It must be exhausting to hear that rich people sometimes make positive contributions to society. I’m really sorry that some responses aren’t just “ridiculous levels of wealth have a corrosive and destructive effect on society.”
Yeah, a lot of people with half their wealth would still be fine. Most Americans could feed a starving family for what they spend on Starbucks in a month. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out why we don’t just take half of people’s wealth to help people who are less fortunate.
Broadly, any positive charitable contributions made to a community by the wealthy are dwarfed in comparison to the wealth they’ve extracted from the same community.
You heard it here, the average American has just as much power to better society as the ultra wealthy do! Please, everyone, adjust your lifestyles accordingly.
Thrag
3040
Your replies are all based on your clear assumption that any support for any kind of wealth tax is based on jealously/hatred of wealty/the wealthy. That’s the tiring part. The constant default to that preconceived notion.
That and constantly equating billionaires to average or even poor people.
I’m not talking about charitable contributions; I’m talking about improving society by providing goods or services that improve people’s lives. As a very narrow example, the iOS App Store paid $38 billion to iOS app developers in 2019 alone, which is greater than the $10 billion net worth of Steve Jobs as the time of his death.
Fine, I will also add that as products of private enterprise, the intangible value of any such goods or services is dwarfed in comparison to the tangible value they extract from the users of those goods and services.
Amazon has built an insane logistics network. It’s quite a feat, getting almost anything almost anywhere in two days! But I still have to pay to use it. And at this point, the primary function of this amazing logistics network seems to be ferrying cheap knockoff shit, destined to break and be thrown away, to middle- and working-class families who will need to replace it within months. So I question how much of an improvement that is.
But either way, why should that inoculate them against the idea of a wealth tax? Their contribution to society is either tiny in comparison to their wealth or largely a one-time event. It’s like me saying I shouldn’t pay property tax anymore because I let my cousin stay here one time instead of making him pay for a hotel.
I wouldn’t call it jealousy or hatred, but there is a consistently stated opinion that rich people are corrosive to society, or that they “don’t pay their fair share”, or that their paper wealth is at the expense of others. There’s a concept that some people can get wealthy by expanding the pie and improving the lives of others in the process, but I rarely see that idea expressed here. And that’s fine, because a lot of people don’t think that way.
Everyone can help other people. Everyone can make positive contributions to the world. Everyone can do things to make someone else’s life a little bit better. That’s what everyone has in common.
I just rolled my eyes so hard that they’re now under the couch. I have no eyes. I’m composing this post by touch and muscle memory as my ocular nerve slowly degenerates inside my vacant eye holes. The pain is excruciating.
That is provably false. If someone buys a good or service for $X dollars, then that means that item is worth more than $X to them. If it wasn’t, then they wouldn’t buy it.
And if you didn’t think that the convenience was worth the cost, then you wouldn’t pay for it.
I never said that it should inoculate them against a wealth tax. And please explain how Amazon employing people (currently 1.1 million as of 2020) on an ongoing basis for decades is a “one-time event”. Or how Apple making the iPhone, which created a market for apps, which opened up other secondary or tertiary markets, is a “one-time event.”
Timex
3046
Like I said, I totally understand your position here. I just don’t think that is actually the ridiculous levels of wealth that are causing the problems.
For me, I don’t believe that anyone’s contributtion to the world is so great that they deserve to have the amou t of wealth that we’re talking about here.
Here’s what I want: to have their contribution to society (read: government social safety net) have as much an effect on them as it does on me. That’s ‘their fair share’. I would be much better off if I still had the tax money I pay in my pocket, but I’m happy to contribute. I want them to feel the same thing. Instead, they fight tooth and nail to pay less of a percentage of their income than I (and others of my class) pay, so the system is starved, and requires more and more inventive ways to find for paying for things. Which is all fairly ironic, because they have so much more to lose if it all crumbles. But they think their wealth is an insulating factor- “if it all goes to shit, I’ll just live in my enclave, with my own bodyguards, etc.”. Fuckers.
Well, part of them gave up after realising which face of capital they vote on doesn’t have much of an impact on how hard it is to pay the bills, but they sure get more forms to fill to try to maybe get help.
I can’t even, man. Increasing everyone’s costs by hiding the heavily marked up price and making everyone ignore the cost of constantly throwing the thing and its accessories away (the only real iPhone innovations bar design, everything else was copied or bought) isn’t an improvement.
And, you know, that app funding doesn’t appear out of a magic money tree, it’s profit extracted from the very same people whose lives were improved into another shinier rat race.
They certainly don’t by being good at their jobs.. That only makes sense if you wish the fully informed rational economic actor who knows very well why he needs a brand new iPhone, despite never learning how to use features introduced a decade ago, or even how much it costs him in total, into existence. Which suddenly goes away as soon as it, I don’t know, signs the wrong insurance, then caveat emptor for not being rational, I guess.
