The recently proposed wealth taxes (e.g., Elizabeth Warren’s proposal) that work the way you’ve described would only start on wealth above $50 million.
So your framing of such a tax as a way to steal from your working-class retirement funds is incredibly disingenuous. Unless, of course, you have 8+ figures of wealth. In which case I hope one day you’re made to pay your fair share to society.
Once a new tax is imposed, its limits and brackets are probably the easiest things to change about it. Moreover, if they aren’t inflation-adjusted, the Fed will make sure we’ll all get there pretty soon, just by printing money like they are doing these days.
Anybody who has any legally earned wealth has already paid his fair share to the society by simply creating the corresponding value. Usually value creators get a few percent of the created value, the rest being enjoyed by the society, by the rest us.
>Once a new tax is imposed, its limits and brackets are probably the easiest things to change about it.
Just introduce a tax on money held in bank accounts. Doesn't matter if its above $100k or $1 million.
>Moreover, if they aren’t inflation-adjusted, the Fed will make sure we’ll all get there pretty soon, just by printing money like they are doing these days.
When people are stupid enough to "invest" into money you run into an obvious problem. The supply of money is limited. Every dollar that is being saved makes it harder to save the next. So you have to create new money as people save money. The conventional way is to run a government deficit. The better way is to stop regressive saving in money by introducing a negative interest rate for big accounts.
Investments don't matter. Even if the rich HODL all existing stocks someone can start a new company that you can invest into. Old businesses can also issue new shares without people being angry. None of this is zero sum. But saving money? Oh boy, that is the most zero sum way to "invest". The only reason the system hasn't collapsed is that the Fed is making sure that every time a dollar is being hoarded there is a new one to replace it.
So Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (and other stupidly rich executives) created hundreds of billions of dollars of value themselves?
Of course not. They got their through exploitation. Any profit that a business has is value not being paid back to the actual workers who created the value of the company through their labor.
Nobody has ever worked for $100 billion. Or $1 billion. Or $100 million.
If your skill is moving boxes onto a delivery truck your work is not more useful/valuable as part of Amazon than at a small traditional company with no scalable internet components. The excess value in these companies should flow to those who took risks to set them in motion and continue leading them. Asserting this ownership premium is theft is pretty ridiculous on the face of it.
Also, imagine if the guy loading trucks for Amazon did make 100x more money just because he’s connected to a high-growth internet company. The economy would be thrown into chaos because no logistics workers would be willing to do less remunerative but essential work like unloading food at the grocery store without substantial wage increases that get passed to the consumer as higher food/gas/delivery prices. Many sectors without productivity growth would get annihilated by Baumol’s cost disease, and consumers would have to spend a much larger share of their income on anything that is trucked around (which is basically everything we buy).
> Nobody has ever worked for $100 billion. Or $1 billion. Or $100 million.
Of course. However, some of us had had a positive impact on the society measurable in Trillions, usually through ideas and entrepreneurship. It is preferably for us a society to encourage such endeavors.
Neither Bezos nor Musk have created that value by themselves. They did it together with investors, partners, employees and clients, all of whom were rightly and fairly compensated and became better because of it.
The only unhappy are those who did not participate to any of it, but they have no right to complain, just envy.
> The only unhappy are those who did not participate to any of it, but they have no right to complain, just envy.
What is right or wrong is just semantics, in reality a mob with pitchforks doesn't care about semantics.
Humans have forced the redistribution of resources concentrated in few hands since the beginning of time
As an entrepreneur the quality of life you provide to people has a really short shelf life, as soon as the hedonistic treadmill adjusts , people start looking at the monetary reward that the entrepreneur got for providing such quality of life...and all of a sudden they think it's not fair because hedonistic treadmill made that monetary reward becomes excessive in retrospect.
Bezos critics have been using Amazon in the current form ever since the early 2010s now, and Amazon rate of innovation has dropped, so hedonistic treadmill did catch up and now they want Bezos head.
Same thing happened with Microsoft. The transition from 3.1 to Win95 was something which shocked the whole world, people were talking about honorary President Bill Gates.
