291–300 of 343 posts
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its not only capital gains, it is the property and the system of shells and offshores that hides assets https://x.com/Finance_Nerd_/status/1952063667458978160 https://x.com/Finance_Nerd_/status/1952063659599106545
So you are saying only ultra rich benefit from long term capital gains taxes? Any data on that?
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Balderdash! Inflation and risk do not round to zero for wage income - wage income for the most part is NOT indexed to inflation and is certainly NOT guaranteed.
You do not owe future taxes on wages based on inflation, capital does. This difference is separately meaningful in both economics and policy. If you do not understand the distinction then you will always be confused by capital tax policy globally, not just in the US. Whether or not your wages increase with inflation is an unrelated discussion.
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> If the government is indeed increasing costs If? It's a certainty. For starters, the only reason HR departments exist is to try to comply with all the regulations. HR departments are expensive. For seconds, all the "employer contributions" to payroll taxes. Then there are all the wage laws, and mandatory this, and mandated that. All increase costs of employing people, which comes out of the employees' pockets one w…
As I said above, everyone is subjected to the same work regulations, so it becomes a moot point. It is a form of tax, so that is not an issue that affects a single employer. And it doesn't come from "employer pockets" any more than the cost of raw materials. Every business owner treats the cost of raw materials with all taxes as a given, but then when it comes to workers they whine as if it was the end of the world.…
Yes, it does, because what the employer cares about is the cost of having the employee vs the value that the employee delivers. Cost of raw materials is not relevant.
> they whine
I recommend you start a business and test your theories!
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I don't know you, so I will speculate that something else is going on. There are a lot of ways to not get hired. For example, one guy I interviewed spent all his time asking about what benefits he was going to get. He had no interest whatsoever in what he'd be doing, and what the company was doing. No hire. Unfortunately, such is commonplace. This gives the savvy interviewee an advantage - approach the interview from…
Oh you're a recruiter? I am curious about something, I hope you can share what you think: is it a red flag when the candidate doesn't ask questions during interview? I often don't have questions because I have a good enough idea of the company and of what I will be doing already, so I don't ask that kind of questions, and I also don't ask about benefits because I don't really care. Is this seen as bad?
Showing interest in the company is very helpful. Asking questions like how does the company make money, what is their criteria for a successful employee, what does the division you're applying for contribute to the success of the company, what kind of person are they looking for, and so on.
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I don't know you, so I will speculate that something else is going on. There are a lot of ways to not get hired. For example, one guy I interviewed spent all his time asking about what benefits he was going to get. He had no interest whatsoever in what he'd be doing, and what the company was doing. No hire. Unfortunately, such is commonplace. This gives the savvy interviewee an advantage - approach the interview from…
First of all I don't think you should be surprised that pay is the most interesting thing to potential employees? That is the entire reason they're tolerating you. If I just want to work on interesting things you would only get in the way. Secondly, yeah, I'm not like that. I've got three or so side projects (I guess they're just projects now) I'm actively working on and have been building things with my teens. It do…
That wasn't my point. My point was the candidate should show interest in the company.
After all, if you're buying a car, does the car salesman sell you on the commission he's going to make?
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For those who have no experience, one can gain experience while in college: 1. contribute to a significant open source project 2. write some significant work of software 3. design and build your own computer 4. build a robot something 5. work as an intern in industry 6. do work as a research assistant When I was at Caltech, students did (entirely on their own): 1. built a gas powered helicopter from scratch 2. built…
I tend to agree with you more often than not but in this case, that's not very realistic. The caliber of students and the opportunities available at CalTech are head and shoulders above those at the average college with a CS program.
BTW, Caltech places emphasis on get-up-and-go in their student selections. I was a marginal candidate, and I found out years later that my projects I worked on in my spare time made the difference. I was always building things in the garage and in the high school shop. (But I didn't tell them about the flame thrower I made from a lawnmower.)
