CF_Kane
6595
I would think so, but I have no idea what motivates most of the tech entrepreneurs (other than I guess a desire to take over the world).
Nesrie
6596
I don’t know that the billionaires are doing something inherently different than the millionaires who may not be doing something that much different from the other people trying who were just not as successful. And we’re talking earned wealth here, not inherit. Inherited is specifically addressed with the estate tax which we can return to the original intention of the tax and not what the GOP deformed it into.
I mean if you can tell the difference between a good idea, a million dollar idea and a billion dollar idea at inception, my guess is you are in the wrong business… go forth and make billions yourself!
The 2020 election primer in a single image:
magnet
6599
Sure. Now suppose someone has achieved their goal. For instance, Spielberg has about $1 billion. Should he produce more movies? Maybe he would, not because he needs the money but because he enjoys making movies.
But now suppose that all the risk were downside. In other words, even if he made more movies, he will never make another penny. Yet, like anyone else, there is the possibility that he will lose what he already has.
I don’t know about Spielberg, but I think a lot of people would retire under those circumstances. Even billionaires are human, and humans are naturally loss averse. Not only that, but they would put all their money under a mattress, because why would they make investments that could only lose value?
So I don’t think a hard cap to wealth is a good idea. It takes potential talent and investment out of the equation for little apparent benefit. People always need the possibility of accumulating more wealth, even if progressive taxes make it increasingly harder to do so.
KevinC
6600
Oh, I don’t either. I’m just wondering why we should be incentivizing someone to accumulate and horde $110 billion or whatever.
Take the tax brackets we had several decades ago, when the upper brackets were what? 90%? Then later 70% or so? There were diminishing returns in place. Sure, you could take another $1 million, but when you were only going to keep 1/10th of it? Maybe there’s better uses for that money. Maybe Bezos could hire a few more warehouse workers so that they could stop having to urinate in bottles and could take actual bathroom breaks, that sort of thing. And if Bezos still wanted to take that extra million? Well, we’ll take 90% of that and we’ll put it towards providing medical care and a bit of a safety net for when you replace that worker with a robot. Hell, if we’re feeling extra frisky maybe we’ll even help those people (or their kids) go to college!
These billionaires make their fortunes off of their society and their employees. I just don’t see advantages to incentivizing them to horde everything while everyone around them struggles and the infrastructure crumbles. So I don’t know if I see a fundamental problem with the idea of a wealth tax where Buffet or Gates may not want to sit on $100+ billion.
Nesrie
6601
So we’ve had shit tax brackets since the GOP got their greedy mitts on them, but there is no reason we have to punish people who accumulated wealth during that time. That money will be “taken care of” when they die because we’ll estate tax. Now this doesn’t mean they might just sit around and wait for the estate tax to come around, they could give it away, raise wages… whatever. But there is no reason to elect someone and then go hammer them the next day, so to speak. This situation was created by the GOP, but it can be undone without dire changes because we had rich people when we had those high brackets and guess what… those people remained rich and still earned. It’s not as if high tax brackets caused everyone to stop making money. That just didn’t happen.
So it’s not really providing incentive for anyone to horde money but that change would also not be used as a weapon either. It’s shifting us back to where we need to be, and again, the answer to try and lessen a permanent ruling class was with the estate tax which again the GOP gutted with mythical and bullshit stories about farmers.
Taxes are not punishment. The idea that income should be taxed, and ordinary wealth should be taxed, but that uncommon wealth should not be taxed, is deeply anti-worker, anti-commoner, anti-middle class.
magnet
6604
Success has many rewards besides wealth, like personal satisfaction, public admiration, etc.
But wealth is the only reward that government can easily manipulate, which is why they focus all their attention on it.
There probably is a direct correlation. It would be quite surprising if increasing the amount you worked caused a decrease in your wealth.
But work is only one factor. Perhaps you meant, "Assuming a perfect correlation between wealth and hard work“ which is surely a false assumption.
It would be interesting if we could redistribute self-esteem from billionaires to working-class folk.
