Every billionaire is a sign of a market failure.
Okay, so you’re NOT measuring “worth” by how much money someone makes! So how ARE you measuring it? What metric are you using to determine that Bezos isn’t worth the amount of money he has?
And you claimed I was making a non sequitir by asking why the government should judge a person’s worth (“When did I say that there should be a Citizen’s Worth Committee?”), but now you seem just fine with determining what Bezos is or isn’t worth all on your own. And if you want the government to tax based on that, then it sounds like you ARE saying that the government should judge someone’s worth.
So which is it?
112 Billion is the kind of money that warps society around it. That’s an absurd level of power to give an individual in what’s ostensibly a democracy. I don’t understand why you’d have to defend wanting to curb that, any more than you’d have defend not letting people own nukes.
He’s not spending $112 billion in a day, in a year, or even in his lifetime. It’s value that exists solely on paper, not power that he’s leveraging. And if the amount of money he has (I’m not sure why you’re using “give” in this context) is somehow threatening democracy, then maybe we should change the laws about how money is used, instead of trying to take that money away.
But you know for a fact that Jeff Bezos isn’t 112.1 billion dollars.
I’m not trying to trick you into saying anything. But you’re claiming that you know what Jeff Bezos is worth (or at least what he’s NOT worth), and when I ask you how you know that, your response is “I don’t have the answers here; I’m not a financial expert.” If you don’t even believe what you just said, then how do you know that it’s possible for the government to “craft a better tax code or look at antitrust, or something”?
It seems like you just feel like $112 billion is way too much money, for reasons you can’t articulate.
Now THERE’S a false dichotomy!
But he *can’, if he wants to. Him merely having it alters how people behave. In this very thread people are arguing that you can’t alter the tax code because what if it pisses off the guys with all that economic power.
“How hard they work” makes it sound like its a voluntary thing. Amazon warehouse workers aren’t peeing in bottles or overworking themselves to the point of triggering miscarriages because they’re so fucking devoted to Amazon.
And it absolutely should be mentioned when it comes to how Bezos got his money. Ruthless exploitation of their workforce is part and parcel of how Amazon operates.
No, he really can’t. Again, there are laws about how quickly or easily a person could cash out their stock in a company…and planning to cash out $112 billion worth of stock would almost definitely drop the price of that stock by a significant amount, even before he could actually act on that. There is no way Bezos ends up with $112 billion in cash overnight, if at all.
And claiming “it alters how people behave because people are arguing you can’t alter the tax code” assumes that if Bezos had less money, people would be acting differently. And for me (and I’m sure other people here), I disagree with the idea of a wealth tax (for example) whether the person has $100 or $10,000 or $1 million or $112 billion. The amount of money involved isn’t “altering” my behavior.
They leveraged a labor system and environment that allowed them to keep all the benefits of success for themselves and share none of them with labor.
Really, most people are saying he should be taxed because extreme wealth is itself bad, regardless of the individual merits of the wealthy.
Some people are saying that some billionaires are special; that they are supermen, unique and irreplaceable, and that taxing their wealth will cause very bad things to happen. It’s really not that clear what those bad things are. Amazon won’t disappear if we tax Bezos 2% (or 6%) of his wealth. Not even Bezos will disappear: it will cost him far more to try to exit the US than the tax would cost him.
The argument that he isn’t so special is an argument against the claim that he is. Nobody woke up this morning and said I think I’ll go on the Internet and argue that anyone could have done what Bezos did. We aren’t saying he isn’t different. We’re saying 1) it wasn’t all him, and 2) someone else would have done it if he hadn’t, and 3) he is going to die one day after all, and Amazon won’t disappear when he does.
This is a good idea. Now, go convince conservatives that money isn’t speech, then maybe we can actually do it. Otherwise, this is not going to happen, and we are back to taxing it.
A million times this. We long ago decided that it was just and proper to tax wealth, as long as it wasn’t extreme wealth, just housing wealth. Every argument you make against taxing billionaire wealth applies to property taxes: it is our house, and we bought it / built it ourselves, and the property tax obligation might force us to sell the house to pay the taxes, and how can that be fair?
