Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 504 posts

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#371

Post by potatototoo99 »

Propelloni wrote: post #358
valval wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Supporting the war in Ukraine is just another example of “bombing brown people”, yet you appear completely oblivious. How? Russia invades the Ukraine. Ukraine defends itself. Ukraine's allies, incl. the USA, send weapons. None of the allies, incl. the USA, fight in Ukraine or Russia. I'm afraid your independent thinking has formed a prejudiced opinion. George Carlin would not be proud.

The US has no allies, only interests. It interests us to be adversarial to Russia. It interests us to "bomb brown people". None of which is done out of some moral duty.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#372

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dymk wrote: post #229
hollerith wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the government spend the additional tax revenue on, in your conservative expection?

Healthcare, school lunches, diversion programs, research grants

The US already spends more on healthcare than just about every other country and the inefficiency of that spending is an obvious problem that should probably be addressed before throwing any more money into the fire. But if it was addressed then the amount of spending needed would go down rather than up.

That other stuff doesn't even cost a significant amount of money by comparison and could be well-funded from the savings.

The government doesn't lack for revenue, it lacks for efficiency.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#373

Post by AnthonyMouse »

zb1plus wrote: post #292
nerdponx wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(conts) infrastructure upkeep, managing various natural resources, emergency management, weather reporting/forecasting/research, economic reporting/research... There are so many valuable services provided by the US federal government. People just take it all for granted.

I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things. I would be much happier to pay taxes if they went to funding schools, infrastructure, NASA, emergency management, poverty relief and other useful things instead of…

> I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things.

Members of Congress often propose things like this because it sounds good but in practice it's meaningless.

Suppose that Democrats don't want to pay for bombs and Republicans don't want to pay for makework jobs, so they both say they don't want their tax money to be used for this. Then the government takes the money from Democrats they didn't spend on bombs and uses it to make up the shortfall in the makework jobs programs and takes the money Republicans didn't spend on makework jobs and uses it to make up the shortfall in the military, and nothing changes at all.

The only way it could actually do something is if you got the money back you didn't want spent on that thing, instead of letting the government spend it on something else. But then most people would do that with large chunks of government spending because they'd rather the money than the programs.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#374

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dlp211 wrote: post #282
fallingknife wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been no austerity: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

I'm not saying you're wrong, but that graph doesn't show anything with regards to whether or not middle-class folks have been hit with austerity. Federal outlays are not granular enough and increasing Federal outlays is pretty meaningless.

Austerity in the context of government means spending cuts. "We diverted the tax money to cronies instead of anything that benefits you and spending actually went up" is not austerity, it's corruption.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#375

Post by AnthonyMouse »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #297
SoftTalker wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this puzzle you? It seems like completely expected behavior to me. Most people try to minimize taxes. Who do you know that gladly pays more than they legally have to pay?

Guess it's easy to talk this way as someone who isn't that rich, but if I'm at the point where I have 8 figures accessible, or 7 figures liquid and own all the important assets (house, car, kids' college funds in 523, etc), I don't particularly care what part of my income is being taxed past that point. My goal isn't to make money for money's sake. Nor even leaving oodles of money to my kids. I'd metaphorically just…

> Guess it's easy to talk this way as someone who isn't that rich, but if I'm at the point where I have 8 figures accessible, or 7 figures liquid and own all the important assets (house, car, kids' college funds in 523, etc), I don't particularly care what part of my income is being taxed past that point.

The issue here is that it depends what you're trying to do. If you have eight figures then you have all the housing and vehicles you need and more money is not going to make a big difference in that regard.

But that's not what people use it for at that point. Mostly what money past that is used for is business. You own a company and you want to get into the auto industry? You're going to need to pay designers to design the cars well before you make any revenue, and then you're going to need factories and raw materials etc. Suddenly a million bucks is chump change and if you want to make it work you need a lot more.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#376

Post by manquer »

SergeAx wrote: post #345
manquer wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The return % is hardly important to what author is saying here. You can assume 4% and still get to 200M in 35 years. Does 200M or 750M make any difference to the point ?

What do you mean "hardly important"? What about suddenly turning appreciation into deprecation? Will my friend banker pay me negative interest? :)

If you are investing majority of your wealth in anything risky enough to depreciate, this model of wealth management is not suited for that? That doesn't mean no risks should be taken, this step comes after that. Lets say you found a unicorn startup, you would do just before being bought out.

These products are niche for a reason, there are only few with the kind of generational wealth to structure their assets in this way.

