I think you'll see most people in agreement with this. There are other steps to take to decrease inequality without directly taxing equity (and we can always look at that later anyway). One point I already made in this thread is that some of these uber mega wealthy tech billionaires own companies that outright dominate everything. There is no existential threat to these companies. There are no 5 other search engines chewing on Google's market share. They technically might not be monopolies but they have the power and resources of a monopoly. And this will be reflected in higher share prices I think.
Elon Musk's epic bacon adventures
- Thread starter Eboue
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The question is: are monopolies good, bad, or it depends? I think the answer is the later.
The monopolies obviously, as affter-effect, create these uber-rich people. Preventing monopolies, would also prevent people getting a net worth of 100B or so.
I agree with more or less, all of these, maybe with some tiny differences. For example, I would add a non-flat tax rate of capital income, same as it is (in many countries) for other types of income. Probably disagree with only the final one, in the wealth tax.
And I still find it insane that share buybacks are not taxed as it is done for dividends. It is a dividend with another name.
Most people on this forum might be in agreement with all this. But not most people in US Congress would agree which is the problem (just look at rotten Joe Manchin).
Personally, I don't have much problem with Google atm. There aren't competitive search engines because Google truly innovated and created that entire sector. You can't artificially break up that psuedo-monopoly and tons of search engines have tried to dethrone Google (From Yahoo and Bing to all the whiny right-wing attempts like DuckDuckGo) and they can't break Google market share for a reason. Google search is already less powerful now since Amazon dominates product searches and you also have social media. I don't think Google is a problem really as they don't cause the damage of tons of other industries even if those industries have 2-3 big players instead of 1. I worry a lot more about Big Pharma, Monsanto, the guns and arms industries, Proctor and Gamble, Wal Mart, telecoms, Dow Chemical, fast food companies, etc than Google.
Yeah, the reason why it hasn't been done is definitely just because it's not easy, and not at all because the people with all the money essentially control the forces that exist to implement these sorts of changes.
Yeah Google causes damage. YouTube is as poisonous a facilitator of extremism and divisiveness as Facebook.
That's savers and pensioners screwed then.
The more radical idea would be if the govt could make a scheme, where instead of having to liquidate, he pays them using the stock
So for the bold, no wealthy person ever has even close to 10M cash sitting in a bank account. First, the FDIC only insures up to 250K so no one really ever would have more than that in a bank account and second, rich people don't really keep their money in banks the way we think about banks. There is really no such thing as idle cash for the wealthy like that. It's all already invested back into the economy. The only real amounts of idle cash come from illegal income like drug money where you have famous cartels that just sit on tens of millions in actual cash because they can't launder enough of it. If it's in the system, even offshore, its not sitting idle.
No one just deposits a sizeable sum like 1M into a bank let alone anything like what the ultra-wealthy have. Their liquid assets will certainly be municipal and corporate bonds that can be converted to "cash" or used to pay debt. They'll also have private banking where they get issued lines of credit based on their assets and pay everything with their credit.
You cannot dip below 32 million - 32 fecking million dollars - because this tax doesn't exist below that. I think he could survive on that just about, maybe cut down on restaurants here and there?
Pensioners are earning money on work, that's what a pension is. It's not free.
What does this "hoarded away from society" rhetoric even mean? It's a minority shareholding in a publicly listed company, it's not gold in a cave.
All that will happen under your scheme is founders won't float companies on public markets any more, itll become impossible for the wider public to invest in high growth companies further concentrating wealth, and asset values will become obscured or hidden offshore.
It would be far more honest if people admitted they just don't like Musk, so fcuk him and his company, and if small investors are collateral damage, fcuk them too, rather than come up with workable fixes to the tax system. Ie populist nonsense.
From billionaire to millionaire eh.
Absolute rubbish.
Poor Elon Musk, we need to protect him so my nan can keep investing in SpaceX.
Nail on the head.
For a second there I thougt he was quoting himself. Both usernames with 5 letters including n, m, i, and c.
I know - it was an illustrative point to show how a person would be taxed under a wealth tax if they hypothetically had that amount in cash. In the rest of my post, you’d see that the % tax, and tax bandings were arbitrary to show the wider implication of a wealth tax and how it’d work.
