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American Equity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: American Equity

#321

Post by arbie »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #144
newmanships wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rich aren't stashing most of their money under a mattress. Gates, Bezos, etc are worth billions, but that wealth is almost all based off of the stock prices in the companies they own percentagess of.

Tax the ownership interest in equities, just as we have property taxes for land ownership. We could also take the route of the Federal Reserve purchasing up equities (The Bank Of Japan does this [1]), issuing deposit accounts to citizens directly (trivial for the Federal Reserve to support this [disclaimer: I work in the financial services industry, and feel qualified to make this statement]), and providing UBI to th…

Equity is already taxed upon grant. Other stock is taxed when they decide to exercise it.

Are you proposing their equity also be taxed "at rest"? How would that work?

Re: American Equity

#322

Post by Retric »

kgwgk wrote: post #300
Retric wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit Cards are an example of non bank loans. The difference is people fronting money for loans would need to take on real risks without FDIC protection or have safe deposits but need to pay for bank services.

You know that the large majority of credit card loans are given out by banks, right? https://www.nilsonreport.com/upload/TopIssuersofUSGPCC.3.jpg

Sure, but like GM's finance division making car loans; Credit Cards are a viable business even without access to depositors.

Often the capital for many bank issued credit cards does not come from depositors at all.

Re: American Equity

#323

Post by dnautics »

kgwgk wrote: post #320
dnautics wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they don't. That's by design. https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi... It's right there in plain English: Inflation exists as a policy to screw "workers" out of the value of their wages. Workers is a nicer way to say lower classes. It doesn't include investors, financial sector, etc, who strongly benefit from inflation.

What he says is that high inflation makes posible for real wages to adjust (without cutting nominal wages) when such an adjustment is required. The price of labor fluctuates as the price of everything else, including capital, and when there is unemployment (lower demand of labor) wages would need to go down but they are “sticky”. These are cyclical adjustments.

And that mechanism doesn't work, unless their salaries don't keep up with inflation. Notably, this relationship is asymmetric, since there is no corresponding way to increase labor wages without giving a pay raise.

Re: American Equity

#324

Post by cryptonector »

justinpaulson wrote: post #228
derefr wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the perspective of trying to get the budget balanced, taxing wealth is probably the single most efficient way to do it. From the perspective of the tax code as an incentive system , taxing wealth is a strange thing—it makes people feel less interest in becoming wealthy, and thereby causes fewer GDP-building things to happen! (This is also, for a similar reason, why economists don't like corporate taxes or trade…

I think becoming wealthy is incentive enough to become wealthy. No one is going to stop trying to be wealthy just because they might get taxed for that wealth. If anything, they will just try to hide it in another state. But the argument that a wealth tax would remove any incentive to become wealthy is not very strong.

If a lottery ticket's prices goes up, and the purse goes down and/or the odds get longer, you'll be less inclined to buy a ticket.

It's the same with work. If hard work is less likely to pay off, or if you'll have to work harder, or both, you'll be less likely to work harder. Some people will work harder anyways, and many will be discouraged.

Marginal effects matter. This is why dynamic analysis is important.

Re: American Equity

#325

Post by cryptonector »

beat wrote: post #287
megaman22 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that eventually you run out of other people's money.

Only if they have a fixed, non-growing amount. Which isn't ever the case.

Socialism has a way seeing to it that it runs out of other people's money.

Re: American Equity

#326

Post by old-gregg »

kome wrote: post #126

American tech élite is funny... USA can't even a normal healthcare BUT the tech élite is all about Universal Basic Income, Transhumanism, the dangers of AI, going to Mars and saving the suburbs/car lifestyle. Can't they just wake up and put their mental energy and money on something that actually make sense?

> ... put their mental energy and money on something ...

When thinking of it, I am often convinced that money is a poor solution to the most challenging problems. Sam likes the idea of universal income, but to me that's like supplying extra oxygen/fuel to an engine, but if the engine is broken it won't do anything, for example I won't be surprised that if every citizen gets extra $2K a month, the cost of "healthcare" will magically raise exactly by that same amount.

Re: American Equity

#327

Post by whamlastxmas »

ronnier wrote: post #109
chollida1 wrote: post #3

Can someone actually explain what Sam wants to do here? I've read the post 4 times and I still can't see an y sort of plan, numbers, etc to actually critique, Which is odd because he specifically ask you to give feedback but never follows through on presenting the actual idea. He does motivate why he thinks a share of the GDP is so he gets the why, but never actually gets into the what, and how. I mean the GDP isn't…

He wants to share your money that you've worked for.

Go make that money in a bubble completely separate from society and then maybe you can claim that society isn't entitled to some of it.

Re: American Equity

#328

Post by toomuchtodo »

arbie wrote: post #321
toomuchtodo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax the ownership interest in equities, just as we have property taxes for land ownership. We could also take the route of the Federal Reserve purchasing up equities (The Bank Of Japan does this [1]), issuing deposit accounts to citizens directly (trivial for the Federal Reserve to support this [disclaimer: I work in the financial services industry, and feel qualified to make this statement]), and providing UBI to th…

Equity is already taxed upon grant. Other stock is taxed when they decide to exercise it. Are you proposing their equity also be taxed "at rest"? How would that work?

> Are you proposing their equity also be taxed "at rest"? How would that work?

Same way property is taxed. A taxing authority sends you a bill (based on duration of ownership), with the tax rate set by legislation. In this case, the custodian of your equity would send you your bill, with a copy sent to the IRS. I don't believe who accepts the payment needs to be defined at this time (although sending payments directly to the IRS or through your custodian are both trivial matters).

Re: American Equity

#329

Post by vasilipupkin »

All we need to do is just give everyone some bitcoins. Since they appreciate every day, all our needs will be solved within a few months.

jeez, make a joke and get downvoted right away?

Re: American Equity

#330

Post by thedogeye »

The moderators deleted my comment about socialism killing 100M people in the 20th century. Reposting because I won't let what happened in China and Russia happen here in my country.
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