I love Freakeconomics and listen to it regularly. I remember listening to her podcast, she makes some interesting points. But at the end of the day, “government employee praises government, film at 11.”
Okay. I thought it was insightful myself.
Indirectly funded by the state via tax breaks if not direct funding. Meanwhile, most of them buy political power instead to increase the level of trickle-up economics.
They can’t regulated out of existence soon enough, so they can stop peddling or outright forcing non-working financial nonsense on other countries. Throwing them into the hands of China too, and previously the soviets.
And incredibly lucky and ruthless, so that’s the kind of people they want as politicians, and here we are. Meanwhile, every other brilliant inventor gets shut down by regulations, starting with IP right that protects too much and doesn’t expire in a way that allows competition.
What else happened 50 years ago? Oh, right, we started pretending nation-states were financially constrained. What a coincidence they all stopped investing in large projects. All? No, Asia industrialized by doing the same directed protectionism that dates back to the british empire. Meanwhile, hey, Africa, here’s some dollars so you can buy stuff we make so you’ll keep depending on us, you can’t be expected to build your own stuff to employ and empower your citizens.
Is there anything they don’t fuck up for everyone else? Ellison is one of the worst people in the world.
By the way, it took a bit of digging, since I don’t do research in psychology any longer, but I found this article. Now that I’ve brushed up on the terminology, I should find some more, it’s an interesting find on how winning predicts future dishonest. Entitlement you could say.
I’m trying to find the original article I read back in 2008 or so though. It was an interesting study on how manipulating a person’s perceived success on a difficult task impacted how guilty they would feel about driving through a red light or how bad others should feel about it. Basically, the better the participants thought they did on the test, the more likely they were to feel that driving through a red light was okay, but also the more they felt that others should be punished for driving through a red light.
Now, in the US, wealth is the principle way we measure success (well, among a certain type of people) so it would not surprise me to learn that wealthy people believe themselves above the law, and have little or no empathy for other people. Or in other words, being evil.
Some would be it would expensive and not sustainable. I read that Warren Buffett has income of around 250 million year. Using the calculator on Elizabeth’s website he’d owe $5.1 billion. Maybe he’d get 2.5% to 3%. Meaning he owe at least $125 million just in interest or 1/2 of his income next year comes around and he owes other $5 billion now he has pay $250 million in interest. Now all of his income is used to bay the interest on his debt so by year 3 he has no choice to sell. Not mention the difficulties of find a bank that are going to loan $10 billion plus on the collateral of a single stock.
Menzo
6579
WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW?!?
If the world can’t afford the dystopian horror of a billionaire having to sell some shares, what will the world do when said billionaire actually dies?
I mean, really, it’s a stupid argument. These guys aren’t supermen. They’re successful chiselers.
Damn, I should have countered with “Wealthy people are going to praise other Wealthy people, film at 11”
Oh well, too late now.
Tim_N
6582
Whether you agree with the billionaire wealth tax or not, we all should agree that seeing Warren elected and the legislation passed in Congress would be an incredible show for the power of democracy, something that we haven’t seen in several decades and is sorely needed right now.
The billionaires will thank Warren in the end, as she’ll be making it slightly less hard for them to get into the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:24 etc.).
FWIW, the actual moon shot also relied heavily on private companies. I mean, it’s not like there was a factory at Cape Kennedy building the lunar module.
Nesrie
6585
Yes, some have. And it also a pretty efficient system to just work with the tax brackets and the rates of them. We can toy around with loopholes, incentives, whatever you want to call them but taxing billionaires out of existence is just not a reasonable goal nor is it worthy of what America actually stands for.
So you’re defining evil a little weird. Do I believe there are rich people out there that think they are better than others and place them above the law, well sure, we have some that tried to buy their kids’ way into college and seem completely baffled why the country kind of turned on them for that, like really don’t get it. But that’s necessarily evil. In any case, it is not an inherit consequence of having wealth that makes someone indifferent to immoral. You don’t just hand someone a million dollars and viola, like a TV dinner, they pop up done, a new evil person is born. It’s not money alone that causes it nor is there data out there that says every rich person is evil even if there is some evidence that suggests they think they are above the law.
