I'm not an economist or finance person, so I don't know why we really ended up where we are. I think a lot of people in this thread, and most of the non-investment-wealthy people in the US, would say it's because of lobbying and so forth to let the rich get richer. That may be true. But I am open to the idea that research and modeling points to this being good overall even if it appears to be (or: is) unfair to 'average' Americans.
I'd like to see some (comprehensible to a layperson) discussion about what would happen if all income - wages, tips, gifts, inheritance, interest, dividends, capital gains, etc. etc. - was treated dollar for dollar equally from a tax perspective. I don't understand why it couldn't be, or why it shouldn't be.
if it was only Jeff Bezos he would be worth more than a Trillion.
Jeff started it, and did efficiently, so that he didn't had to sell out to too much VC.
He manages one of the most efficient companies in the world. and plenty of employees have equity, I wish companies here did the same.
Really? He was being literally treated as a god among man. And his word was rule there, and not just for the slaves.
Bezos is literally nothing. It's just that nowadays the average person has more power, and the average bourgeois has even much more power, but the old rulers could do anything.
>Bezos could hire a small army of mercenaries and defeat any cesar/king/emperor of the past.
The kind of army that governments would allow Bezos to own couldn't defeat the strongest rulers in the past unless he got very lucky and managed to pull a Cortes and ally with another much larger force.
And now we are in territory of bizarre wargame scenario.
If the army of the past came to present they are dead in the water. All you need is to know where their leader is and assassinate them, sniper rifle, explosives thrown from helicopter etc. You don't need military equipment, as the past people have no experience and knowledge of mode technology.
Other way around - modern army in the past - is a bit too complex (too many variables/scenarios) to write in a comment. That is territory of a podcast episode or two :)
What's the problem with there beeing people with 100000 times my NW? specially if it's a guy that created one of the biggest business on the planet?
The problem is there being persons that can't afford to eat, but blaming bezos would only be fair if the way he got his money actually contributed to the lack of basic needs meet by the needed.
I think the standard counter argument to this is essentially:
1. Governments are ultimately responsible for this.
2. These social safety nets are funded by taxes
3. The specific man in this specific story runs a company that as recently as a few months ago was labelled the worst offender for tax avoidance. [1]
4. Jeff is now wealthier as a result of avoiding taxes on both a company and personal level
5. People who otherwise might have had a hot meal and a roof over their heads now don't.
There is a whole separate counter argument to what I have just said about how it wasn't technically illegal to avoid the taxes using the specific loopholes that he has used. My original comment about people are ultimately responsible for the kind of society they want to live in speaks directly to this.
Should we maybe think about closing some of those loopholes and getting a lot more serious about tax avoidance among the top 0.1% of companies and people in the world?
I think saying poverty is the issue is heading in the right direction, but I would even go further and say that poverty is not the issue, but that conditions not improving over time is the issue.
Most humans (except maybe Buddhists and Daoists) are on a hedonic treadmill. So long as their condition today is better than it was yesterday, they generally derive greater contentment than being better off in absolute terms and then plateauing.
This "most people were better off over time" is the stuff stable societies are made of. It's why post WWII America did so well. It's why China has been doing well for 20-30 years now. When most everyone is doing better today than yesterday and believes they will be doing better tomorrow than today, they are content.
Even poverty is tolerable if things are improving over time because you adjust your expectations.
The lack of improvement over time is what makes prisons for example such an awful punishment. You're placed in a state where your conditions are not only worse in absolute terms but there is no prospect of it really improving until your really.
I also think that too much information or mis-informations, or simply bias or selective information can damage the way you perceive if thinks are getting better or worse, but that's another topic.
I guess that depends on how you define poverty. When I first moved to San Francisco, I slept on an air mattress for about 8 months and ate for about $2-3 a day and spent about $200 a month for health insurance. I walked most places at the time with the occasional muni fare. So my total monthly expenses was about $300 to $350 month once you include necessary incidentals. I don't think I had more than $300 in my bank account at one time. The only large purchase I made in that time period was a $200 pressure cooker, which I used to cook the beans I ate. I would buy black beans, kidney beans and rice in 20lb bags.
Would you consider this poverty? Cost-wise and earning-wise most people would consider it poverty, but it didn't feel like poverty because I knew what I was doing and I adjusted my expectations accordingly. I reckon I lived on about $2700 over those 8 months in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Would I want to do it again? No. Could I do it again if I had to? Yes.
What's the issue?
amazon pays taxes in multiple ways, what's left it goes into amazon stock value.
I think it's perfectly fine to only pay the tax once you sell, why should you keep paying a tax just for owning?
