521–530 of 580 posts
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By definition a stock is not a liquid asset. It needs to be sold first. In order to be sold, you need a buyer. You don't always have a buyer.
The stock market converts stock into a (more) liquid asset. The value of GOOG may vary day to day, but no one thinks that it's difficult to turn shares into cash.
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>There's no magic threshhold of $500k. In the US in 2021 (aka, right now) the magic threshold for capital gains is $445,850-$501,600 depending on filing status. So you're technically correct that $500k isn't a magic threshold, but it's certainly in the middle of it. But more importantly, you're going down a technical rabbithole. The point of this comment chain is "what happens to people experiencing a one-time windfa…
> In the US in 2021 (aka, right now) the magic threshold for capital gains is $445,850-$501,600 depending on filing status. No, its not. The transition point between the top (20%) and middle (15%; the bottom is zero) marginal rate of long-term capital gains rates are either exactly the top or bottom of that range for 3 of 4 tax filing statuses (you left off married filing separately, which is much lower than even the…
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Price transparency is necessary for the proper functioning of any market. Otherwise there is no clean signal of the supply and demand curves. Lack of price transparency results to inefficient markets, e.g. someone consistently ending up with outsized profits.
Price transparency makes sense when goods are fungible. Employees are often not fungible.
Also, while employees might not be completely fungible (pretty much all are replaceable though on a long enough timeline), the employees are buying money from the employees, and that is fungible.
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At some point they may have paid taxes on that $2B asset distribution, but of course they still have it, so maybe they took out a $1B loan to pay the IRS. Now they sell the asset, and they are lucky that it fetches $1B, enough to pay the loan. Now they have $0, and a huge sigh of relief. Could have been much worse. So you see, a lot of these equity-based billionaires would owe more than they have without these 'looph…
It's not a "loophole" to not owe taxes on lost money.
A simple example is an equity distribution that sells for less than taxes owed on it. The distribution is taxed at last trade price, and the loss in the sale is limited to $3000 annually.
Many people do not realize how disastrous it can be to assess tax on anything that isn't legal tender, and this article seems to be promoting that.
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> In the US in 2021 (aka, right now) the magic threshold for capital gains is $445,850-$501,600 depending on filing status. No, its not. The transition point between the top (20%) and middle (15%; the bottom is zero) marginal rate of long-term capital gains rates are either exactly the top or bottom of that range for 3 of 4 tax filing statuses (you left off married filing separately, which is much lower than even the…
It's both a magic number and a threshold. Married filing separately is just 1/2 of married filing jointly, which is how it should be.
Its a threshold, but not one below which capital gains stops mattering, which was the significance falsesly ascribed to the “magic number".
If you had cited the bottom of the 15% bracket instead of the top as the magic number below which cap gains don’t matter, well, “magic” would still be overdramatic but you would at leaast have something of a point. But that’s close to an order of magnitude lower.
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Price transparency makes sense when goods are fungible. Employees are often not fungible.
Why does it not make sense when goods are not fungible? The buyer and seller can ascertain how fungible the good they are interested in exchanging is. If it’s not, then the other prices will not matter as much. But more information is better than less information. Also, while employees might not be completely fungible (pretty much all are replaceable though on a long enough timeline), the employees are buying money f…
Arguing about the relevance of information to a transaction for some good is 1:1 with simply arguing about the transaction price for some good. Just haggle directly instead of in some meta fashion.
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This is why the system has to be designed to prevent concentrations of wealth or power.
How? (I'm not trolling, I'm sincerely curious. I respect and appreciate your viewpoint pmoriarty even though I don't always agree with you.) I feel like it's probably a bad idea to let individuals acquire so much wealth and power that they rival some nations, yet I haven't been able to frame an ethical way to prevent it if the "0.001%" have acquired their wealth legitimately, that is, by the rules we all must follow.
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Why does it not make sense when goods are not fungible? The buyer and seller can ascertain how fungible the good they are interested in exchanging is. If it’s not, then the other prices will not matter as much. But more information is better than less information. Also, while employees might not be completely fungible (pretty much all are replaceable though on a long enough timeline), the employees are buying money f…
What's the value of a 1999 Camaro? How much should that number influence the price of last year's minivan? Arguing about the relevance of information to a transaction for some good is 1:1 with simply arguing about the transaction price for some good. Just haggle directly instead of in some meta fashion.
It is much better now with the internet, but it was not long ago that if you did not know some in a specific business, you had no idea what they would be earning. For a kid in a lower income family, they might never know about what to study to get the top incomes.
> What's the value of a 1999 Camaro? How much should that number influence the price of last year's minivan?
Depends if the buyer is trying to decide between buying a 1999 Camaro or last year’s minivan. Just like a high school student might be trying to decide which field to go into.
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likely everyone else just gets paid less in the interest of fairness.. this already happens at tech companies like stripe. "Oh we dont care how many competing offers you have or how qualified you are. we pay everyone the same in the name of "fairness".
You would like to think so, but if we compare Finnish to American payrolls, you would find instead that instead top management gets less, if anybody. But there is more... Economic prosperity is always most sensitive to what the bottom quarter gets paid, because they are who are obliged to spend what they get immediately. The greater general prosperity that results benefits everybody else, in sum, more than the increa…
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> , there is a lot that says that the 1% actually pay the vast majority of taxes collected: What a strange argument. I will personally pay 95% of all taxes in the US if I somehow make me make 99% of all income. Which seems fairly equivalent to your point, except both of my numbers are slightly exaggerated.
Right now, the top 20% pay a significantly higher share of the federal income tax collected than their share of income.