1828

LOL, if anything, that is a great argument for why index funds are great. The fewer of these bros running around with millions of dollars the better.

1829

Which is why I would support retraining and education programs for anyone caught in a large industry shift like that. In theory these positions won’t die so much as dwindle. Projects should show that happening and less people will go to school for that type of work, but i am not in favor of leaving anyone high and dry so… finding them new employment it is.

There has always been this I’m smarter than the market, will make myself and other rich rat race though. Some of them do see what others don’t see, but most don’t. I don’t think anyone is going to ever fully kill the dream/wish but it’s not our job to keep a market open for education to put young people in. It’s the other way around. They need to prepare future generations for that… the future.

1830

The Governor of Nevada must have been told by the legislature there that they weren’t super into his idea of letting companies form their own governments.

This idea will now die in committee as it should.

1831

Thank god for that. Thanks for posting the link!

1832

Apple has a blowout quarter.

  • Revenue: $89.58 billion versus $77.3 billion expected
  • Earnings per share: $1.40 versus $0.99 expected
  • iPhone revenue: $47.9 billion versus $41.5 billion expected
  • iPad revenue: $7.8 billion versus $5.6 billion expected
  • Mac revenue: $9.1 billion versus $6.8 billion expected

The company ended the quarter with a shocking $204 billion in cash. Apple revealed a new $90 billion stock buyback and raised its dividend by 7%.

1833

And therefore the stock price is pretty much flat today. Gotta love it.

1834

Yeah I’ve stopped trying to figure out what the stock market is going to do based on recent events.

1835

Half the stock market see flat interest rates and cheer, because they want to borrow money.
Half the stock market sees flat interest rates and boos because they want to lend money.

You can’t win.

1836

Investors are now worried the Apple cannot do it next quarter. That’s all they ever do with Apple is worry that they cannot keep succeeding.

1837

One day they will be right and it’ll all have been worth it.

EDIT just to add that I don’t have much of a leg to stand on here, since I sold all my Apple stock before they launched iPhone 6. I was sure that people would rebel against the removal of the headphone jack.

1838

Amazon’s turn. They made more money in the last year than in the previous three years combined.

From April 2020 to March 31st 2021, Amazon collected $26.9 billion in profit, while it made $24.7 billion in profit between 2017 to 2019.

Total taxes due: $0 (/s, but maybe not)

1839

They’re actually eligible for a $37 million tax refund and Jeff Bezos has been granted prima nocta in all states west of the Mississippi.

1840

Yeah, I did that somewhere around there too. Surely they had peaked! Oops

1841

This may be very naive thinking, but why not apply the same tax bands that get put on income tax, to profits.

E.g. in the UK you can earn £12570 before you pay any tax (well you pay National Insurance, which is and is not a tax, on amounts about £9,550, at 12%, until you earn £50,250+, at which is becomes 2%.)

Then between £12,570 and £37,700 you pay a flat 20%

£37,700 - £150,000 a flat 40%.

£150,000+ a flat 45%.

The same system (different bands) applied to business would work well I think?

E.G. Profits of £125,000 allowed with no taxes (helps the vast majority of business, which are small)

£125,000 -£500,000 10% of all profits.

£500,000 -£1,000,000 20%

£1m-£10m, 25%

£10m + 30%.

Makes sense to me, keeps things simple, encourages smaller business to grow, and larger businesses wouldn’t worry too much.

1842

I think using a progressive taxation for businesses is a mess. For a business a flat fee makes more sense, since business are by definition putting back into the economy through job creation (CEO’s and other high earners unusual income -capital gains, etc…- should be taxed as other people, though).

The real problem is that businesses, as well as extremely high income people, have an inverse band system, in that the more capital you have the easier it is to have the resources to access tax discounts, etc…

There are ways o fix that, like VAT, which applies a flat fee to all net revenue, except that VAT rules for international transactions are strange and in general an international transaction carries no VAT once all discounts are applied, which if everybody had VAT would still mean it’s charged at some point of the chain, but perhaps not in the country you want it to. So again large multinational companies have ways to work around that somewhat. Specially if you can divert some income to countries with no VAT.

So the other option is to go away with tax incentives and refunds for super large companies, but again, the larger a company is the more lobbying power it has and the more it can help a region if it sets offices there, so that’s another hard route to take.

I don’t necessarily think companies should be taxed much more than the 20% or so in profits that is standard in many countries (as long as the shareholders, investors and directives are taxed at the same rates as working people), but they should be taxed something and there should be a limit to how low you can bring that percentage through accumulation of incentives.

1843

Wouldn’t this just encourage businesses to divide themselves into much smaller legal entities for accounting purposes?

1844

You could mitigate that to a degree by applying the rule at group level (there are similar issues with the rules on interest deductibility that are handled this way), but, yes, it would certainly increase the potential and incentives for evasion/avoidance unless carefully designed and enforced.

1845

Yeah I suppose group level here means addressing it towards umbrella companies?

1846

More or less. You basically go up the chain to to the highest entity that consolidates the others in its accounts (it’s more complicated in a jurisdiction like the US where private companies don’t file accounts, but there would be similar ways to do it via tax filings), and then apply the rule at the level of the consolidated group (in this case, presumably you would then apportion the total tax bill proportionately according to each entity’s profit, but this is all back of the envelope stuff, not a policy proposal). NB I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant.

Here’s how it works for interest deductibility in the UK:

1847

Another day, another example of me just not understanding what’s driving the stock market anymore. I woke up to the news that the latest jobs report was dramatically worse than people expected, and unemployment rose. I assumed this meant the market would be way down today.

Nope! It’s up over 1% for…reasons.