I have two accounts, I just like arguing on the internet. Don't tell the admins.
Pensions are stock market assets, much like shares in Tesla. A very large % of any pensions value is usually down to a compounding of value over time, not just the base sum saved from salaries.
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Like I said, populist nonsense. Its just populism from the left, not the right, so maybe you just cant recognise it.
Not everyone can be such an enlightened centrist as you.
Not really true is it? Most of these companies require seed funding and then further funding to raise their operations. Granted, most of the time it'll be open to institutional investors, but even that landscape is changing. Your point about 'founders won't float' is quite far from the truth. The only way to scale up to these unprecedented levels is to float (or at least go through funding series), otherwise the business will barely get off the ground.
Amazon and Tesla all went through multiple rounds of funding to get where they are now.
I don’t understand why there are people in this thread defending the blatant greed and opulence as though it’s their own money. It’s not and these assholes are laughing at you just as much as they are at the people who criticise them.
People are defending a system that works ok, or at least better than any other system that humanity was ever able to come with. And don't want to see it burned just cause some people think that they have answers to everything, although quickly you see that their answers are as deep as those that might come from an 8 years old.
No issues if they don’t go public as they would simply limit their ability to raise capital to grow their businesses. If someone were shortsighted enough to do that because they think they can save on taxes then that’s on them.
It is a strange position to take, even among capitalists who want to see capitalism work better for the masses.
Pretty much everyone, including some of the richest people ever, want to see capitalism work better for the masses. The problem is how that can happen, and I do not think the solutions are as simplistic as you and co are making.
In any case, the system has been self-improving since it started existing. Of course, it would be nice if it improves faster than it is.
It's ideological capitalism. People like Revan are emotionally invested in capitalism being better than anything else, partly because they've chosen it, and partly because to them, any left-wing (or even social-liberal) politics is the first step on the inevitable slide into Stalinism.
"People are defending a system that works ok, or at least better than any other system that humanity was ever able to come [up] with" was probably said about feudalism back in the day as well.
We already have better systems than the American version of capitalism, and they aren't good enough either. Inequality is increasing. Saying the system works when we have people whose families quite literally won't have to work a day in their lives for generations to come is simply astounding.
Amazingly it's often from the same side of the political spectrum who values "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps", working hard and keeping what you have earned. If people were at least honest regarding those principles then a 99 % inheritance tax shouldn't be difficult to get through.
How do capitalists feel about monarchies?
We already have better systems than the American version of capitalism, and they aren't good enough either. Inequality is increasing. Saying the system works when we have people whose families quite literally won't have to work a day in their lives for generations to come is simply astounding.
Amazingly it's often from the same side of the political spectrum who values "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps", working hard and keeping what you have earned. If people were at least honest regarding those principles then a 99 % inheritance tax shouldn't be difficult to get through.
How do capitalists feel about monarchies?
It would be nice to improve it so people who get insanely wealthy from it, can't use their influence to degrade it.
Thanks and late reply because I can only really reply at length when I'm on a laptop.
I get your overall point - but wealth taxes have been around for millennia, and there's been precedent that the state are allowed to take a portion of owned property. Ancient Greeks had it, 7th Century Arabs have it. On your point 2 specifically - that is the mantra of capitalism, and for so decades there has been this idea of shareholder wealth maximisation = success, but that rhetoric is the reason there's so many societal ills today. I think we'd end up on a sorta unrelated tangent, but essentially, we need to look beyond the idea of profit, shareholder wealth as the arbiters of good business, and the be all and end all. To put it more simply, if Amazon drivers are being refused the right to escape a tornado by middle layer management in the same year as Bezos' net worth rises by £50bn (I think that's the right figure) then something is fundamentally wrong.
