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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

#311

Post by gonehome »

ironrabbit wrote: post #161
gonehome wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nega…

Interesting. Resetting cost basis upon inheritance does seem like a massive tax avoidance loophole, I can't quickly think of a reason why this should be allowed. I agree also that this would probably be a popular (and sensible) modification to the tax code.

Part of me wonders if the same group of people trying to take away the wealth created by others have both not created much of their own and stand to inherit a lot from their parents.

I don't know - but I have a hunch that a lot of these voices are often trust fund kids, or kids of wealthy parents. It'd be an interesting paradox if they're suddenly against policy that may affect their inheritance.

Currently though inheritance is protected up to fairly extreme monetary amounts (in the US anyway) so the change would have to be fairly dramatic.

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

#312

Post by lend000 »

coliveira wrote: post #245
aeternum wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to go to space because if we don't, all of humanity will go extinct. The earth won't last forever and also tends not to fare well when it goes 1:1 with asteroids or nukes.

The earth can last for billions of years. That is, if we don't destroy it... The problem is not to get out of earth, it is not to destroy whatever planet we happen to inhabit.

This is blatantly wrong. The Earth's climate will naturally enter a significantly higher temperature climate attractor within 50 million years and will be completely inhospitable to known life in less than a billion years. The oceans will have completely boiled away, even from the poles, within 1.1 billion years, as the sun continues to increase in luminosity [1].

And this is the most optimistic scenario, assuming no gamma ray bursts, bolides, or super-volcanoes strike first.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth

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

#313

Post by WalterBright »

kylestlb wrote: post #289
staunch wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason to get into comparisons, except to the extent that it helps push them to compete harder, and make more progress. A public space race of billionaires is exactly the kind of thing we should all be hoping for. They can leverage their relatively small funding to push much larger government funding in productive directions. They're better than most government administrators and don't have as many constra…

"Almost all progress is connected to selfish goals" [citation needed]

More like find one that isn't. I bet you can't :-)

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

#314

Post by acituan »

sigstoat wrote: post #194
acituan wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next. The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than ideal will not follow us to the new destination. To assume our survivability as species only depends on the locale, not what we will eventually turn that locale into. This happened with every new frontier. The romanticism of "it will be better in the new place" is baked…

> The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than ideal will not follow us to the new destination. there are plenty of existential risks which can't "follow" anything, or happen to more than one planet simultaneously. does living on two planets eliminate all existential risks? no, and nobody has claimed that.

> there are plenty of existential risks which can't "follow" anything, or happen to more than one planet simultaneously.

If the most salient risk was a large meteor striking Earth, you would be right, changing locale would have solved that. But almost all of our current existential risks are anthropogenic, and specifically risks based on our current lack of ability in being do multi-agent coordination at scale. Without solving the game theory of the entire class of those problems, they will follow us to any planet we go just fine.

> does living on two planets eliminate all existential risks? no, and nobody has claimed that.

Your implication of a strawman is a strawman itself. I am not arguing on the basis of a two-planet-solution's non-exhaustivity.

I am arguing that assuming a change of locale as the principal solution to our inherent perennial problems is not a risk-free position. In fact I find it actively harmful as it distracts us from proper root cause analysis and makes us chase after old men's peter pan dreams instead of our need for growing up.

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

#315

Post by arrosenberg »

edmundsauto wrote: post #275
arrosenberg wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is wealth being redistributed, or are the Bezos’ simply slurping up the new money that have been so abundant? How do you differentiate these? If you have 100 dollars, distributed evenly among 10 people, and then you print 100 more and give them all to Jeffery, then you have redistributed the wealth even though you only printed new money. He went from 10% of the power to 55%.

I differentiate distributed from re-distributed. He may have a higher percentage of available wealth, but it’s not like other people have lost their money.

That doesn't make sense though, each dollar doesn't exist in a value vacuum, so you can't ignore the impact of uneven distribution. If Jeffery wants to own the entire town, he can (and then he can get loans against his property to continue funding operations). At that point it seems pretty inane to argue that re-distribution hasn't happened - money is a proxy for economic power, and when you give one person a larger percentage, that's redistributive. Maybe the other people in the town can still buy groceries, but now they're competing with the baron for things like land, and baron Jeff will always win, if he wants to, with all that extra money.

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

#316

Post by snowwrestler »

robotresearcher wrote: post #174
ALittleLight wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have to repay those loans eventually incurring the tax burden when you do, right?

You die without ever selling your stocks. Your heirs can pay off your loans by selling some of the stocks they inherit. Their cost basis for those stocks is their value at the time of inheritance. This way no capital gains tax is ever due on the stock gains made in your lifetime.

Sure but Bezos’ heirs will certainly blast past the exemption on the estate tax, which exists specifically as a backstop against this type of situation. They will pay taxes on most of what they inherit.

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

#317

Post by WalterBright »

riantogo wrote: post #309
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…

That is the romanticized version. The history of man is exploration, expansion and exploitation. Destroying everything nice in its path. We destroyed other species, our own species if they looked different, and finally we have all but destroyed the planet. Rather than staying on that path maybe a better approach for humanity is compassion, kindness and helping each other out. Having said that, I'm totally okay with b…

> as it puts money back in the economy

That's the rich people hoarding cash theory.

They don't hoard any cash. All of it is invested in the economy. Even "cash" deposits in the bank are, as the bank loans out a multiple of those deposits.

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

#318

Post by robotresearcher »

djrogers wrote: post #303
robotresearcher wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You die without ever selling your stocks. Your heirs can pay off your loans by selling some of the stocks they inherit. Their cost basis for those stocks is their value at the time of inheritance. This way no capital gains tax is ever due on the stock gains made in your lifetime.

At the amounts you're talking about (100s of millions of $$), virtually all of that stock would be subject to the federal estate tax, with the vast majority of it at the 40% top rate. Those unrealized gains you're talking about are one of the main reasons the estate tax was enacted ~100yrs ago...

Yes, in practice there are more tax sidesteps via foundations, etc. But the step that wipes the capital gains liability is as described.

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

#319

Post by rejectedandsad »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #145
rejectedandsad wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

this isn't even remotely true, in Canada for instance, if you got laid off during covid, you could get $2000 a month payments unconditionally.

$2k CAD ($1,591.79 USD)a month vs 600 * 4.33 = $2599 USD (which is in addition to unemployment insurance).

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

#320

Post by Teknoman117 »

alberth wrote: post #173
okintheory wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://w…

> "Yes, this is a big part of why there's now a common argument that unrealized (but very large) capital gains should be taxed." So how will the person pay for those taxes WITHOUT selling the underlining asset. This is a huge problem in startup land with something called AMT. Where you "on paper" are a millionaire but have no ability to sell your paper shares since the company hasn't IPO yet. I'd hate to live in a wo…

I would imagine that what would end up being implemented would be more nuanced. If most of your on-paper net worth is unsellable assets, I don't think it would be much of a stretch to say those wouldn't be subject to a hypothetical wealth tax.

Tax law has plenty of examples of various assets having unaccessed value until it's sold. Publicly tradable shares have value because I can sell them to someone for a fairly visible price. If I can't sell it, you could make the argument it's really not worth anything.

AMT also happens plenty to non-startup world people. Own a house and have a combined household income of >200k? You're probably dealing with AMT.

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