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Just Be Rich (2021)

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Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#291

Post by cpursley »

inhumantsar wrote: post #163
cpursley wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, ultra-rich people don't pay income taxes because they don't have incomes. And they type of income earners who earn high are often those who spend years studying for no/low pay like doctors, lawyers (yeah, yeah), local small biz owners, etc. The tax experiment I'd like to see is a very progressive sales/VAT tax that exempts certain used goods, essentials (groceries, etc) and hits luxuries, sin tax (tha…

the tax experiment I'd like to see applied at scale is a Land Value Tax. for the unfamiliar, the gist is taxing the value of the land, not the improvements on it. the idea being to reduce the amount of land speculation, expands the number of homes built, and lower the cost of doing business by incentivizing land owners to use the land to its fullest productive potential. eg: replacing a single-family homes with multi…

This is an interesting idea. How do you handle the situation with retired/fixed income people (say, who are retirement age and paid off their mortgage and trying to keep expenses low)?

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#292

Post by arrosenberg »

throwaway7ahgb wrote: post #264
arrosenberg wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If California taxes people and businesses at insane levels, maybe we shouldn't replicate insane level of taxation everywhere else in U.S., on the off chance that it is not, in fact, an optimal level for generating wealth for the people. This is nonsense. California is the strongest state in the union economically, with one of the highest quality of life and income per capita. We have an affordability crisis that is…

Another view: 1) California is so popular because it has beautiful weather and natural resources. A group of monkeys could govern the state into prosperity. 2) California has also had the highest number of power outages amongst all states.

We can stay #1 is conclusively false - we let Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson run the state and we still haven't fully recovered from the damage. A competent group of monkeys would still need similar tax revenues to what we currently collect to be prosperous.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#293

Post by arrosenberg »

danaris wrote: post #276
arrosenberg wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems more likely you don’t process sarcasm well.

"Satire requires a clarity of purpose and target, lest it be mistaken for, and contribute to, that which it intends to criticize." To put it another way: From Poe's Law[0], we know that no matter how outlandish a position you take sarcastically in a forum like this, there's nearly guaranteed to be people who will be taking such a position in full sincerity. If you don't clearly indicate in some way that you're being…

No, I don't think I will. If you missed it, that's a great sieve for knowing what kind of person I am responding to. If you can't pick up on a joke, it's not going to be a fun conversation anyways.

> If you don't clearly indicate in some way that you're being sarcastic, you're going to be mistaken for the real asshole, because your tone of voice does not come across in plain text.

That's the sign of goooood sarcasm. Most people don't take internet forums as seriously as you seem to.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#294

Post by FrustratedMonky »

ryandrake wrote: post #277
throwaway7ahgb wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% I come from a family of farmers. The land is worth a lot but also has large notes on them. If you see the way these farmers live, NOBODY would call them rich. They never sell and the land gets passed from generation to generation. All the income from farming goes back into the farm (notes, taxes, supplies, maintenance).

Huh... I must be missing some huge bit of information, then. Using my example, how is the business worth $14M if it's not making, say, $1M a year? If it's not making any money, wouldn't the value be much less? Maybe the current business value is very low, but the land is worth $14M because someone else could make more money with it. In that case, the wisest decision would be to sell it, use the proceeds to pay off th…

Sorry. don't have a good example with math.

I think the issue is that in the 70's the cut off was lower, below 13M. And stocks/bonds were also not doing as well so the concept of selling and investing and living off that wasn't possible. And possibly a lot of farmers had loans, large debt.

I'd need to find all the pre-inflation 70's examples. I just remember at the time the farmers were kind of stuck in a catch-22. Probably does not apply to todays farmers.

But you are correct, with your numbers. If the land really is worth that much, they could sell and re-invest.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#295

Post by piva00 »

WalterBright wrote: post #288
piva00 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just reiterating that capitalism is capitalism. Capital demands a higher possible gain than the labour that is actually creating value to play the game, simply because it is harder to accumulate capital than providing labour, if you have enough capital you can mitigate risks, so why exactly should that risk be compensated more than the actual creation of value provided by labour? Without capital in this system…

Without capital labor has no value.