Sorry, on a massive tangent here - but bringing it back - the fundamental principle of the wealth tax isn't for the state's benefit either, it's for the redistribution of wealth in society, and to reinvigorate the economy. If a Musk or Bezos has to sell some of their property, and when we're talking about those types of figures, we're talking about their worth going from $230bn to $226/$227bn if they're paying a wealth tax between 1-2%. That's the reality of what they'd lose, which is a drop in the ocean. Furthermore, if they're companies continue to perform the way they have done, they'll make more than that in the following year - I said in my previous post - Tesla's share price rose by like 740% and Amazon's by 75% in 2020.
I think a & b are fair.
For c - I think it'd just be easier if we had a globally agreed corporation tax rate for large multinational entities that either i) post revenues in the multi-multi billions, ii) or profits in the billions. I know there's some European acceptance of this idea, and it's something that make take shape in the next few years.
d - A wealth tax (similar to the one I posted before) would take care of this situation quite nicely. Year 1, Musk is taxed, and dies. Year 2 - he pays IHT on his estate & his kids are taxed via the wealth tax too.
e - is fair, although I'd imagine it'd take years of court appearances and the like to be able to prove your case to antitrust laws and what have you.
However, on your c & e points - The other thing is most of these guys are able to hide behind dummy limited companies, and the like. If you target them as individuals, rather than the companies they run, then you can still hit that trapped wealth. The reason I'm banging this drum is because this is why we're in the situation we're in. We need to stop look at their holdings as CEO or minority investors, and consider them as individuals. It'll make the fluctuations in their shareholdings irrelevant as no matter what it is, if it's over a certain threshold it's liable to wealth tax. In fact, it might even make Elon a bit more mature about what he says on Twitter.
Taking a thin slice at the top and putting it in the bottom repeatedly can address many of the issues.
This visualisation shows that the system isn't working.
The best part about "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" is that it was originally a saying that meant something impossible.
Depends whom though. Warren Buffet has been begging the US to increase the taxes in the wealthy, has already given 40-50B to philanthropy, and is giving all the remaining part of his wealth for philanthropy within 12 years of his death, has convinced another hundreds or so billionaires to sign his pledge. Bill Gates has done a wonderful job with vaccination in Africa for example, again giving a similar amount of money already. Ray Dalio, who has given 5B so far, mentions in pretty much every speech he makes the inequality and how it is a problem that needs to be addressed ASAP or we'll get serious trouble down the line. Zuckerberg is giving 99% or so of his wealth during his lifetime.
I made a few examples when some ultra-rich actually are working on that direction and want to see the inequality get lower. In the case of Buffet, he has already said that the money he and other billionaires have given does not change anything for them and is less impressive than a middle-class person who gives something to charity which means that he won't be able to send his kids to cinema or something. Which is obviously true.
What I am rejecting is that this problem has a simple solution and that there is this cabal of ultra-rich who are setting all the rules. No, for pretty much all of them having X or X/10 money makes no real difference, except on the control of the company they created. So the money is not 'hoarding wealth' but it is 'hoarding influence in their company'.
The question is, are those companies making more wealth for the entire nation/world or not?
We probably don't.
And yes, it is highly unlikely that capitalism in the current form is the pinnacle of mankind's society. Most likely there are better systems, and that capitalism is gonna evolve into some of them eventually. Same as how feudalism evolved into capitalism.
Feudalism definitely did not evolve into capitalism, except maybe in Russia.
There's probably a better argument for capitalism evolving into some modern form of feudalism.
You owe me a thumb.
So what's your solution?
User generated content platforms are here to stay. YouTube existed before Google bought them and you have plenty of other varieties from TikTok to Twitch.
I fail to see that as a Google problem but a society problem. With better educated population and a civic minded, mature society there is nothing wrong with a user generated video platform. But the problem I believe you refer to isn't something Google created nor could it control.
I suppose you could try to have them ban and remove any content that meets some threshold definition of "extremist"? It might work or it might just backfire because there is no way to manually keep up and it'd have to be algorithm based.
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God forbid the richest guy in history pays any tax like a normal person lest Teslas shares go down a few per cent.Apple and Microsoft have both gone on to fresh highs having moved beyond their founding CEOs. Of course CEOs are important to their company. No-one is ousting Musk as boss, just having the temerity to suggest a man with wealth more than 70% of Africa's combined GDP might pay some tax. You know to help with the poor and stuff.