Only, this turns out not to be the case.
From a philosophical perspective the idea of the right to the peaceful enjoyment of ones own possessions is fundamental to the ethos of liberal democratic capitalism.
But the system isn’t designed to give everyone what they “deserve”. It’s designed to provide the right incentives, and (in a sensible system, which the US does not have) make sure noone is too badly off.
Hah! I think the suprising lesson of the last 40 years is that vast enterprises within oligopolies can (not always, but often) deliver excellent products on wafer thin margins despte conventional theory telling us that this situation is ripe for market failure.
Money is not power. Power is power.
Threaten to take half of what someone has, every 10 years, and maybe they will try and claim more real power. Is that what you want?
Still…property taxes.
Market failure doesn’t have to mean poor products! It might be the market of e.g CEOs is broken, while the product the company makes has a perfectly fine market. For example.
I think you have misunderstood. Conventional microeconomics does envisage a return accruing to capital as more than merely a rent. However for the return to be so large, the companies have to be very large, which means oligopoloistic, which is typically predicted to result in market failures.
Oh, I see. Well, I suppose the level of surprise depends on how inevitable and obvious such market failures are. And sometimes it’s hard to know how things would otherwise be.
Like, is the absence of affordable electric cars (or any practical ones until recently) a consequence of oligopolistic car manufacturers focusing on internal combustion engines? Very hard to know.
But I agree that it sure feels like you’d expect some of these huge companies - often in tech - to be more obviously a bad deal than they seem to be.
No one is suggesting that you shouldn’t tax them.
What you shouldn’t do, is impose a totally bonkers 6% tax on their existing wealth. Because it won’t work.
But you won’t get the money.
Your plan won’t work, because you won’t have the revenue you projected.
Which means that any plan that is based on getting that revenue to pay for the expenditures, won’t work. You need a plan which will actually achieve its projected revenues.
No a lot of people here are only talking about taxing the money they spend. Because that’s really what you’re saying when you talk about the income of mega rich people.
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. The problem with him having so much is that it hurts everyone else because his personal power warps society around him and raises costs on everything. It doesn’t matter if he “deserves” it or not. I deserve my salary, but the government takes some because it needs to function and I can afford to pay. In exchange it provides me with protections against my employer, against losing my job, and against a wide variety of crimes that could harm me. It also builds and maintains things I use regularly or occasionally, and helps out people who need more than me, which indirectly benefits me too because those people and the money they have to spend make it possible for companies like amazon to exist.
The government does all these things and more for the very rich. It protects them from crimes that have much less risk for me, like industrial espionage or a populist revolt. It provides them a stable market to sell their goods and a rule system that prevents their worst abuses of each other. It also charges companies that do certain things that hurt everyone, either by forcing them to comply with regulations, by taxing them more, or by subsidizing their competitors who do positive things.
At no point in these determinations about what the government charges and what it provides is it trying to balance the ledger at an individual level. It charges people what we collectively agree they can afford and provides the services we collectively agree are desirable. Many people agree that amassing insane wealth is one of those negative behaviors we would like to discourage. A significant majority of people agree that the insanely wealthy can afford to pay more than they currently do. Most of them believe that there are things we would all be better off paying for if we could raise the revenue (though perhaps some of them would prefer to lower their own taxes at the cost of the mega-rich).
tl;dr Billionaires can make 10% on the whole of their fortune much more reliably than the less wealthy. That 10% earnings should be taxed at a high rate because they can afford it and because their wealth hurts others and money is needed to compensate for that. Whether you tax 6% of current net worth or 60% of any increase in net worth, the point is to tax the gains not only the tiny fraction of their wealth converted to “income”.
This isn’t really an economically sound idea here.
Bezos having a hundred billion dollars in Amazon stock doesn’t really raise the price on anything for you. He doesn’t actually exert that much force on actual commodity prices, being only a single buyer. There’s no inflationary force caused by billionaires.
A wealth tax is equally unlikely to happen.
If Bezos renounced his citizenship, he would face a capital gains tax on his unsold assets, which is 20%.
A one-time payment of 20% is usually far more appealing than an annual payment of 6%.