The author puts it at 300M+ net worth, I cannot attest to that, but I expect it the costs associated and starting conditions needed of how much of your portfolio is in extremely low risk assets to make this worth while, so only sensible for the ultra rich.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#377

Post by intended »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #369
intended wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please note - this is a more modern belief. Something that solidified in the zeitgeist post 2008. If you go to early Reddit, you will see it a staunchly pro market, anti tax stronghold - as was HN. For eons, “competition” was the mantra along with “greed is good”. Many people who own wealth reached there with that ethos. No one has to “contribute more”. That’s the opportunity for whichever bright eye person decides t…

> Lobbying for convenient rules, lobbying for weakened regulators has given far more advantage to firms, which then use that wealth to become rent seekers. They dont need to innovate, because they can litigate. One of the big problems here, and the lobbyists do this on purpose, is that they promote the false notion that the issue is the quantity of regulations and not their substance. Quantity can be an issue when th…

> “incumbents want fewer regulations”

Just to be clear, you are quoting typical lobbyist talking points here? I definitely disagree with such a simplification.

I agree with the fact that incumbents want to make it easier to make money.

> This is completely the opposite …

Yes, I am in firm agreement that the content, quality and enforceability of the regulation matters.

That said, I used contracts as an example, specifically to combat this common reduction: “Compliance cost price smaller businesses out of the market, so they are bad for competition and the little guy.”

Writing up a contract is more expensive than trusting someone’s word, it is fair to say that having no contracts would enable more small businesses to flourish (lower costs).

Many things reduce costs, however firms / businesses having to bear compliance costs is not bad for the polity.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#378

Post by AnthonyMouse »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #272
Bloating wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rule of Bureaucracy: grow to absorb all available resources

The rule of Capitalism? The rule of monopoly? The rule of feudalism? Greed isn't exclusive to to systems of government.

You're just listing different kinds of bureaucracies. The principal difference with capitalism is that there isn't supposed to be any constraint on everyone trying to do it, and then competition prevents any one entity from absorbing all the resources.

This, of course, doesn't work if the incumbents capture the government and pass regulations that constrain the competition which is supposed to be keeping them in check.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#379

Post by roenxi »

T4iga wrote: post #367
waihtis wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not, it's literally what it is. Per default, accumulating wealth contains risks for the individual attempting to do so, and increasingly more and more of the wealth is stripped away while reducing none of the risk. Thats absolutely theft.

Fulfilling your obligation to a society that brought you riches, however much risk you took and however much hard work vs luck that was, is not theft. Fueling that society, so that it can persist for your well-being is your obligation as a citizen. If you fully play out your argument, the least wealthy and least successful deserve it the most to have their remaining wealth taken because they are not assuming any risk…

> If you fully play out your argument, the least wealthy and least successful deserve it the most to have their remaining wealth taken because they are not assuming any risk in this society.

No, if you fully play out his argument then the least wealthy deserve not to have their wealth stolen. His argument is that theft is bad, it isn't a complex argument with unexpected implications.

Although it does seem a bit faulty regardless, the amount of risk someone is taking has no bearing on whether taking their stuff is theft.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#380

Post by AnthonyMouse »

intended wrote: post #377
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lobbying for convenient rules, lobbying for weakened regulators has given far more advantage to firms, which then use that wealth to become rent seekers. They dont need to innovate, because they can litigate. One of the big problems here, and the lobbyists do this on purpose, is that they promote the false notion that the issue is the quantity of regulations and not their substance. Quantity can be an issue when th…

> “incumbents want fewer regulations” Just to be clear, you are quoting typical lobbyist talking points here? I definitely disagree with such a simplification. I agree with the fact that incumbents want to make it easier to make money. > This is completely the opposite … Yes, I am in firm agreement that the content, quality and enforceability of the regulation matters. That said, I used contracts as an example, speci…

> Writing up a contract is more expensive than trusting someone’s word, it is fair to say that having no contracts would enable more small businesses to flourish (lower costs).

But now we're back to "what the regulation is matters more than how many there are". There can exist rules that benefit small companies, obviously. But if the rules every company has to comply with can fill three shelves at the library, this is not going to benefit small companies because they will be unable to operate.

> Many things reduce costs, however firms / businesses having to bear compliance costs is not bad for the polity.

It depends what they are.

One of most insidious is regulations that are ostensibly neutral, i.e. there is a societal benefit of approximately $100 per company on average and to get it the rule is going to impose costs of approximately $100 on the average company. The books are full of these because they provide some ostensible benefit and the cost isn't even being calculated. Nobody fights against them too hard because they're approximately breakeven.

Except that each of them adds $100 in compliance costs to every company, and there are ten thousand of them, so now every company in that industry has a million dollars in compliance costs, which small companies can't sustain. So the rules on their own provide neither benefit nor cost to society, but impair competition, and that has a societal cost.

Post reply on HN