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On July 19 2024 17:10 KT_Elwood wrote:Big companies need to be publicly traded at below 1000$ per stock (auto split). This would allow to take away the (mostly inherited) wealth that some people wield. Just splitt the excess wealth amongst the employees.
And companies would split at 995 and never get affected by this.
Generally stock prices are 'made up', but market values (price x quantity) should be a more stable measure.
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On July 19 2024 10:35 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2024 09:55 Gahlo wrote:On July 19 2024 08:54 Incognoto wrote:
Should Biden drop out, who would be the most likely Democratic nominee? It's gotta be Kamala or else there'd be a lot of people upset a woman/brown person got passed over. Not as many as people seem to think, but the people that would be most bothered by it (outside of Harris's hired political circle) are mostly the same people the Democrats always tell to suck it up and fall in line anyway, because the alternative is so much worse. So while Harris is the obvious procedural pick and it would be messed up to skip over her, I wouldn't put it past Democrats to do it and demand those people fall in line or else. That there's still even talk about it not being Harris is only because some top Dems are seriously considering/pushing for it not being her (usually by way of advocating an open/blitz/convention primary process).
All the more reason to not alienate them further.
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On July 19 2024 17:10 KT_Elwood wrote:Big companies need to be publicly traded at below 1000$ per stock (auto split). This would allow to take away the (mostly inherited) wealth that some people wield. Just splitt the excess wealth amongst the employees.
Thats not how the markets work. This and the tax "solutions" ealier in the page just show a lack of grasp of tax systems and finance basics.
These comments are more like the rural dude complaining because he is poor and throwing rural wisdom at complex topics. Which is something very surprising to find in this thread.
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On July 19 2024 14:05 Fleetfeet wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2024 13:34 Simberto wrote:On July 19 2024 10:50 Fleetfeet wrote:On July 19 2024 10:01 ZeroByte13 wrote:On July 19 2024 06:07 Simberto wrote:
It is basically impossible to grasp just how absurdly wealthy a billionaire is. And we have people who hoard hundreds of billions, like some kind of dragon. Most of billionaires don't have their billions in cash, right? They have them mosty as shares in huge companies - usually the ones they created or helped to themselves, even if not always. Someone here proposed to restrict the max wealth size to 1 billion dollars. Ok, let's say I founded a company and it became really big. I might be worth 2 billion dollars, but I don't have them in cash, I'm worth 2 billions because I have 20% of shares in a company with market evaluation of 10 billions. So how would you restrict it? I'll have to lose (to whom?) 10% of my shares to make it less than 1 billion? But next month something happens with the market and the company's value drops - do you propose to give these shares back or what, to compensate? How would it work? I'm not saying billionaires shouldn't have high taxes or it's ok for them to abuse their power, etc. But " hoarding hundreds of billions" sounds like they have Scrooge McDuck-like vault with gold or something. I agree that the 1b solution wouldn't even work on paper. It's already the case that a lot of net worth isn't necessarily personal, and at best you'd get certain rich people to diversify their assets in less meaningful ways, like moving 800m worth of shares to each of their kids and/or to other countries etc. Besides, it's currently an issue that policing the rich is difficult on account of them being rich. Even if you could get a capped networth policy in place, I have no faith it'd be policed adequately. I agree that a hard cap at 1 billion, as is sometimes proposed, is probably not the way to go. Luckily, that is not what i would propose. My main steps would be: 1 (incredibly easy): Make sure that the rich actually pay the taxes the owe. This means funding the IRS to the point that it can actually prosecute tax crimes by the rich, and not just have barely enough personnel to prosecute those who cannot afford fancy lawyers. Luckily, this costs negative money, as it actually earns more than it costs. 2 (much harder, but necessary for anything else): Reduce the absurd amounts of influence rich people have by limitting how much they can spend on "elections" aka bribing politicians. 3 (also kinda hard): Massive inheritance taxes on anything beyond a few million. Inheritance is very easy to tax, because it is completely unearned money that some people who already won the birth lottery and got incredible education and connections just get gifted for no reason other than that they were born to the right parents. To avoid/reduce a class of hereditary nobility, we need to tax that free money. 4 ( starting to get political): Have a wealth tax. To avoid money clumping into ever increasing piles at the top, while normal people have to fight for the scraps, we need to tax those piles themselves. The US is in the unique position where they can actually do that without the super rich easily escaping with their money, since they already tax US citizens abroad. 5 (maybe more controversial and potentially more problematic) : Tax changes in net worth, not income. If you were worth 200 billion last year, and are worth 250 billion now, surely you have gained 50 billion. Which should be taxable. Kwark could probably figure out a way how to do that in detail without it completely breaking everything. A lot of this goes over my head, as there are too many moving parts for me to track and ponder legislation about. However, don't some of these already exist? I'd be surprised if there weren't limits and controls on how much a person or corporation can donate to a political party, and those limits were just flatly circumvented. In fact, isn't that what the point of superPACs is? There's also a 'wealth tax' in the form of tax brackets, which also doesn't seem to work correctly and is just often circumvented.