With his portfolio, his salary wouldn't be able to cover a a simple 1% annual tax.
Now the issue is USA capital gain tax being lower than dividend tax, that's completely bonkers and encourages ridiculous uses of buybacks (which amazon has never done).
The capital gain tax should be the same as dividend tax
From watching from afar, it seems that right now he makes sure amazon grows just to be able to finance Blue Origin from his own pockets.
He is just a man with ambitions, whose "crime" people call out is amazon not paying profit taxes...
With all the taxes from the non cash business amazon brings, that is the least ethical concern about amazon, specially since most of time they indeed have no profit as they reinvest.
Now the warehouse conditions is another thing, but hey it's america, those are spoken about because every its like that but amazon is a big target.
Amazon is a big corp like any other it has a bunch of faults, but to point Bezos simply evil over it is ridiculous, he does not have full control of amazon like Zuck has over FB
I think that’s worth discussing (op asked what there is to discuss). I don’t think rich people are evil. But I wish we could come up with mechanisms for them to share their wealth with their employees who helped them build that wealth.
I know where you are coming from, but that is basically what the salary is for. We just have the bad situation that not everyone is in a driver seat to negotiate his salary (or have a choice). I'm not sure how it is in the USA, but in germany for example, there is minimum wage. I think the society and politicians are responsible to make sure that employees are treated gracefully and to establish mechanisms.
Ya I am split on the issue myself. The USA has min wage, but it’s pretty low and it there is more inequality than just that. It just feels like execs get more than their fair share. Like when the US is compared to Japan, Japanese execs have less extreme inequality among employees in the same company. I wish there were ways to incentivize that. No individual human needs to be worth a billion dollars.
And while it’s true that the execs have earned something, studies show that there is more luck and randomness to their performance than personality-cults will acknowledge. It’s annoying that they are entitled so much wealth when studies shows that performance of their companies is much more Influenced by other factors than that one execs work alone.
A person or group with immense power can trivially achieve great good.
However, if you consider systems A and B, where system A is a bit better at using immense power for good than system B, you will notice that system A will result in a lot more good than system B. Therefore, if you care even a little bit about good things happening, you will be very keen to have system A instead of system B.
The fact that someone with immense power does something good becomes a lot less reassuring when you consider the opportunity cost of not having someone or some people who are a lot better at achieving good have that immense power.
Someone a lot better a doing good were not apparently good enough at getting the resources to do good.
You can't just dump a lot of power into someone you think that does good, because you have know way to know if (s)he is even able to manage that to start to do go.
At least bezos continues to improve the world infrastructure through amazon, and financing the space industry though blue origin.
If (s)he can't get/create resources, how can he do good? It seems you would just put a waster in power.
It's the difference between charity orgs with fading impact, and the ones that change people lives. Same applies to corporations, plenty changed the world for the better.
But this begets the question: How do we know that this system with Jeff Bezos is not already System A?
There are a lot of people who think they know what System A is and believe we are in System B but there's no lack of examples of people who get their chance to implement what they believe is System B and cause far more misery because they didn't know we were in System A (relatively speaking)
Personally, a system that generally rewards competency and is based on voluntary transactions to me is trending towards System A because people who amass power in such a system and maintain it generally do so because they are good at getting results through transactions that on the whole are generally voluntary and mutually beneficial.
>Personally, a system that generally rewards competency and is based on voluntary transactions to me is trending towards System A because people who amass power in such a system and maintain it generally do so because they are good at getting results through transactions that on the whole are generally voluntary and mutually beneficial.
It's easy to imagine systems which have more freedom and are better at rewarding competency. Like anarcho-syndicalism. If freedom and the rewarding of competency are what you value, why dismiss systems such as this? Throughout history humanity has gone through several systems. I'm not sure your justifications for believing the current one is the best would hold up to scrutiny.
The problem with more equal systems is that no one has that immense power to do good. So you end up needing to solve huge coordination problems that historically we are very bad at in order to achieve such projects. Governments have a bad track record of achieving such things relative to the private sector and they seem to be the best vehicle available for said coordination problems.
You can easily get too much debt if you are not careful doing those kind of things. Most people just check that the debt payments fit in their budget, but they forget their budget might shrink.
US families are drown into debt, in fact most families live paycheck to paycheck, so i wouldn't give that advice of using debt event without interest. I would only give such advice to people I already know that can take care of themselves financially. (As in know how to actually manage money, not about being rich or poor)
And there is another benefit of paying in the act: its off your mind, one less thing to worry about. Might not be the most efficient but is the the one that makes you worry less.