KevinC
6606
To be clear, I’m not advocating punishment for the wealthy. I’m also not coming in here with a well-formed policy or platform that I’m trying to espouse. This is mostly just me thinking out loud, and the question I’m currently asking is “Why should we incentivize someone like Gates or Bezos or Buffet to amass and hold onto that kind of fortune?”. As a society, does pooling that much money in the hands of a few benefit us? Or should we be looking at disincentivizing acquiring and holding that level of wealth? Would society see benefits by taxing that wealth and putting it back into the system?
A lot of tech people sell their companies to Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle and so on. Some for retirement/financial safety, but also because of they don’t want to get trampled on by the price cutting they can do, or the stupid software math patents, both of which are allowed because of purchased political power.
Since burnout is a thing that leads to big health costs and joblessness, and not uncommon in the tech field (especially in startups), you shouldn’t be surprised.
It depends on how much you think nations are financially constrained. It would help in stopping them owning all the megaphones, though.
magnet
6608
So the less I work, the more money I’ll have. Maybe if I quit my job and sit home all day, I’ll strike it rich and retire early.
Or maybe, like I said, it’s a multifactorial relationship. Health is a factor.
Because the natural alternative to amassing wealth is consumption.
Imagine two people who earn $1 million per year. They pay the same in income taxes.
The first person spends $50,000 annually on living expenses and uses the rest to buy US bonds. The second uses the money to buy a new Ferrari every year, and drives the previous one into a tree.
When they retire, the first person has a net worth of $50 million. The second person is broke. Which person had the wrong incentives?
Nesrie
6609
The conversations here definitely showcase that they are, that the motivation is behind the idea is. It’s not good, and it’s not necessary to implement reasonable taxation.
It would be pretty hard to incentivize what you don’t know. Amazon lost money for a long, long time. Again, if you could predict that Bezos was going to be a billionaire, you’re probably in the wrong business. There were a lot of people who bet against Amazon just like they bet against Wal-Mart, like they bet against Google and bet for some other company we probably don’t even remember anymore.
The motivation and incentives is not for making money but for ideas which in turn make money. Innovation is not an enemy, but reasonable taxation can be there if they do, in fact, one day do very, very well.
Matt_W
6610
No one is being punished for being rich. We are talking about disincentives for accumulating ridiculous wealth, not punishment. Class stratification is bad for a society. No one actually needs a billion dollars. I feel like this discussion is grounded in notions of meritocracy–those billionaires earned what they have. They’re worth 20,000x more than your average American. Taking that away is punishment or theft. No. They got lucky. They’re not special visionaries. They don’t have superpowers or special skills that no one else could replicate. They’re not even particularly smart. They may be above average in all of these qualities, but they’re not 20,000x better at them than your small-town college professor or electronics technician or construction manager or whatever.
Chris Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites is a relatively short, easy-to-read primer on these subjects. It’s about the myth of American meritocracy and how the drastic inequality we currently have corrodes everything it touches, from our political system to our culture to our ability to innovate.
An income gradient is a good thing. It incentivizes effort and the development of skills. But the current wealth distribution, where the top 10% have 77% of the wealth and the bottom 50% have 1%, is well beyond beneficial and deep into highly deleterious.
Nesrie
6611
Again, most of these people didn’t pop out of the womb saying hey I am going to be a billionaire. They didn’t know that was going to happen, and we did not incentive the billionaires we’re talking about here. Their ideas, companies and products/services took off and the money just came with it.
This is so counter-intuitive. Like you get a time machine and you go back in time and at what point do you tell Bezos to stop Amazon from being successful? You gonna the tax the shit out of Amazon as it’s going red so that… WalMart becomes the winner and that’s winning now?
KevinC
6612
You don’t. You just increase taxes on the wealth as it grows ever larger and larger.
Nesrie
6613
And what if we still wind up with billionaires after that? What’s the plan then? Now we take most the wealth after a certain level of income but they still make money, but the evil still exists. Somewhere out there is an American with an arbitrary amount of wealth some people find offensive, now what?