I am not talking about progressive income tax. I am talking about a wealth tax. A tax you pay based on how much you own, not on how much you earn.
But yeah, these are not easy questions, and people with a lot of money (and thus power) are very opposed to people even thinking about stuff like that, and have very good systems in place to prevent too much of that from happening. But i still think that this is, next to the climate problematic, basically the most important political question right now. Ever increasing wealth inequality leads to so many problems, and if we are not careful, we will get a new heridetary aristocracy and hereditary serfs not based in some divine right, but just in pure wealth. We are already very strongly on the path to that.
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So... Say there was a death tax of 100% above a certain threshold of wealth, would buying a large enough life annuities totally circumvent it technically, but then wouldn't it still accomplish the goal of wealth redistribution eventually if you modify the taxes on insurance companies in some way.
EDIT: confused myself as no one would actually do the above they would gift away it to their families and not essentially spend it before death...
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On July 19 2024 17:32 Gorsameth wrote:
Elon Musk has been openly pushing Nazi propaganda for a while, as in quoting and retweeting actual nazis on twitter.
There hasn't been any question about which side of the fence he is on for a long while.
It's crazy to me that this doesn't end his career like it would have just 10 years ago.
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On July 19 2024 22:04 Incognoto wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2024 17:32 Gorsameth wrote:
Elon Musk has been openly pushing Nazi propaganda for a while, as in quoting and retweeting actual nazis on twitter.
There hasn't been any question about which side of the fence he is on for a long while. It's crazy to me that this doesn't end his career like it would have just 10 years ago.
It's the Trump era 
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On July 19 2024 21:38 Byo wrote:
So... Say there was a death tax of 100% above a certain threshold of wealth, would buying a large enough life annuities totally circumvent it technically, but then wouldn't it still accomplish the goal of wealth redistribution eventually if you modify the taxes on insurance companies in some way.
EDIT: confused myself as no one would actually do the above they would gift away it to their families and not essentially spend it before death...
In my country gifts get taxed the same as inheritance (its direct translation is "tax on the transfer of inheritance or donation"). On paper at least. In practice, people try to circumvent this to varying degress of success, especially if you're rich enough to afford the accountants and lawyers necessary to do so.
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Northern Ireland25476 Posts
On July 19 2024 17:32 Gorsameth wrote:
Elon Musk has been openly pushing Nazi propaganda for a while, as in quoting and retweeting actual nazis on twitter.
There hasn't been any question about which side of the fence he is on for a long while.
I mean, there shouldn’t be much of a question but that doesn’t stop folks in this day and age. ‘He’s not x he just cares about free speech’ is a common one that crops up all the time for example.
