California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

It was during the time of Omar Ibn AbdulAziz. I looked up the reference, and it was actually not just income from Zakat, but the entire fund in Iraq was overflowing, so much so that it was not only sufficient for the needy, but it also paid off people's debts, and married whomever wanted to get married.

[1] https://www.islamweb.net/ar/fatwa/181283/%D8%A3%D8%AB%D8%B1-...

There has to be three streams. Housing those who need to get a job/reskill/can’t work. Another for medical intervention. And the third is rehab for addiction issues. This would be the largest group.

I want to share more re problem statement/solution strategy..but a little busy now. I hope to revisit this at some other time. I just have to find it for a quick cut and paste from where I had written earlier. Cheers.

That's not an apt metaphor. I wasn't talking about it being unfair to those who paid off their debt already/got "killed by the trolley", but those who didn't go to college because it was too expensive, or lived at home, went to community college for two years, and then transferred to a state school so that they didn't have to take on debt. Now their tax dollars would go to help pay off the debts of everyone who went to expensive private colleges, many of whom come from much wealthier families.

Rather than forgiveness, we should make the debt dischargeable via bankruptcy. It should've never been made non-dischargeable (though it did help reduce interest rates, and enable more people to get them, that also upped the amount schools could charge, and made it so loan officers didn't have to consider the creditworthiness of the applicant, and their plan for repayment). It should be something that passes a need bar before essentially foisting the cost on society, and bankruptcy is a mechanism for doing exactly that.

Use the money toward making public universities free, and expand the public university system, as well as trade schools. That’s really how you save all those future people tied to those tracks.

Are you familiar with the history of AMT? When it was enacted, it was meant to target an extremely small set of households, on the order of 1,000 iirc. But the thresholds weren’t indexed to inflation, and so now it triggers on a huge number of people every year. Maybe we are all temporarily embarrassed billionaires ;-).

If you're telling yourself, "the only difference between me and Bezos" is his "privilege", and "If I had that 300k I would do the same", I think you're missing out on how important his personal choices were, and your own.

If you don't see the choice factor, I think two things happen: 1) you stay where you are because you think, nobody is in fact successful, they only had it given to them, and 2) and you think it doesn't matter what you do, so you will not navigate your path with choices, and see yourself as an agent, but instead see yourself as basically a helpless leaf in the current, tossed this way and that by fortune and fate.

Personally, I feel it's really important to take personal responsibility for my own path, and see where I am as a result of choices. Not just for things like business, but for all of life. I think that's perspective puts me in a position of power, and taking that perspective is something I can control. Even in the context of things like harassment, or accidents, or childhood abuse and trauma, I don't think about it as, "I chose for this to be done to me," but rather as, "I choose what I make this mean, and I choose how I respond." I feel if I give that up that perspective, I willingly take on a disempowered perspective, so I see giving that up as giving myself a disadvantage.

I understand if you and other people want to see things that way, and I myself have the reflex where if I see someone successful I immediately ask myself, "Yeah, but who did they know? Who gave that to them?" and I try to let go of that because I see that as a trap that will make me feel better (by comparatively telling myself, it wasn't my fault, I just didn't get so much given to me, and also by letting me bring down in my own estimation the significance of their success, and thereby their capability, by eroding its legitimacy, since it wasn't them, it was just what they got given) -- and I try to remember that such notions won't help me get anywhere. So I try to emphasize to myself how inspired I feel about this, as in, "I like this. How can I get some of that for myself?"

One way I try to remember this to myself is, "If I can't get from where I am to where they started, how would I ever get from they started to where they go to?" And "win from any position". All the same, I'm not suggesting these are appropriate attitudes for you or others, since everyone has a different path and purpose, and we need a diversity of people who believe different things...but I just hope that sharing this, can give you some insight into the other perspectives that are out there about this. I know how hard it can be to hear even a simple set of ideas like this, because these ideas, if you entertain them run the risk of removing the comfortable distance you put between your own path, and those of others, by being able to explain it away as not having any responsibility yourself. It's a lot easier to psychologically deal with knowing about "people more 'successful' than me" if I can tell myself "it's not my fault" and even "they are not responsible for their success". Taking that responsibility, even just in a perspective sense, prompts you to look at where you are at, which can be very painful. It's not my intention to initiate this sort of response in you by sharing this, and it's not an attack on your position, just sharing my relationship to that kind of thinking, and how I understand it can be a very difficult type of thinking to try. I hope it was insightful and worth your time reading, but if not, at least you have the perspective you already know and like.