Ah right, okay. So $10b isn't ultrawealthy, Scrooge McDuck money, gotcha. Thanks for setting things straight.
The ultrawealthy (Bezos cashes out on Amazon shares)
Ah right, okay. So $10b isn't ultrawealthy, Scrooge McDuck money, gotcha. Thanks for setting things straight.
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SpaceDock
Shred till your dead
Ha! I said the same thing on page 1. It is 100% true. So many people believe they are above the crowd and just haven’t hit their stride or whatever metaphor you want there. They believe their normal life is temporary.
tacotiklah
I am Denko (´･ω･`)
It comes from the old protestant "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" work ethic. Said mentality absolutely crumbles when you see a single mom holding two or more jobs while trying to raise the kids and juggling god knows what else at the same time. People like that have run out of bootstraps to pull themselves up by, but somehow still get lectured to about how they need to work even harder to obtain "the good life". It's super cringe, and completely detached from reality.
It's the Joe the Plumber paradox. Agitate against policies that help you now because one day you might go from working for a business to owning the business. But other than the fact that day will likely never come, there's also the fact having no help to get there (social safety nets) ensures that it stays out of reach.
tacotiklah
I am Denko (´･ω･`)
Also, sry for the double post, but I did want you to see this. I went back and read your response on the first page. Mad props for your proposed solutions because I 100% back those. Thanks to a lot of passed legislation around the FDR days we had laws that did a lot of that and for decades we saw a hell of a big dip in wealth inequality. However, slowly but sure, all that shit started getting overturned and deregulated (largely by congresspeople on the right). All that massive deregulation lead to the 2008 economic oopsie that cost a LOT of people their jobs.
And proof that we haven't learned our lesson since then, take a wild look at the deregulation of industries under the Trump administration. Between that and Covid-19, we're overdue for another (if not worse) economic oopsie. Actually, we technically had that already recently. IIRC, we had a 33% dip in GDP, which was about twice that of the Great Depression and about 12% more than in 2008's oopsie. Really weird that MSM hasn't been harping on that more. I can only assume that's because of Trump's prodigial ability to gish-gallop from one blunder to the next, keeping people distracted from more serious shit going on.
diagrammatiks
Well-Known Member
I mean don't conflate defending billionaires with saying billionaires aren't the problem.
There are very few multi-billionaires that got there from actual salaried cash.
Musk is kind of an edge case but most of of the highest paid executive positions are at 50 to 100 million a year. Which means it would take 10 years to generate 1 billion dollars of individual income.
Now, most of these salaries are structured to deliberately avoid taxes. That's a problem sure but that's also fixable.
The majority of the richest people are rich because they have significant stock ownership in super large corporations.
Amazon is worth over a trillion dollars right now. Bezos owns a little over ten percent of amazon which makes his worth over a hundred billion.
Does that mean amazon is hoarding a trillion dollars. nope.
Amazon's never even seen a trillion dollars at one time. The valuation is based on a whole bunch of people deciding that's what it should be traded it.
On top of that 40 percent of amazon is owned by mutual funds, retirement plans, and individual investors.
Does that mean that Bezos is hoarding a 180 billion dollars. no. He would never be able to liquidate that much at one time without severely impacting the valuation.
Blaming billionaires doesn't get you anywhere. Understanding all the different parts that contribute to that net worth and implementing policy that effects those components is what we need to do.
Tax the shit out of the them. Tax the crap out of corporations too. There's still a lot of other things to fix.
so many sound bites of oh if we only taxed some of the 180 billion we could feed all these people or give people money. That's not how this works. That money doesn't exist.
Eh, sort of. A lot of people targeting billionaires support taxing transactions. In a sense that *would be* a tax on this sum of money that doesn't physically exist somewhere as cash.
tacotiklah
I am Denko (´･ω･`)
I think you're really missing out on a lot of what's being said if you think that's the ONLY thing people want. There's a hell of a lot more that can be done and anyone with an IQ higher than freezer temperature can recognize that. The point is that there are places like raising the tax rate on the ultra-wealthy to start out and work from there. Or hell, a better and more immediate fix would be to bring back anti-trust laws and other shit that republicans gutted and deregulated the hell out of. That would probably do even more than taxing/eating the rich, but I'm for both.
diagrammatiks
Well-Known Member
they'd have to realize the gains first. then tax it. that's fine. So we force him to sell shares?
@tacotiklah The irony of the US wanting to ban TikTok and force a sale to Microsoft, after they forced Microsoft to split in half 20 years ago isn't lost on me. There's a number of obscene telecom mergers being allowed to go on that would've never happened in previous decades.
diagrammatiks
Well-Known Member
narad
Progressive metal and politics
I wouldn't mind seeing Trump threaten to nuke North Korea in the form of song to the melody of "Rocket Man"?"
