It’s in the best interests of the owners of capital that capital be free to cross any borders with a minimum of friction, but people be stuck where they are. That’s the basic dynamic that creates this kind of situation, and it’s not accidental.
Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)
51–60 of 94 posts
Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)
#52Moneyland is a good book on this topic. Rich people (top 1%) don’t live or earn money “anywhere” anymore. There’s so much ease to global movement of capital they just move it around so they pay - no taxes - have no accounts with their name on it - launder all their money legally (if need be) - buy up property and invest without any interest in any country in particular. It’s a depressing read.
Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of. They are just workers making somewhere in the mid-6 figures - doctors, lawyers, small mom-and-pop business owners, best coders, etc. And they pay the majority of taxes, actually. Bottom half of Americans pay nothing and top 1% pays 35-40% of all taxes. You are not fair to those educated, strong, hardworking people.
Are you referring to 1% of wealth or 1% of income? I think you are correct in regards to income as it is mid six figures[0]. But I think the general complaint about the 1% is in reference to wealth which has a cutoff of about 10 million[0]. Also I was skeptical of your claim about the 1% (of income earners) paying that much (at least in terms of income tax) but this[1] does seem to support that you are at least in the ballpark.
https://dqydj.com/top-one-percent-united-states/[0]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/top-3-of-...
Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of. They are just workers making somewhere in the mid-6 figures - doctors, lawyers, small mom-and-pop business owners, best coders, etc. And they pay the majority of taxes, actually. Bottom half of Americans pay nothing and top 1% pays 35-40% of all taxes. You are not fair to those educated, strong, hardworking people.
On what do you base that claim?
https://www.atr.org/top-percent-pays-more-taxes-bottom-a3619
>top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes
Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)
#54I was thinking about the super rich, recalling that story where a rich philanthropist made NYU Medical School tuition-free in a surprise announcement. I couldn't help think: why do we live in a system where there are people so rich, that we rely on their kindness for our upper-crust medical students to not have debt? Why not have an economy that limits mega-wealth so we don't need to rely on the generosity of mega-wealthy donors? The subtext here is the vast majority of mega-wealthy donors are NOT going to help the rest of us who helped build their wealth.
Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)
#55Imagine if instead of constantly building horrific low-income housing projects to (fruitlessly) retroactively "solve" the problem of middle and lower-class people being unable to afford housing in major metropolitan areas, we didn't poison the market in the first place by treating housing as foreign investment vehicles.
The cycle works like this: - we have people who live in subpar conditions - let's build some cheap houses and rent them at discount to those in need - actually not that cheap: why is that only rich people deserve to have a balcony? - within a decade the houses turn into a ghetto - oh, but there is a research which suggests if people actually owned the houses instead of just renting them, they would stop throwing garb…
In New York, they were deliberately intended to become ghettos, or at best a place to sequester the city's poor.
http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/politics/216905-the-l...
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/nyregion/how-new-york-cit...
Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of. They are just workers making somewhere in the mid-6 figures - doctors, lawyers, small mom-and-pop business owners, best coders, etc. And they pay the majority of taxes, actually. Bottom half of Americans pay nothing and top 1% pays 35-40% of all taxes. You are not fair to those educated, strong, hardworking people.
Are you referring to 1% of wealth or 1% of income? I think you are correct in regards to income as it is mid six figures[0]. But I think the general complaint about the 1% is in reference to wealth which has a cutoff of about 10 million[0]. Also I was skeptical of your claim about the 1% (of income earners) paying that much (at least in terms of income tax) but this[1] does seem to support that you are at least in th…
Top 1% of capital owners are just mostly very old people with comparatively little income. And their capital is passive and brings no or almost no profit (having 10M of capital and making 350K of income only 17% of which is income from capital - rest is from work - means abysmal 0.5% average return). It is in fact even less because most people who are top 1% by capital aren't top 1% by income: top 1% by capital is typically someone who bought some land on the cheap in 1950s and turned out lucky now when he's 90 years old, top 1% by income is a 30-year old Hollywood agent, Google coder, or a NYC lawyer.
These people (top 1% by capital) are as far from archetypal "sharks of capitalism" as it gets.
Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)
#57Imagine if instead of constantly building horrific low-income housing projects to (fruitlessly) retroactively "solve" the problem of middle and lower-class people being unable to afford housing in major metropolitan areas, we didn't poison the market in the first place by treating housing as foreign investment vehicles.
The cycle works like this: - we have people who live in subpar conditions - let's build some cheap houses and rent them at discount to those in need - actually not that cheap: why is that only rich people deserve to have a balcony? - within a decade the houses turn into a ghetto - oh, but there is a research which suggests if people actually owned the houses instead of just renting them, they would stop throwing garb…
Building houses can help prevent homelessness, but it can't treat the socioeconomic causes that makes folks homeless in the first place. You can't "just" build houses - you have to treat income disparity and the massive wealth gap at the same time.
Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)
#58It is not just the super rich running this scam but almost every multi-national. Just take Apple as one example. Apple is sitting on close to $300+ billion in cash in some offshore tax haven, just to make sure that cash is located outside of the USA to insure it does not attract any tax. This wide spread multi-national tax avoidance has been running at epidemic levels for many decades now. From what I recall Google s…
Yes, but you're missing the half of the equation where everyone who is a senior employee gets granted or grants themselves large amounts of stock options, then decides to funnel this tax free hoard of wealth into stock buybacks.
It's the most direct and massive transfer of wealth from normal and poor people to rich in the history of any society. It's disgusting and despicable, anyone who owns equities in 2019 needs to recognize they have become a part of this amoral system and work to reform it.
We are literally destroying billions of dollars every day to enrich a handful of shareholders (who are already the richest humans that ever lived by any metric). It's the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of humanity squared, and it's only increasing.
Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter. Everyone else copies Google. This heist is happening right now, today, in the open, and it's totally legal.
Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder. I.e. I met a software guy from Sachs who told me about what he did there. Essentially he built automated software to flag “suspicious transactions”. So ie if 200…
> The Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle Of Man I believe are constantly being used for the purpose of tax evasion, money laundering etc... that’s what frightens me about Brexit - I think the hard Brexiteers actually want to make this easier, not harder. It's the one single thing that makes me most pro-EU. I don't see how we can fight tax evasion on a country-by-country level. But a economic and geographical blo…
I am not even sure one can fight tax evasion as the EU as a whole without giving the EU a tax surveillance authority none of the member states want to give it. It's the same thing as a EU-wide immigration issue. Given the EU border powers over all Schengen states? Or just accept that this is going to be contentious forever? The EU is geared towards the latter which is not on the whole a bad thing.
Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)
#60Given the plain absurdity I can't help but ask what they are high on if they think a banking system is a neccessity to loot. Banks have certainly been complict but the solution is to hold /actual bad actors/ responsible.
Perhaps rhetoric or ideology given that it is dripping with antisemitic dogwhistles taken at face value. Most of those are essentially ancient bullying charging them with being disloyal, rootless, and exploitative after repeatably persecuting them, displacing them and forcing them into a scapegoated "dirty work" that was religiously allowee so they stood to inherit the money after their death. Looting like that has occured through time immemorial - from the occupation of Viking, literal stealing of goods and the very literal colonialism of the East India Company and Leopold.
Once again it ammounts to absurd scapegoating - if they actually wanted to hold the kleptocrats accountable they would hold them accountable! Their fortunes aren't going to do them much good when they are isolated from them in prison or death row.
It is the blind hierarchical normism of enforcement double standard that is the true root. Ousted dictators aren't responsible for travesties and can retire quietly while enslaved hostages are guilty of materially supporting terrorists.