Rate of innovation slowed down from Win95 to Win98 and all of a sudden people began looking at Bill Gates 150B wealth back in 1999 and pressure mounted to break up Microsoft and arrest Bill Gates and expropriate his wealth
> And the answer is: when the rest of society slows down, suddenly those who couldn’t keep up don’t feel so behind.
Well said. This goes beyond even the socioeconomic causes of suicide that you mentioned and surely includes people with depression, (social) anxiety disorders, etc.
As an anecdotal data point, I have social anxiety, and depression diagnosed and I have been feeling relieved by the whole thing.
Going to office etc, left me with constant worries and thought cycles, energy spent on analysing and overthinking social situations. Now there's just video calls/chat messages I have to worry about and there's fewer attack vectors for worries there.
Same with random/events parties happening, even with friends I never felt very comfortable attending. Now I always had the perfect excuse to just stay at home.
Your implication is that Bezos’ employees were inconsequential to the creation of all that brand new wealth. Surely you don't actually believe that and this is just your ideological rhetoric to further your politicized beliefs?
You’re clearly not being charitable to her if you read her tweet and thought she meant Amazon has to be broken up because their tweets are snarky towards her. She’s saying that Big Tech in general is so powerful—they can do whatever they want—and then snap back at politicians in snarky tweets without a care.
You’re completely missing the point I was making. It’s not about the snarky tweets. It’s about how big and powerful corporations have become.
I don’t know why I’m surprised; HN has shown me more and more that otherwise intelligent people are more than happy to support corporate friendly narratives and anti-progressive ones.
I don’t feel like Blind is a good source. Selection bias at play. Especially with disgruntled employees or the ones who only care about optimizing earnings.
Well if you listen to some Tesla fanatics including boss man Elon himself, traditional car companies carry too much baggage from their ICE platforms to transition to EVs successfully, so all this “experience” they have is a net drag.
Meanwhile outside the Tesla/Musk bubble, traditional car companies do not have QC issues like Tesla’s and are even outselling Tesla in major EV markets like Europe.
At least Musk is finally admitting to the QC issues.
Tesla is not the only EV car on the market anymore.
The top selling EV in Europe in 2020 was the Renault Zoe, Volkswagen is catching up fast (they sold 56k ID 3 despite only going on sale in the second half of last year VS 85k Model 3 over 12 months), Tesla model 3 was second, but numbers are dropping.
If we are talking about quality, I think the new BMW and Mercedes will take the lead in the segment Tesla is being marketed right now.
Tesla numbers are good thanks to Norway buying a lot of them.
> AFAIK self driving as in unattended driving is not big in Europe, given that most of the driving happens in crowded cities and country roads.
In the UK at least they will not only have to work fine in very busy roads but also be fine in country lanes which are often very thin, very green, and pretty fast - this will be disproportionately a problem for Tesla's because this is where the rich live.
Dutch website is claiming that Renault Zoe R110 Life costs 33 590 [0]. Seems like I've missed 3500 subsidy from Dutch government.
Nobody is able to do true self driving like a taxi in city today. But it will be possible in this decade (I have 95% confidence) and it will be happening in Europe as well. Whoever achieves true, reliable, widely deployed self-driving first will crash competition. Car ownership will effectively disappear in the decade after that i.e. 2030 and later.
Yes, rural areas will probably be the last to switch since car density there is very low. But suburbs are certainly going to switch because it will make the life just much more pleasant. Drivers instead of paying attention to the road will be spending time on their phones. Instead of wasting time and space for parking they will just request cars on demand.
Yes, Musk is overly optimistic. On average you can double his predictions. And his missed predictions on self-driving are extreme even for him.
But Tesla is making progress. Maybe even more importantly, the world is making progress on fundamentals of machine learning. If you want more reliable estimate than Musk, then you can check forecast aggregators with established track record [0]. I've asked "When will Tesla self-driving taxis be available to Metaculus users?" [1] Metaculus being the forecast aggregator. Community predicts 25% before 2024, 50% before 2026, 75% before 2029, 95% before 2035.
