931–940 of 1001 posts
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>Bill Gates 501c3 puts back less than 1 percent off their benovelent humanitarian money back to the United States. The country that coddled him, an his connected mother. This is just a thinly veiled way of saying "america first".
How so exactly?
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I'm in NZ and it's craz I've here too. I don't know if that's a symptom of a wealth gap or something else. What ever it is it's a real issue. I personally think prices are inflated by low interest rates and the bubble is going to pop at some point.
Thank God you guys have Jacinda, though. Our government doesn't have the balls to get rid of negative gearing, let alone completely nullifying tax deductions on mortgage repayments.
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You and Russ both need to take a look at [1]. Socioeconomic mobility has massively fallen in the US over time. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...
Interesting. I'll have to fully grok it later. I've never thought about defining upward mobility as doing better than your parents.
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No, tax won't help. The reason is because the population grew and the amount of land available stayed the same. (Google London population growth charts).
How much of the increased housing costs is due to growth and how much due to lack of real-estate taxes? Real estate prices are going up everywhere - including places with negative demographic trends.
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I right there with you when you talk about power imbalance, and although wealth and power are tightly linked, I think they can be discussed separately. I have no problem with the 1% having all the money as long as they are not using it to wield power and extracting rent from the rest of us. I think there are issues with our Democracy and our Media, not with our Capitalism. PS: if we wanted to, a democracy could simpl…
> I think there are issues with our Democracy and our Media, not with our Capitalism. The question is, how do you stop Capitalism from subverting Democracy and the Media to perpetuate itself? I think one can successfully argue that capitalism is a human-scale paperclip maximizer, but for capital. > PS: if we wanted to, a democracy could simply make it illegal buy investment property insuring that everybody had somewh…
You craft a set of rules that Capitalism must play within. We have a pretty good set of rules now. No murder, no slaves, no obvious pollution. But there is room for improvement.
My suggestions are... 1. More media diversity (Media ownership rules). 2. Cap political donations to something that everybody can afford. (Say for example no more than $500 per person per year, no company donations)
I also sometimes suggest that the media (and social networks) should be held more accountable for the things they print and broadcast. (it's an unpopular opinion)
America is a lot bigger than where I am in Australia. Here, I'm optimistic that we can see small incremental changes that will help us balance power. regardless of the opinions of the super rich.
With a diverse media, enough pressure can occasionally be applied in key areas.
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I grew up in a family of 7 (4 younger siblings), during civil war, father was into gamling and drinking, mother was unemployed and constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown (understandable given the conditions she was living in). To paint the picture, I have vivid memories of vomiting a boiled onion I ate after not eating for days (I think I was arround 5 years old). And we were poor well into my early 20s untill…
> So I don't think it's something you can solve with money alone, having functional parents is always going to set you up to do better in life. Do you think your parents being in poverty (if they were) or a similar situation made it as difficult for them as it was for you? It seems to be an obviously vicious cycle that is difficult to break without education and opportunity for people in these situations.
Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. The rich do have the power to extract rents and "rig the system" to ceme…
> Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Isn't it? Even when taken to extremes? Wealth inequality is in direct conflict with a core value of democracy: one person one vote is reduced to a bit of a joke when there are people who can easily afford to pay an army of hundreds of political operatives to flood public discourse with their opinion. A little inequality doesn't hurt, but the existence of billionaires (even 1…
Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. The rich do have the power to extract rents and "rig the system" to ceme…
It's not just about QoL, income inequality corrupts political systems, which unravels everything else. It's also worth saying that a very easy way of increasing the QoL of those at the bottom is to take a tiny fraction from those at the top. And generally, people aren't talking about the average small business owner who makes $200k/yr profit. We're talking about people who have more than $50m in a big money vault. It…
"Those at the top" don't generally have that much cash. They have shares in companies, often ones they started themselves, which happen to be worth a large amount on paper. If you wanted to distribute that in a form people could actually spend (not just moving shares around) you would have to liquidate the companies those shares represent. In the process you would destroy far more wealth than you distributed and eliminate services and production capacity which were previously working for the benefit of the very people you're claiming to help.
People like to complain about public companies and their alleged focus on short-term gains, but that's exactly what this proposal represents: a short-lived and highly diffuse gain in short-term consumption for the masses at the expense of long-term capital investment and productivity.
I'm just gonna quote what I think is a very important part from the Graham piece itself >" People who don't look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn't get as rich. But if you dig into how they got rich, the old days don't look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources,…
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> That's re-building all of the wealth your family spent generations accumulating, every 50 years. Only if you assume a 0% rate-of-return on your family's wealth. With a realistic assumption about rate-of-return, your wealth will never deplete because of a 2% wealth tax. It will simply grow more slowly.
You can't invest a family farm, or a painting. I will repeat myself a 3rd time - if the goal is to slow the growth of wealth, the right course of action is to raise the tax rate on the returns to that wealth. If you tax wealth itself, you're needlessly relying on the investability of said wealth, as well as on market returns.
As for case of non-income generating wealth, too bad. If you can't manage to generate the absolutely pathetically low returns (2%!) that would be needed, then you don't deserve to be rich forever.