How so? One can dig a hole with their bare hands and find a water source. If one create some rudimentary tools then the process is faster. If another one sculpts the dug clay and fashion rudimentary sun-dried clay vases you got a way to temporary store that water.

All of that has value and the only "capital" needed were the basic resources of some wood, food, and water, if you stretch the meaning of capital.

Capital cannot, ever, create value by itself, it has to come from labour. Capital can only help the process to be faster.

Even in a potential distant future where everything is made by machines, labour is required, just not human labour.

There's absolute no value from capital without labour.

Please, prove me wrong.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#296

Post by immibis »

nec4b wrote: post #254
immibis wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed] Consider the opposite extreme, where the government subsidizes investments to 100x what they are actually worth. Would this create more jobs and innovation, or merely "bullshit investments"? If a subsidy wouldn't create jobs and innovation, a tax wouldn't take them away. There is also the likely possibility that the same investments would be made, but valued lower.

>>[citation needed] Any economics text book.

Go on. Which economics text book would tell me that if the government incentivized investments to 100x their actual value, the resulting investments wouldn't be bullshit?

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#297

Post by throwaway22032 »

soared wrote: post #283
throwaway22032 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. You posted this comment 7 hours ago. Current you has zero impact on whether you posted it. Time flows forwards, not backwards.

What action did you take that caused your grandpa to invest in real estate? If none, it is lucky for you that your grandpa took one action over another, as you had no impact on the event.

You can call it luck as many times as you like, I simply disagree.

If my dad builds me a shed it is no more lucky than if I build a shed.

We should leave this here, I feel that we just have different relationships with our parents :)

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#298

Post by Terr_ »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #255
ryandrake wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, in the US, the estate tax minimum is over $13M. Under that, and it's not subject to tax. If you inherit a $14M farm (!!) and have to pay a little estate tax on it, well, I'm not exactly weeping for your misfortune. I would be happy to take that farm off of you and figure out how to pay the tax, if you're so against taxes.

I think the issue is that the land can be worth over $13M, but the income from farming it is low, so the people living on the land are poor. Then the taxes against the $13M are beyond what the family can pay, so they loose the land. Or the land gets whittled down as parts are sold off to pay the taxes on the rest. The land is worth way more than the income from farming it.

> I think the issue is that the land can be worth over $13M, but the income from farming it is low, so the people living on the land are poor.

Except that "issue" is not real. It's just a story like the issue of Scrooge McDuck's unsafe coin pool.

When it comes to family farms getting inherited, 99.984% of them will not owe anything at all in Federal Estate Tax [0].

[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2021/april/less-than-1-...

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#299

Post by [deleted] »

ryandrake wrote: post #277
throwaway7ahgb wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% I come from a family of farmers. The land is worth a lot but also has large notes on them. If you see the way these farmers live, NOBODY would call them rich. They never sell and the land gets passed from generation to generation. All the income from farming goes back into the farm (notes, taxes, supplies, maintenance).

Huh... I must be missing some huge bit of information, then. Using my example, how is the business worth $14M if it's not making, say, $1M a year? If it's not making any money, wouldn't the value be much less? Maybe the current business value is very low, but the land is worth $14M because someone else could make more money with it. In that case, the wisest decision would be to sell it, use the proceeds to pay off th…

[deleted]

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#300

Post by Terr_ »

throwaway7ahgb wrote: post #268
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that the land can be worth over $13M, but the income from farming it is low, so the people living on the land are poor. Then the taxes against the $13M are beyond what the family can pay, so they loose the land. Or the land gets whittled down as parts are sold off to pay the taxes on the rest. The land is worth way more than the income from farming it.

100% I come from a family of farmers. The land is worth a lot but also has large notes on them. If you see the way these farmers live, NOBODY would call them rich. They never sell and the land gets passed from generation to generation. All the income from farming goes back into the farm (notes, taxes, supplies, maintenance).

> The land is worth a lot but also has large notes on them.

Assuming you mean debts/mortgages, those already get subtracted from the valuation of the estate [0] which means the farmers you're worried about are even further away from having to worry about the Estate Tax.

> NOBODY would call them rich.

Again, I think that get some clear estimates and go through the math, you'll see that "think of the poor farmers" is a myth promoted by certain non-farmers, where both of us would call them rich.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/adjusted-gross-estate.a...

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