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Northern Ireland25476 Posts
On July 19 2024 19:59 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2024 14:05 Fleetfeet wrote:On July 19 2024 13:34 Simberto wrote:On July 19 2024 10:50 Fleetfeet wrote:On July 19 2024 10:01 ZeroByte13 wrote:On July 19 2024 06:07 Simberto wrote:
It is basically impossible to grasp just how absurdly wealthy a billionaire is. And we have people who hoard hundreds of billions, like some kind of dragon. Most of billionaires don't have their billions in cash, right? They have them mosty as shares in huge companies - usually the ones they created or helped to themselves, even if not always. Someone here proposed to restrict the max wealth size to 1 billion dollars. Ok, let's say I founded a company and it became really big. I might be worth 2 billion dollars, but I don't have them in cash, I'm worth 2 billions because I have 20% of shares in a company with market evaluation of 10 billions. So how would you restrict it? I'll have to lose (to whom?) 10% of my shares to make it less than 1 billion? But next month something happens with the market and the company's value drops - do you propose to give these shares back or what, to compensate? How would it work? I'm not saying billionaires shouldn't have high taxes or it's ok for them to abuse their power, etc. But " hoarding hundreds of billions" sounds like they have Scrooge McDuck-like vault with gold or something. I agree that the 1b solution wouldn't even work on paper. It's already the case that a lot of net worth isn't necessarily personal, and at best you'd get certain rich people to diversify their assets in less meaningful ways, like moving 800m worth of shares to each of their kids and/or to other countries etc. Besides, it's currently an issue that policing the rich is difficult on account of them being rich. Even if you could get a capped networth policy in place, I have no faith it'd be policed adequately. I agree that a hard cap at 1 billion, as is sometimes proposed, is probably not the way to go. Luckily, that is not what i would propose. My main steps would be: 1 (incredibly easy): Make sure that the rich actually pay the taxes the owe. This means funding the IRS to the point that it can actually prosecute tax crimes by the rich, and not just have barely enough personnel to prosecute those who cannot afford fancy lawyers. Luckily, this costs negative money, as it actually earns more than it costs. 2 (much harder, but necessary for anything else): Reduce the absurd amounts of influence rich people have by limitting how much they can spend on "elections" aka bribing politicians. 3 (also kinda hard): Massive inheritance taxes on anything beyond a few million. Inheritance is very easy to tax, because it is completely unearned money that some people who already won the birth lottery and got incredible education and connections just get gifted for no reason other than that they were born to the right parents. To avoid/reduce a class of hereditary nobility, we need to tax that free money. 4 ( starting to get political): Have a wealth tax. To avoid money clumping into ever increasing piles at the top, while normal people have to fight for the scraps, we need to tax those piles themselves. The US is in the unique position where they can actually do that without the super rich easily escaping with their money, since they already tax US citizens abroad. 5 (maybe more controversial and potentially more problematic) : Tax changes in net worth, not income. If you were worth 200 billion last year, and are worth 250 billion now, surely you have gained 50 billion. Which should be taxable. Kwark could probably figure out a way how to do that in detail without it completely breaking everything. A lot of this goes over my head, as there are too many moving parts for me to track and ponder legislation about. However, don't some of these already exist? I'd be surprised if there weren't limits and controls on how much a person or corporation can donate to a political party, and those limits were just flatly circumvented. In fact, isn't that what the point of superPACs is? There's also a 'wealth tax' in the form of tax brackets, which also doesn't seem to work correctly and is just often circumvented. I am not talking about progressive income tax. I am talking about a wealth tax. A tax you pay based on how much you own, not on how much you earn. But yeah, these are not easy questions, and people with a lot of money (and thus power) are very opposed to people even thinking about stuff like that, and have very good systems in place to prevent too much of that from happening. But i still think that this is, next to the climate problematic, basically the most important political question right now. Ever increasing wealth inequality leads to so many problems, and if we are not careful, we will get a new heridetary aristocracy and hereditary serfs not based in some divine right, but just in pure wealth. We are already very strongly on the path to that.
Pretty much
Granted I don’t think billionaires are really the main problem here, they’re just very visibly the worst manifestation of it, and symbolically very powerful in that sense.
The overall trend to wider disparities is the core problem, for me and the increasing number of the billionaire class is just how it manifests most visibly. If one focuses on tackling that issue you’re still going to end up with a very lopsided spread of wealth, it’ll just be a little less extreme at one end of the scale.
We also end up with a very tricky scenario when we factor in climate change as well, in combination. Joe and Jane Public, realistically are going to have to take a hit to make a meaningful dent in tackling climate change. Many of whom don’t even believe in it. For those that do, it’s very politically challenging to make them take a hit in relative living standards when such grotesque inequality is so manifestly visible.
Within our current rough paradigm you almost need to drastically reduce inequality and raise tangible living standards up first, so you can make the sacrifices needed for climate action palatable for many people I’d imagine.
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On July 19 2024 22:30 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2024 17:32 Gorsameth wrote:
Elon Musk has been openly pushing Nazi propaganda for a while, as in quoting and retweeting actual nazis on twitter.
There hasn't been any question about which side of the fence he is on for a long while. I mean, there shouldn’t be much of a question but that doesn’t stop folks in this day and age. ‘He’s not x he just cares about free speech’ is a common one that crops up all the time for example.
He's not a nazi he just follows nazis on twitter because he has genuine concern over the levels of immigration.