Spaced Out Ace
Well-Known Member
Fuck Microsoft. Tired of their near monopoly. I'm not super pro Apple, but I prefer Mac over Windows. I'd much rather just have Linux on my devices, though. I don't see Microsoft keeping any data safe on TikTok or elsewhere. Even if they don't outright hand it over, it'll be hacked and leaked.
Spaced Out Ace
Well-Known Member
"TwitTok" can fuck off.
Spaced Out Ace
Well-Known Member
And by the way, the idea that a dickhead like Gates, who chastised a community that was mostly open source, will ethically run medical practices (testing, administering, etc.) is absolute lunacy. He can have my dose of his vaccine.
fantom
Misses his 6 strings
Linus Torvalds dick-o-meter is off the charts next to Bill Gates. And I'm pretty sure he chastised the open source community far worse than Gates ever has.
Spaced Out Ace
Well-Known Member
And the Linux community said, "yeah, that's cute, Linus, but fuck you."
My teacher/advisor in college would pronounce "linux" pretty weirdly compared to everyone else. I eventually asked why (though I don't think many others bothered), and apparently it was based on how Linus Torvald pronounced his name. Only to later find out that Linus has to further correct people that it isn't "Lye-nus" or "leenus," or some shit like that. I told him, "if I ever meet him, I'm going to tell LYE-nus to shut the hell up." He got a laugh out of that.
And Gates' dick-o-meter far surpasses his opinions on the open source community.
diagrammatiks
Well-Known Member
it's clearly pronounced like the peanuts character.
tacotiklah
I am Denko (´･ω･`)
Mostly related to the topic via the worship of meritocracy, youtuber Vaush does a damn good takedown of it via shitting on Tim Poole (alt-right dude that lies and claims to be a lefty) and Tim's claim that because he's a millionaire, anyone can be. Worth listening to:
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Drew
Forum MVP
Not being above tilting at a few windmills on my lunch break, I'll take the bait.I just don't get the white knighting of the super rich.
I think it's a question of misplaced priorities.I have no problems at all with the "super rich." Ignoring for the sake of discussion the problem of defining "rich" vs "super rich," I don't think there's anything inherently evil with having a ton of money, be that one million, one billion, or one trillion dollars.
I have a HUGE problem with anyone in America being unable to put a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs, and food on their table. I think we as a country need to take aggressive policy steps to address these problems and ensure that all Americans, and residents of America, have access to at least the bare necessities to live an acceptable life. No one should go hungry, no one should be exposed to the elements, no one should be denied healthcare - you know, the basics.
I think a problem that the American left has, speaking as an American liberal, is that oftentimes we confuse the first with the second. Poverty SHOULD be eradicated. If "ultra-wealth" has to be eradicated to get that done, then so be it. But, eradicating "ultra wealth" isn't necessarily a necessary precondition of eradicating poverty, yet pretty consistently the left - and especially the progressive left - makes eradicating "ultra wealth" an end unto itself, not a means. Handy example:
Why? Do we NEED to do this to eradicate poverty? Would just broadening the tax base and raising the currently-low levels of progressive taxation while simplifying the process and elininating a lot of deductions that are out of reach of the poor (for example, I think it's ludicrous I can deduct my mortgage interest, but my neighbor can't deduct her rent) somehow demonstratably not be enough to address poverty in America? Or maybe slightly curtail military spending or, god forbid, our bloated police budgets? None of these are any less realistic solutions than seizing any dollar over the first billion, before you try telling me this is just a pipe dream. Listening to a lot of the left talk about income inequality, you could come away with the impression that eradicating wealth is the policy goal, not eradicating poverty. That, to me, is a problem.
I'm saying this not out of any self-interest - I do well enough but I'm hardly "rich" - or any belief I'm a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire, or out of any particular sympathy or sycophantic attraction to the "ultra rich." I just think we as liberals and as progressives spend WAY to much time attacking wealth, when we should be attacking poverty, and I think missing the distinction here makes it a lot easier to caricatures progressive politics on the right as mere forced redistribution that's bad for the country, rather than a desire to ensure the basic survival of all Americans, which is something that's undeniably good for the country. You're never going to convince a moderate that wealth is bad, but you probably CAN convince them poverty is bad, and that's where our focus really needs to be.
If at the end of the day after increasing and fixing our tax code we've ended homelessness and hunger and we've instituted universal access to health care, and every working American is earning a living wage, and we still have billionaires, I mean, you'd have to be crazy to call that a policy failure, is my take. And yet, most of the progressive left's rhetoric is that we START by eliminating billionaires. I think we've got that backwards.
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