I'm personally more aggressive and predict 95% before 2030.
I love how if Musk gets something wrong for years people who hate him relentlessly shit on him. However he has been right about so many other things, but those things are simply not talked about and all the experts who wrote op-eds telling him how wrong he was are long since forgotten.
And as soon as a prediction doesn't come true, they rejoice and celibate assuming because it hasn't come true in the original timeline it would never happen.
When SpaceX couldn't land the Falcon 9 for a couple years the amount of industry insider and SpaceX haters who celebrated was amazing to see, and now landing and re-flying boosters is beyond boring because it is so common.
I have seen this cycle so many times now. So, I guess sit around and feel superior for now, be sure in the fact that in 2027 nobody is gone remember all your comments.
I don't think it's useful to say traditional car companies are outselling Tesla in Europe; they're selling a differently positioned vehicle. It's like Android to Apple - $200 Android phones aren't "outselling" $1000 Apple phones in a lower income market.
Man people look at one statistic from Norway and simply make assumptions.
Tesla has 23% of the global BEV market, that is the same market share as 2019. And many of those other cars are small low range city cars. So in terms of BEV revenue Tesla is much more then 23%.
Tesla has focused on the US and China first. While VW and others had to focus on Europe first. To use that fact and argue 'even outselling Tesla in major EV markets' is just disingenuous.
Next, it simply not true that traditional car companies don't have QC issues. If you look at analysis you will see that other expensive cars are often not so much better then Tesla. In terms of safety, battery and drivetrain, we have seen traditional car companies have lots of issues.
Also, Tesla is not using market share in Europe because of Quality issues. That is simply what Tesla hater want to believe because it fit the narrative.
> According to a source with the Yang campaign, his revamped UBI plan would grant 500,000 New Yorkers in the greatest need an annual $2,000 - $5,000 through a program administered by the city’s Human Resources Administration, the same city agency that administers other benefits programs.
So it’s municipal-level welfare (means tested). Calling it scaled-back UBI is pretty disingenuous. Also, I wonder how well this works at the city level.
What would be the process for a homeless person from Baltimore to become a homeless NYC resident in order to take advantage of this? I'd imagine it's not as simple as just showing up in NYC. Serious question, just something I've never thought about.
That's the broader point about universal welfare. If there is no friction in someone moving from a place without it to a place with it, of course people will try to claim it from any place.
So unless they set up some kind of residency requirement or collect biometric info from the homeless and register them as NYC beneficiaries, I don't know what would keep homeless people from coming from other areas (other than, of course, a lack of money or transport).
Do they qualify as residents in this scheme? Seems unlikely, if just because it's difficult to decide whether someone asking for xxxx dollars is part of nyc if they don't have a home. Seems likely because they are in the most in need.
I can’t explain it to you, and from my first hand observation this is exactly what it creates.
Without going into details, people know how to get every type of aid from the government and live under virtual welfare for extended periods of time (well before retirement age). The total aid amounts to well over 10-30k easily.
I know people that take advantage of it and honestly I can’t believe we all foot the tax bill for it. It’s free money, people will find a way to get it, the same way corporations find tax havens.
The incentives aren’t right, and the loopholes too many. We cannot pay for freaking everything as there really is a moral hazard argument to be made here, especially when it’s obvious it’s misallocated.
Whenever I see a comment like this, it's hard not to take it personal. When my parents came to America as refugees, they wanted to come to CA specifically because there was already a community and an understanding that the social programs were better than the alternative of TX.
Of course they tried to take advantage of programs like food stamps. They took advantage of it because they met what the government considered as qualified. The alternative, which my parents did have to do at times, was skipping meals so their kids had enough to eat. It's not taking advantage of a system if the people meet the requirements. No one says they're taking advantage of a coupon at a grocery store, it's there to be used.
This argument doesn't really work without data/numbers to back it up. I'm pretty relaxed about some percentage of welfare going to people who are gaming the system and don't want to work as long as the people who need it are getting it.