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United States42778 Posts
On July 19 2024 17:10 KT_Elwood wrote:Big companies need to be publicly traded at below 1000$ per stock (auto split). This would allow to take away the (mostly inherited) wealth that some people wield. Just splitt the excess wealth amongst the employees.
That doesn’t make sense.
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Stock splits dont actually decrease any value right? Its just taking the same sum of money and creating more shares to distribute it over? If you own 1 share and theres a split you now have 2 shares but the total sum of money is the same?
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United States42778 Posts
On July 19 2024 23:37 Sadist wrote:
Stock splits dont actually decrease any value right? Its just taking the same sum of money and creating more shares to distribute it over? If you own 1 share and theres a split you now have 2 shares but the total sum of money is the same?
Correct. So the nominal price of a share is meaningless and so keeping it under an arbitrary cap is meaningless.
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Northern Ireland25476 Posts
On July 19 2024 22:53 Jockmcplop wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2024 22:30 WombaT wrote:On July 19 2024 17:32 Gorsameth wrote:
Elon Musk has been openly pushing Nazi propaganda for a while, as in quoting and retweeting actual nazis on twitter.
There hasn't been any question about which side of the fence he is on for a long while. I mean, there shouldn’t be much of a question but that doesn’t stop folks in this day and age. ‘He’s not x he just cares about free speech’ is a common one that crops up all the time for example. He's not a nazi he just follows nazis on twitter because he has genuine concern over the levels of immigration.
Interesting
Cannae remember but I think that’s what Musk sticks on things he’s spotlighting while ‘just asking questions’
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The general concept of reducing the concentration of wealth by distributing it to the workers that generated it is good. The mechanisms to do that get a little trickier, particularly when you want to preserve capitalism.
My $0.02 is that no business needs profit. They need revenues in excess of various costs, but profit can always just be turned into wages, assets, development, etc.
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United States42778 Posts
On July 20 2024 00:02 GreenHorizons wrote:
The general concept of reducing the concentration of wealth by distributing it to the workers that generated it is good. The mechanisms to do that get a little trickier, particularly when you want to preserve capitalism.
My $0.02 is that no business needs profit. They need revenues in excess of various costs, but profit can always just be turned into wages, assets, development, etc.
Profit is compensation for risk. If you’re not going to be compensated for risk then it is better to liquidate the business entirely and take the known value of the assets than to run the business and risk those values declining.
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On July 20 2024 00:02 GreenHorizons wrote:
The general concept of reducing the concentration of wealth by distributing it to the workers that generated it is good. The mechanisms to do that get a little trickier, particularly when you want to preserve capitalism.
My $0.02 is that no business needs profit. They need revenues in excess of various costs, but profit can always just be turned into wages, assets, development, etc.
Inevitably money ends up in the hands of the extremely wealthy.
There's no way around it in the current system. Any redistribution of wealth immediately starts trickling up, and obviously when it gets in the hands of rich it all gets hidden in various worldwide low tax economies.
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On July 20 2024 00:04 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2024 00:02 GreenHorizons wrote:
The general concept of reducing the concentration of wealth by distributing it to the workers that generated it is good. The mechanisms to do that get a little trickier, particularly when you want to preserve capitalism.
My $0.02 is that no business needs profit. They need revenues in excess of various costs, but profit can always just be turned into wages, assets, development, etc. Profit is compensation for risk. If you’re not going to be compensated for risk then it is better to liquidate the business entirely and take the known value of the assets than to run the business and risk those values declining.
Sounds like the start of a case for a risk wage, not a reason profit is necessary to me.
On July 20 2024 00:08 Jockmcplop wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2024 00:02 GreenHorizons wrote:
The general concept of reducing the concentration of wealth by distributing it to the workers that generated it is good. The mechanisms to do that get a little trickier, particularly when you want to preserve capitalism.
My $0.02 is that no business needs profit. They need revenues in excess of various costs, but profit can always just be turned into wages, assets, development, etc. Inevitably money ends up in the hands of the extremely wealthy. There's no way around it in the current system. Any redistribution of wealth immediately starts trickling up, and obviously when it gets in the hands of rich it all gets hidden in various worldwide low tax economies.
Hence the bit about the mechanisms being a little trickier (I was being sardonic) when you're trying to preserve capitalism. 
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Talking about wealth redistribution without addressing wage gaps seems pointless. wages tied to productivity and limits on ceo salaries (including bonuses) compared to 'the workers' would do a lot more for the common people then trying to limit wealth via the stock market or inheritance taxes.
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EPT