AND we don’t need them to be evil or immoral or throw just general hate in their direction in order to tax them appropriately anyway. I am opposed to this weird idea of a wealth tax, but raising the tax brackets at the top, tackling the estate taxes… there are a number of ways that can target some of the income and still keep companies and wealth creators in this country. I really don’t think that another country having these people instead would benefit the USA in any shape or form. So let’s just put the torches down here, remember that if we can get almost ANY of the Democratic candidates in the White House that we stand a very good chance of getting reasonable wealth distribution back on the table, and I think the results of that will be worthwhile without any real dire or dreamed up schemes to do it.
So I’ve heard. I am just suggesting that whether a private company does the actual work or runs or if a government one does it, neither automatically means one is more efficient or successful than the other. And it also boils down to goals, which may not actually be to make money which a private company pretty much needs to do in most cases but government, maybe not.
And whoever loses the bid always says, “I could do it in half the time for half the price and none of the problems!” Easy to claim it’s the worst deal when you don’t have to deliver anything.
The plan is not crafted to please Zuckerberg. There is no reason one man should own 30% of a public utility like Facebook, and the hero worship of the “person who invented the X” is not a net positive thing. Many people built Facebook. Many of them got filthy rich. They would still get filthy rich under Warren’s plan. They can still have the founder as CEO if they need him to manage things. Making him into nobility helps no one.
I don’t know how it is in the US, but my experience is actually the exact opposite - the Government tends to always get the best pricing from a contractor, because there are rules and regulations and a ton of conditions, one of which is often that one must select the offer with the lowest price. And government always ends up doing so even when they know better, because not doing that will open you up to lawsuits, and in the case of the persons doing the choosing, may cost you your job.
The problem is that the system can’t handle the large number of dishonest contractors out there. Because once the contract is signed with a bad actor, you will end up with massive cost overruns and/or huge maintenance costs for the bunch of crap the contractor delivers on an underfunded budget (this can be a problem with a good vendor too, but bad vendors literally systematize this process). The problem is that dealing with the fallout from bad contractors is a problem for the project leader/executive working on the contract fulfillment - who is only very rarely the same person as the one who approved the contract in the first place.
CF_Kane
6588
I’m curious why the Oracle of Omaha, lauded as one of the greatest investors in history, cannot earn more than 2% annually on his enormous fortune to pay a 2% wealth tax. Earning 2% seems pretty trivial.
Harvard earned 6.5% on its return in a “lackluster year,” and the S&P 500 returned 10% over the same period. Assuming that Buffett enjoys index funds or invests as competently as a University endowment, it seems hard to believe that he would wind up in the poorhouse thanks to a wealth tax.
KevinC
6589
What are the advantages to society in incentivizing people to accumulate and horde billions of dollars to begin with?
CF_Kane
6590
If it weren’t for the incentive to make billions, we wouldn’t have Facebook. What a terrible world that would be!
Seems like there are few reasons why we should incentivize billionaires. I’m just saying that the wealth taxes proposed by Warren/Sanders aren’t going to eliminate billionaires, so we shouldn’t act like they will.
I think this is a legit question. The argument I’ve always heard is that these people make billions because they’re willing to take risks, and risk is necessary for innovation and growth. And I believe this is true, to a point. We want people to take risks that result in innovation, absolutely.
But…like almost everything in life, too much is bad for you. There should be incentives for people to make enough to live comfortably for the rest of their lives - we can argue over exactly what that is but I think $10 million is a reasonable number for the sake of argument. Call that the “LCL” - live comfortably line. Once you’re above the LCL, it’s no longer necessary to protect additional wealth for the sake of encouraging risk, because there’s effectively no longer any risk to the wealthy person…if they fail, they just go back to the pile of money they already have.
There’d be several parts to implementing something like this, some of which we’ve already discussed. Hefty taxes on anything above the LCL: income, estate, possibly wealth. Changes to how bankruptcy and liability law works so personal wealth is protected only up to the LCL, regardless of how you’ve set up your corporations or partnerships or trusts or whatever. And I’m sure there’s lots more things that I can’t think of off the top of my head.
KevinC
6593
I know you were making a joke about Facebook, but would say… $50 million not be enough to incentivize people to work hard and succeed? I’m just taking a random large number out of a hat. But for anyone building a startup, would the thought of $10 or $20 or $50 million not be a dream goal? I think it would.