In the UK: "A poll conducted by the Trades Union Congress in 2012 found that perceptions among the British public were that benefit fraud was high – on average people thought that 27% of the British welfare budget is claimed fraudulently; however, official UK Government figures have stated that the proportion of fraud stands at 0.7% of the total welfare budget in 2011/12."
Hard to know what percentage the people would accept in practice, but I've gotta suspect it's higher than the actual percentage that exists.
Not sure if you are talking about PPP loan fraud, loss carry forward, or some other scam that the extremely wealthy are able to pull but I'm interested to know which one!
As long as the cut-off is fairly simple, I really think a BI (as you call it) is a good idea.
This is from a UK perspective, but my opinion on this is partly practical (to avoid waste) and partly ethical as the ruling classes generally don't view poor people as being worthy of financial autonomy (They actually have more in common with socialists on this matter that they would be comfortable with).
We've just seen recently a scandal where the government, rather than just giving people money ("Money can be exchanged for goods and services."), has paid some contractor to dole out - at potentially significant cost, although the figure seems to be wildly varying depending on whom you ask - some tins of beans and pasta.
No need to speculate, there are plenty of countries doing variations on UBI already, and they have been for many decades. We can learn from what they do.
Australia gives around $1130 AUD / month to anyone that is low income, or doesn't have a job [1] (There is an additional $300/mo right now for COVID, but lets ignore that.)
It is means tested, but the result is that anyone that doesn't have a job (for any reason at all - don't want one, quit, can't be bothered) gets that payment. You get more if you have kids, and you might get more for rent assistance too. It's been that way for decades, and Australia's economy has not magically been destroyed. Inflation is not through the roof, prices did not magically go up to just use up this free money.
On the plus side, crime and violence are extremely low, and multiple Australian cities are in the top 100 most livable on the planet. [2]
UBI and welfare (what we have in Australia) are very different. Andrew Yang has spoken about this better than I could off the top of my head, but to add a few things about our system (which does work very well from a global perspective):
* The stigma (in non-covid times) toward "dole bludgers" is pretty significant. We're a pretty egalitarian society, but there's a fairly common distain towards welfare recipients. This would likely be reduced if everyone was receiving the payment.
* You mentioned that recipients receive payments even if they quit or can't be bothered getting a job. That's kind of the situation with the current payment (JobSeeker), which was created last year when covid hit. The usual adult benefit (formally called Newstart allowance) had very strict "mutual obligations" and required you to apply for N number of jobs per fortnight otherwise your benefits were cut (https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/individuals/topics/mutu...). Also, if you quit a job you would have a cooldown period (usually 8 weeks) before you would receive benefits (with exceptions for injuries, redundancy, etc).
* Rent assistance is basically guaranteed. If you pay rent, you will get a portion of this covered.
* Our welfare program also includes a pharmaceutical discount (almost all prescription meds are $6.60 for recipients).
It's a really decent program overall, but it's not UBI.
Obviously welfare isn't identical to UBI, though in my opinion it has many of the same results.
> * The stigma*
Sure, there's some stigma, but that's irrelevant in terms of the economic/financial impact to society.
> very strict "mutual obligations"
It's easy enough to fill out job applications left hand, etc. For anyone that wants it, it is extremely easy and TONS of friends from University did it for over a decade.
Anecdotally, the mutual obligations have ratcheted up quite substantially since I was at uni 10-15 years ago. There have been several scandals involving accredited "Employment Services Providers" mistreating applicants, most commonly around offering them unsuitable (dangerous, to themselves or others) work at a firm controlled by the ESP.
Applicants can't refuse, or they'll lose their payment, and this is taken advantage of.
Here in Hong Kong, some years, flat payments are made to every legal permanent resident. It's kind of UBI, with flat payments and no means testing, but it fluctuates a lot. When it's payment scheme time, my bank puts up posters near ATMs reminding people to go to the government website and register their accounts to receive the wire transfer.
That being said, we have a very high wealth gap here. My understanding is that social programs are generally very lacking.
So your framing of such a tax as a way to steal from your working-class retirement funds is incredibly disingenuous. Unless, of course, you have 8+ figures of wealth. In which case I hope one day you’re made to pay your fair share to society.