But, yes, the money isn’t the problem, despite being undeserved, because it’s mostly just stuck in an account somewhere. Well, other than the earth destroying bit that is used in incredibly environmentaly wasteful ways. It’s how much it’s used to promote the great mythical men and how much we need them to keep society going, or even pay for stuff, or have jobs, and how much that nonsense makes everyone else mentally unhealthy striving for something that doesn’t exist in a system that still fails in ways described centuries ago, except for the great mythical modern Rockefeller’s with bleached legacies, which, say, even being a buddy of Epstein doesn’t blemish.
Unless the person got their money through illegal methods like robbery or murder or fraud, I don’t know how you would dispute that. If you have an objective method of measuring someone’s contribution to society, I would be glad to hear it.
Then what’s the point of anyone saving money at all, if they’re required to struggle the exact same amount as you in order for it to be “fair”? Are you struggling as much as you were five or ten or twenty years ago? Hopefully you’re better off now, but that doesn’t mean that your tax payments have suddenly become less “fair” over time.
Jeff Bezos paid $973 million in taxes over the past five years, which is more than I will pay over my entire lifetime. I don’t think the system is starved.
It’s such a relief to know that people don’t hate the rich!
Spoken like a true capitalist! And we all know that our economic system is never exploitative and everyone walks away from every transaction mutually enriched!
I understand your position to be, at least partially, that the wealthy should not be subject to a high tax burden that would subsequently improve society because they are assumed to have already made positive contributions to society in the process of becoming wealthy. Is that not what you’re arguing when you say this?
There was an “either” in the bit you quoted, and I think you’re bucketing your examples incorrectly. I would argue that both of your examples fall into the category of “Their contribution to society is tiny in comparison to their wealth”.
For Amazon, “job creating” is not unequivocally a positive contribution to society. Especially when you consider that Amazon fought tooth and nail to prevent its workers from organizing, which would have allowed them to further their own interests and well-being. And I may need you to expand on how the creation of an uncurated app store filled with gacha skinner boxes and/or cheap knockoff shit is a positive contribution to society.
Actually, I wonder if you genuinely think that “creating a marketplace for people to sell cheap knockoff shit” is inherently good.
You’re assuming that putting inventions together into a workable product isn’t worth anything. And yeah, people paid money for devices and apps, because they felt like those devices or apps improved their lives. It’s turtles all the way down, man.
It’s not the greatest of sources, I admit, but really, they didn’t change much, the existing competition was just stuck, and newcomers had less capital to be as quick and less able to influence anyone. It wasn’t surprising tech if you were paying attention.
But, yeah, if you’re just going to spout the assumptions of neoliberalism unquestionably, well, hope it’s profitable for you, at least.
Something doesn’t have to be specifically true in every single transaction to be generally true on the whole.
No, I’m simply suggesting that many of the wealthy got that way through positive contributions to society. If we can’t agree on that point, there’s not really anywhere the discussion can go from there.
Again, on the most simplistic level, Apple annually pays their employees more than Steve Jobs’ entire fortune was worth when he died. That’s not even counting all the devices sold, secondary and tertiary markets after that…
I’m sure you know that Amazon isn’t just “a marketplace for people to sell cheap knockoff shit”, but if that’s the premise you’re claiming, then once again we have nowhere to take this discussion.
Again, you’re assuming that getting “unstuck” isn’t worth anything, and having available capital to produce and sell a new product isn’t valuable. And of course the tech was surprising! Blackberry looked at the demos and assumed that Apple faked their UI. If anyone shouldn’t have been surprised by the tech, it’s Blackberry.
This is a willful misreading of what I said*. No, I don’t want them to have as much in their pocket as I do. First, as I mentioned, I don’t want anyone to be that rich. Period. I’ll say it again, no one has contributed that much ‘good’ to the world. Every economic system starts to get warped at its farther edges. Capitalism might be the ‘least bad’ system we’ve come up with, but it isn’t immune to this. And I say this as a bona-fide Capitalist, Business Ower, Job Creator (I employ one person besides myself, part time, but according to the Capitalist Hierarchy, I’m therefore better than regular people).
What I want is for them to pay as much as it takes to actually notice. And not just in a vague ‘all taxes are theft and the government is just going to misuse my money on those undeserving poor that should just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, like I did (after getting loans from my wealthy parents)’.
*as usual.
No it’s not a willful misreading of what you said. We’re trading a few paragraphs back and forth on the internet, and some things are going to require clarification. I don’t know why you’re assuming malice instead of just realizing that I’m not a mind reader. Sheesh.
Thrag
3057
It’s the constancy of it. As I pointed out, and you keep demonstrating very clearly, you are replying as if everyone is screaming we should eat the rich.