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You do not owe future taxes on wages based on inflation, capital does. This difference is separately meaningful in both economics and policy. If you do not understand the distinction then you will always be confused by capital tax policy globally, not just in the US. Whether or not your wages increase with inflation is an unrelated discussion.
And how exactly does capital owe "future" taxes on gains or dividends based on inflation?
As for risk, if you buy something, then you go bankrupt so you lose it all, the state doesn't pay you the negative capital gains tax from your losses. That is the risk part that workers never have to deal with, there is no such thing as negative salary but negative capital gains happens all the time. You can't cancel out those losses if you didn't make profits elsewhere.
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This is simply incorrect. To make the tax incidence on wages and capital gains equivalent, you must first deduct losses due to inflation and risk. For wages, inflation and risk round to zero. For long-term capital gains inflation and risk are large and often the majority of the "gain". Short-term capital gains are already taxed like wages. In the US, unlike some other developed countries, there is a very limited abil…
The way we calculate risk is inherently extremely biased towards the wealthy. In terms of real, relative risk, being a laborer is much more risky than being an investor. The investor may lose hundreds of millions, but it doesn't matter. The laborer may lose 500 dollars after being fired, and it could kill them. We've detached risk from real risk. Real risk is - will I eat, will I survive.
We are talking money here, we tax money so we talk about how money is risked.
We don't tax your health or wellbeing, it is true that those are serious risks worse than monetary risk, but it isn't something the tax office should deal with so it isn't a part of this conversation.
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> big government Is indeed an issue, as it corresponds with the malaise you describe. > wage stagnation is in part due to the government increasing the costs of hiring people. That indirectly results in correspondingly lower wages. The so-called "employers' contribution" is a misrepresentation.
I am not going to say that I have the data but from what I remember that was not identified as one of the causative concerns in the book. Subjectively I doubt that that is a systematic driver of income inequality. For example in 60s the taxes in the higher margins were extremely high (80% I think?) and worker bargaining power was strong. Yet it was a period of unprecedented growth and innovation, one where ideas of i…
I was always curious, why would anyone believe that hard work leads to economic gains in the first place? That's like saying "flapping your hands very fast leads to building a house". Nothing about working hard has anything to do with economic gains. This has always felt to me like magical thinking: if I check certain boxes, I'm automatically entitled to "hard work funds" allocated to me. Like anything in capitalist…
Your logic is side-stepping the point. There was a period of time, at least in the USA, where the goal was economical and social stability (New Deal, GI Bill, unions). Over the course of my life, the goal has morphed into wealth transfer. You can track this with the Gini coefficient, right? Sharp upward climb during the Reagan years. A "losing faith" metric is also a bellwether. The promise of economic gains is the r…
I think the problem is that work changed too fast. This shift is much harder to navigate. A lot of 20th century career conveyer belts have been disrupted in the last 30 years. A lot of schools are still setting traditional expectations that no longer match reality. This is why people think their work doesn’t lead to gains: job requirements have been swapped from under US workers, and everyone is struggling to keep up. That said, opportunities are larger than ever, but we have to become more "entrepreneurial" again, perhaps more akin to the way we were during Industrial Revolution. Take that English major and use it to become an excellent YouTuber rather than a writer, type shit.
> In fact, I'd go so far as to say everything about capitalism trends towards pre-made paths.
How do you explain every new innovation? Cars during the time of horses? Twitter during the time of Facebook and MySpace, family medicine during the time of hospitalists and experts (fairly new field), Amazon during the times of Sears, framework laptop during the times of Apple, etc, etc. People don’t always know what they want, and America is incredibly well catered towards starting businesses (at least until a certain guy in a certain white building does permanent damage). Saying that we’re all constrained to market is very reductive. We are more empowered to find new ways to be useful than ever before. Doing economically unviable things has never been ok.
I just want to make it clear that very specifically “hard work means economic gains” is ridiculous on its face, and a lot of people take it literally, without the caveat that you have to do something useful.