, but that doesn't mean they are synonymous with the crimes of those totalitarians.

If Jones identified as a Stalinist, Maoist, or something similar I would definitely consider that more worrying as that is more similar to someone considering themselves a Nazi. Identifying as a general "communist" is not the same thing.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#134

Post by Zelphyr »

flowerlad wrote: post #93

So this money is for the recipients for to use as they please, including for personal use? Or are they required to donate to causes they care about?

My understanding is that they can spend it however they wish, no strings attached.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#135

Post by [deleted] »

chroem- wrote: post #72
edmundsauto wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't democracy and communism orthogonal? Admittedly, I'm not a scholar, but it seems to me that democracy is mostly concerned w/ how leaders are chosen. Whereas communism is about how resources are distributed. It sounds possible to have a democratically elected government that sets a communist economic policy.

That's not true, because the goal is to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat through violent revolution. Democracies are incompatible with dictatorship and must be overthrown in order to purge the other social classes. This is why every instance of communism has led to human rights abuses and/or mass murder: totalitarianism is part of the ideology.

[deleted]

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#136

Post by tw04 »

prepend wrote: post #127
cassac wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It deserves cynicism. If he wasn’t a jerk he’d just pay his employees more and maybe pay some taxes. When everyone is fair upfront they don’t need to give us free turkeys on thanksgiving we can buy our own.

> pay his employees more Doesn’t Amazon pay highest in its industry? I suppose people always want more, but it seems like they are already among the best. Of course pay varies by location and what’s good in one state is good in another. But it seems the average warehouse worker pay is $12.61 [0] with states ranging from $9.66 for North Carolina (holy cow) to $14.84 in Washington [1]. Amazon pays $16/hour [2] so that’…

Your own link [0] shows they aren't even close to the highest (Sysco - $30.99). At $16/hr they don't make the top 25.

And knowing people who work warehouse for Best Buy and Target ($19.33), the working conditions are so much better as to be incomparable to what Amazon does to warehouse workers. Ignoring the fact they get paid more.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#137

Post by rejectedandsad »

peakaboo wrote: post #38
Zelphyr wrote: post #9

All the critics lobbing cynicism against Bezos, Branson, and Musk saying, in essence, that their money is better spent here at home reminds me of a wonderful scene from The West Wing when one character asks why we have to go to Mars: "'Cause it's next. For we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill, and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the West, and we took to the sky. The history of…

I don't know how to put this in a polite way... Let's just say your brain seems to have gotten too much TV entertainment. These billionaires made many billions on covid, while you got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive. These billionaires pay their workers minimum wage every day. People can't get toilet breaks at amazon warehouse without being harassed. This guy is a world class parasite. There is nothing "we"…

> while you got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive

American people had the most generous COVID response of any country in the world, including the Superdole.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#138

Post by hemloc_io »

Zelphyr wrote: post #9

All the critics lobbing cynicism against Bezos, Branson, and Musk saying, in essence, that their money is better spent here at home reminds me of a wonderful scene from The West Wing when one character asks why we have to go to Mars: "'Cause it's next. For we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill, and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the West, and we took to the sky. The history of…

I don't think it's really fair to lump Bezos, Branson, and Musk into the same bucket.

Musk, for all his flaws, started an actual rocket company with new and frankly insane tech.

Bezos and especially Branson's ventures feel much more like personal vanity projects than something that will actually push space exploration.

I mean Blue Origin has been running for 20 years and the best we have from them is flights that were accomplished in the Cold War?

SpaceX has been around for two years less and has accomplished orbital missions. Lumping them all together feels like we're giving out participation trophies.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#139

Post by prepend »

pb7 wrote: post #105
techrat wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The people they employ pay the payroll taxes out of their salary. No company pays payroll taxes for their employees.

Businesses pay the same amount in payroll taxes as employees do. Self employed people pay double the payroll taxes.

Technically, self employed people pay less than double because they can deduct the employer contribution. So I think it’s like 12.4% for self-employed vs, 7.5% for just an employee.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#140

Post by tharne »

missedthecue wrote: post #98
cassac wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It deserves cynicism. If he wasn’t a jerk he’d just pay his employees more and maybe pay some taxes. When everyone is fair upfront they don’t need to give us free turkeys on thanksgiving we can buy our own.

He pays all of his employees no less than what Bernie Sanders considers a living wage. At what point would people be satisfied that Bezos pays enough?

Never. People with a scarcity mindset tend to be resentful of anyone who's achieved any level of success greater than their own.
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