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Are super-rich people just better at making money?

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Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#21

Post by smilekzs »

bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

One thing I've noticed consistently, is when politicians talk about "taxing the wealthy", they almost always follow that with "earning more than $xxxk a year". This is conflating wealth with income.

Being within this tax bracket myself, I do not deny that I am biased, but I do hope this bullshit gets called out hard whenever someone brings up yet another underhanded measure to milk us (typical SFBay SWE) above and beyond the ~40% levels we're already facing...

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#22

Post by erie »

orionblastar wrote: post #2

Better at finding opportunities to make money. Better at eliminating competition see Bill Gates and Microsoft and the DOJ. Some are just born rich and learned how to invest.

Rich people are in the right sectors empowered by globalisation and tech, those are health care, food and education industries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsmwnUPQ3Q8 Bill Gates is working on his version of circular economy, his charities feed into his investments: "The global pharmaceuticals market size is projected to grow from $1585.05 billion in 2022 to $2401.22 billion by 2029, at a CAGR of 6.1% in forecast period."

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#23

Post by bamboozled »

bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

"To solve all this, it's pretty simple,"

I feel if it was simple it would be fixed?

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#24

Post by gjulianm »

bloodyplonker22 wrote: post #4

The example that is used in this blog post is completely and absolutely wrong. He portrays wealth accumulation as a zero-sum game with people coin-flipping against each other. In reality, someone does not have to lose for wealth to be created.

No, but it's a decent approximation. Even in the case of "creating wealth", the person with more money usually gets a bigger share of the money simply because they had more money. This being Hacker News, I think we all are too close to the tech startup model, which is certainly far more equitable than others; but a lot of companies do not share fairly the value created between workers and owners.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#25

Post by bmitc »

hackerman123469 wrote: post #12
bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

But tell me, how are you going to tax the super rich? It's incredibly difficult to tax someone who's actually poor on paper. Most super rich people actually don't seem to have much wealth officially declared, all of their wealth is sort of like "pseudo" in that it's all tied up in assets, and sometimes assets that aren't directly owned by them but their companies etc. and they have a lot of shortcuts for tax breaks o…

It isn't difficult at all. This is an oft repeated excuse. The rich use their wealth as collateral to purchase things, like homes, companies, investments, etc. and transfer wealth to inheritors with basically no tax. So stop worrying about trying to figure out how to tax unrealized wealth and start taxing the things that unrealized wealth helps secure and purchases. This is one way to force realization of that wealth and thus tax it as well and get it back into circulation.

Right now, the rich are extremely incentivized to remain "poor on paper", so we should remove those incentives.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#26

Post by quickthrower2 »

HPsquared wrote: post #10
bloodyplonker22 wrote: post #4

The example that is used in this blog post is completely and absolutely wrong. He portrays wealth accumulation as a zero-sum game with people coin-flipping against each other. In reality, someone does not have to lose for wealth to be created.

Indeed- the more money a person has, the more adventurous they can get in producing value. It's not rocket science! (most of the time)

Producing value? Sometimes. Sometimes extracting rent. Sometimes speculating.

If private equity buys a pharma company and cuts research, jacks up prices to extract money from insurance, that might be "clever" but it is not really benefitting anyone, quite the opposite.

Obviously a lot of capital is used to create more value, but it does so by using labour, so it is the creativity of the people working for that capital that is adding the value mostly, while the capital sits back and enjoys it's growth. This is the concept behind public traded companies.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#27

Post by strstr »

dhruval wrote: post #11

This smells misleading / overly simplistic but I can’t quite quite put my finger on precisely why? Some thoughts - consensual trades are win win (you want a sandwich, I want $5 let’s trade! And we both win) - something about the model is overly simplistic, like it produces a statistical distribution that looks like extreme inequality from randomness, but lots of different sorts of distributions can emerge from aggreg…

Zero-sum assumption and lack of returns on bets seem suspicious.

Betting is a bad deal for everyone in this model (even the rich person) since each coin flip is variance for no expected gain. Kelly betting implies you should bet nothing in this game.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#28

Post by nemo44x »

bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

The problem with this live of thinking is that in reality most taxes are paid by wealthy people. The majority of people actually pay 0 taxes and in fact receive credits above their burden of 0.

Whine there’s certainly room to address fair taxation rates we should seriously consider how we spend tax revenues today. A 1.5 trillion omnibus is being rushed through Congress that’s full of pork and special interests. We just sent however many billions to a country to fight a war that has nothing to do with us.

So we spend all this money and of course it’s not enough. People say “more! Tax the rich!” Without considering the reality.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#30

Post by lozenge »

sgjohnson wrote: post #8
bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

> To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. That never happened. https://mises.org/library/good-ol-days-when-tax-rates-were-9...

Your source doesn't address the amount of tax collected from the ultra wealthy in relative proportion to their wealth. It only addresses the amount as a percentage of the federal budget.
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