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Private equity bought America's essential services

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Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#571

Post by Nasrudith »

hdndjsbbs wrote: post #291
spyckie2 wrote: post #118

The irony is that PEs exist largely because of pension funds. So to sum it up (not so nicely) we are transferring value from our current standard of living to pay for retirement checks for our old folks. Pensions fund a significant part of PE and they do so because they need around a 7% return in order to look solvent. If they do not have the higher PE returns, they basically go out if cash in 10 years and everyone w…

If the government guaranteed basic human needs are met for every person (food, shelter, healthcare) there would be less of a need for giant pools of public money (pensions, insurance) sloshing around. Mass index fund investment is basically socialism but stupid. My retirement money is going to get invested in the SpaceX IPO against my will. The market is not efficiently allocating capital, it's structured to allow el…

Where the do you think the government gets their tax money from if not the market? That is like saying we shouldn't kill animals from meat, we should just buy it from the store.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#573

Post by Der_Einzige »

slibhb wrote: post #418
no_wizard wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how they were ridiculous on the face it. The economy during that regulatory period grew into a huge juggernaut. Most of the R&D that laid the future of the world happened during that period. The middle class grew to its largest portion during that period. I don’t think the economy was hamstrung in the least

Rose colored glasses. The classic example is airline deregulation which happened under Carter. The real cost of flights is way, way down since then. But this doesn't stop people from complaining about how "flying is a worse experience now" and wishing for a return to inane regulations.

I want more expensive flights because the rabble shouldn’t be flying. Flying is a worse experience now and cheap flights like spirit is how you get the Burger King crown guy being a common occurrence on flights.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#574

Post by runeks »

znnajdla wrote: post #393

The Abrahamic religions have a natural safeguard against excessive wealth concentration: ban interest-based loans to private individuals (usury is shunned in the Bible and the Koran) and instead encourage a wealth tax on hoarding that directly transfers charity from the wealthiest to the poorest (tithe or zakaat). Some modern economists have suggested this should work theoretically if properly implemented. See Helmut…

> [...] instead encourage a wealth tax on hoarding that directly transfers charity from the wealthiest to the poorest (tithe or zakaat).

Hoarding of what?

Commodities? Should I be taxed for hoarding firewood before winter?

Money? Only poor people hoard money. The wealthy invest it.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#576

Post by piva00 »

protonbob wrote: post #569
piva00 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no way to trust someone saying "I have natural immunity, I had COVID" when the crisis was happening, even more given how it was used politically to fan the flames for political gain. Stop thinking about individuals, think about systems, and societies. Given that people were refusing basic instructions (keeping distance, for example); that people dying of COVID in a hospital didn't believe the disease was re…

You could trust them by letting them show you a blood test that showed antigens.

You still only think in individual terms, you are not at all engaging in this discussion with any kind of systems thinking...

All healthcare resources were stretched thin during the height of the pandemic, your proposal is to add yet another resource-intensive test? For what exactly? So people could skip taking the jab? Don't you see any issues with the cost-benefit analysis of this? Not even accounting for the fact of how easy would be to defraud it.

People were faking vaccination cards, faking a blood test showing antigens would be another very common fraud. You cannot trust people when the consequences are much greater than any individual issue...

> Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#577

Post by spyckie2 »

ahepp wrote: post #429
spyckie2 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, if you were to say there is a way where you can take $10b and have that money make more ROI with less risk than $1000 can, people would look at it and scream this is broken let’s policy this out of our economy. It defies all laws of a balanced economy (not a capitalistic one, a balanced one). It’s just like monopolies and we have strong laws against that. But… if you were to say hey we need to pay our old pe…

I think you have this pretty backwards. Private equity does not exist because of pensions. Private equity is investment that has not taken additional steps to be a part of regulated public markets. It's true that private equity is dominated by institutional investors. One reason for this is that the investments are generally deemed too complicated, illiquid, and risky for retail investors (although the Trump administ…

PE has two definitions, the first is its structure as a private business investment.

Pensions did not create this business structure, it has existed forever.

The second definition is the subset of PE that is systemically buying businesses and extracting wealth from consumer and worker to asset and shareholder.

The article is not talking about the first definition and neither am I.

To regulate private businesses equity is not what I’m going for either, it’s regulating the large PE firms doing this specific business model en masse.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#578

Post by smallmancontrov »

canyp wrote: post #517
jonwachob91 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

elaborate on this line of thought please.

Not OP but a progressive tax generally scales non-linearly to tax higher brackets a higher %. So then you have an increasingly lower / decreasing incentive to make even more money. Many countries already have a progressive tax on income , but that is irrelevant to business profits.

Yep, exactly. There's an easy way to make it gradual, too: put the "heel" of the progressive tax above where the largest American companies are and let inflation bring them into the curve. They can either pay a tax cost not to split, or they can split.

Alternatively, don't. I expect this proposal to be popular with executives regardless because it creates new spots for executives, just as it does with lower-flying labor.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#579

Post by robocat »

bombcar wrote: post #295
nekusar wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does one solve pensions? I was thinking that Covid and widespread antivaxxer mentality would have. But no. This will be the latest ladder-pull by the boomers and silents to extract the last bit of wealth from all the younger generations. And this will impoverish gen-x and all younger generations even more so than we already are.

It goes beyond boomers (the boomerdoomer is already in full swing) - as they're dying off, most new employees do not have pensions (instead having defined contribution plans which have their own issues) - except for a few very large swaths, namely government and education.

20% of boomers are already dead and only 5% expected to be last another 30 years (AI).

The world isn't likely to change much over that time, so my guess is we'll collective find new victims to blame for everything rather than boomers. Old people are such great targets.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#580

Post by 486sx33 »

MisterTea wrote: post #305
yardie wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the tools we use was bought by PE last summer. When it was time to renew our support contract had tripled in price. I use it across 10 projects so our costs went from $200k to $500k. I let our account manager know this was unacceptable but even his hands were tied. Cancelled those contracts and let them know we were retooling with a competing tool and opensource to fill those gaps. The impression I got was we…

> When it was time to renew our support contract had tripled in price. Currently in PE hell myself. Company I work for was bought out few years ago when the owner cashed out. Right out of the gate it was a numbers go up game. New sales person was hired and their first order of business was - drum roll please - triple prices! Customers balked. Some walked. In addition, some employee benefits evaporated, vacation time…

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