Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#61

Post by einhverfr » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 1:12 PM UTC

petre wrote: post #49

einhverfr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I am in favor of a high tax on absentee ownership of real estate. Deduct the property where you live and where you work. Everything else gets taxed heavily.

It's pointless. One can have multiple temporary residences. The Swiss have already solved this. You pay the same amount of tax regardless if you keep the property empty, live in it or rent it. It's calculated as a percentage of average rent in that area which gets updated with market prices every 6 months or so. They also have low VAT and corp taxes.

But the Swiss make you pay an income tax on rent you would have made if you had rented it. Land value taxes are probably better than that.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#62

Post by ethbro » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

goatinaboat wrote: post #50

anovikov wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

To be global 1% means earning $32k/year (source: investopedia). It’s a catchy phrase but ironically basically any Westerner using it is part of it. The archetypal Occupy protestors clutching their latest-model iPhone in one hand and a Starbucks in the other

"1%" is a mirror that reflects human tendencies to only look jealously at those doing better than them, rather than objectively include those worse off.

Radiolab (I think?) had an episode on this.

Even the rich are jealous of their "1%".

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#63

Post by nicoburns » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

anovikov wrote: post #43

nicoburns wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO people earning 6 figures should still be paying more taxes than they are (I earn less than that, and I'm pretty sure I should be taxed more than I am), but they're not the people that are really the problems. It's the multi-millionaires and billionaires that are hogging a disproportionate share of the worlds resources.

This is just the inifinite scalability of success in the digital world, right? How can we complain if we are all actively working on the same thing?

Right. And our economic model needs to change to account for that scalability, because the natural constraint which previously made the system work(ish) has gone.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#64

Post by alfromspace » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 1:14 PM UTC

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #25

alfromspace wrote: post #3

Imagine 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…

Don't forget:

-Ah, the federal government pushed/incentivized us to give mortgages to people who have poor odds of paying them back

-Economy or housing market downturns a bit

-A bunch of people can't pay their mortgages

-Major recession

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#65

Post by nerdponx » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 1:19 PM UTC

WhompingWindows wrote: post #54

I 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-we…

The problem as I see it is that accumulation of wealth-movement power (note that I did not say "accumulation of wealth" because that isn't really at thing) seems to be necessary to some extent in order to overcome collective action problems in society. Funding medical school is a great example -- nobody wants to do it, on their own, but society as a whole wants it to get done.

Either you have wealthy individuals do it, or you have the government do it. But someone has to pool a lot of resources in one place and start moving them around, if we want things like free med school to exist.

Maybe it's better if the government does it; in theory it leads to better outcomes because the government has better incentives to make good decisions with their wealth-movement power, outweighing the inefficiencies of economic centralization by ensuring that people's basic needs are met across the population. This is what a lot of leftists and liberals will argue.

Meanwhile conservatives, libertarians, etc. will point to government track records in actually implementing programs well, engaging in corruption, designing good policy, and becoming extensions of corporate interests. Not to mention generalized waste due to mismatch between "incentives to start projects" and "incentives not to spend money".

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#66

Post by jussij » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 1:22 PM UTC

situational87 wrote: post #58

jussij wrote: post #34

It 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 t…

> Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter.

This sort of tax avoidance has been going on for decades.

As just one example see the link below to see how Google has been avoiding it's tax responsibility here in Australia:

https://www.smh.com.au/business/google-paying-a-fraction-of-...

If that same level of tax avoidance was perpetrated by an individual they would be facing decades in prison.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#67

Post by AlexTWithBeard » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 1:25 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #55

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Sorry, I don't buy it.

First, there are buses going to Long Island beaches (Jones Beach, specifically).

Second, a place becomes a ghetto not because there's no nice park nearby. A district becomes a ghetto because people who live there deface the walls and throw garbage on the streets.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#68

Post by AlexTWithBeard » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 1:27 PM UTC

can3p wrote: post #46

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It doesn't always work like this. In the Netherlands you can find big parts of the cities built by housing corporations with people renting them for decades, yet very few of them you can define as ghettos

I don't know how you guys do it, but Netherlands keeps amazing me.

An absolutely fantastic country.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#69

Post by alfromspace » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 1:34 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #55

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

"Mayor John V. Lindsay, who took office in 1965, was determined to break this cycle, to put low-income projects in middle-class neighborhoods. He tried, memorably, in 1971 in Forest Hills, Queens, figuring that the community’s predominantly liberal Jewish population would not object to the arrival of three 24-story towers. He was wrong. The construction site was soon overrun with angry protesters."

I have to wonder, does anyone, yourself included, want projects in their neighborhood? And more importantly, is there evil dirt in 'bad' neighborhoods that makes housing projects become high-crime ghettos, and if we just build them in middle-class neighborhoods with good dirt instead, everyone's going to behave and make it a nice place to live?

I can tell you, living in an extremely liberal, formerly low-crime small city that in the past decade decided to "put low-income projects in middle-class neighborhoods" and even offered section 8 vouchers to random people from a big city hundreds of miles away to move in, it's been a catastrophe. Spreading crime and dysfunction around isn't really better than quarantining it.

Re: Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)

#70

Post by sweeneyrod » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

veritas20 wrote: post #47

anovikov wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

This statement is often used and is misleading without the context of income of this 1% as a percentage. So, if this 1% earns 80% of all income, then 35-40% is relatively low. I'm not sure if your intent was to mislead or just reiterate stats that you saw from some where, but please give the appropriate context and data to support you claim that this is unfair.

Except the top 1% actually earn around 20% of income (https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...). It should be obvious that they pay a disproportionately large share of taxes (relative to income) -- how could it be otherwise given that higher income means a higher tax rate?