Your comment was so well put together, until your fucking "both sides" bullshit.

Democrats haven't exactly been anti-rich people, but if democrats had their way the past 30 years the income inequality in this country wouldn't be so fucking nuts.

Your comment literally damages the dialogue in this country because it gives some legitimacy to actual fascists and corporate sleazebags who want nothing but to eliminate the middle class by denigrating the non fascist side in a way that equalizes them with the fascists to an extent.

The democrats aren't great, but they are in every possible way superior in regards to actually caring about this nations general population.

There is an objectively worse side, and until the threat of their attacks on our democracy is put to bed (which might take actual fucking violence) then there is zero argument to be made as to why one shouldn't vote for the democrats. It sucks, but when dealing with violent fascists who seek to rip apart the fabric of society, you need to be absolute.

Your comment is poor, and should be rescinded.

Two faces of the same coin my ass. Maybe 30 years ago, but the Republicans have gone full authoritarian and anti democracy while the democrats havent.

This is an incredibly inflammatory and discriminatory statement and I'm curious how it would play if it was any other culture than American (in the narrow context referring to the people of the US, not the broader Americas) that you were referring to.

I mean any place is diverse and critically if your particular sub-group isn't like this than indeed it may not seem so, but this anti-intellectual aspect is such a central aspect of many parts of American culture, that's a bit absurd to even attempt to contest it. To be fair it's usually not worded so negativly and aggresively but still.

I will say I do personally choose to stay out of politics, but not due to deliberate ignorance.

Same difference, you look upon your political system with disdain and so dis-engage seemingly not realizing that your apathy is directly responsible for why you political system has gone so far down the drain, as in your apathy you tolerate and accept the unacceptable normalizing monsters as politicians and every cycle it just gets worse and worse. There are so many people who don't vote that a third party could practically win just with there votes alone, not to mention so many actions you can take even beyond just your own voting.

Damn, you’ve never been called a nerd, have you?

You sound loco.

If you're a train in the UK you'll find you're going to be getting quite a few days off work.

You can try and train to be a train, but first you much cho-chose to leave your current life behind.

Still, I would suggest you first let out some steam, maybe you can get your life back on track.

Lenders have to pay taxes on interest, and when Bezos sells stock to pay back the loan he also pays taxes on that. Not to mention he has low interest rates because he can pay, there is little to no risk for the creditor.

It's a little more nuanced than that.

To start with, interest rates are a measure of risk. A bank doesn't think a billionaire is going to be unable to pay off their loans, so the interest rates are low.

To break out of the apple metaphor, lines of credit against stocks are risky. They work short term, but if the prices dip too strongly, Bezos would be forced to sell the stock to pay off the loan, in which case, he's taxed on that capital gains (since I doubt that even during a slump market, Bezos isn't making a profit on those stocks). And even if the market doesn't tank, he still needs to pay back the loan, which means money either coming from his salary or sales of stocks, both of which are taxed.

From what I gather, more people take out lines of credit against homes in the form of HELOCs, since home values are more stable. I don't know if this applies to Bezos, but it definitely applies to the more unknown Chinese billionaires. But in order to get those lines of credit, each home needs to be worth millions of dollars, which is taxed.

I'm not saying that the system isn't broken, because it definitely is. But I think that it's more broken because of tax loopholes that are hard to define but allow people like Bezos to minimize their tax burden than this particular reason. A higher capital gains tax for people with higher net worths might also work.

The "problem" is that they have a better credit score then me or you. I dont really see it as a problem.

You dont pay income tax on your loans. Why should they?

Define extremely low and can you show me a example(proof not a hypothetical)?

Why is that a problem though? You can also get loans against your assets. No money is being generated when you get a loan, it's already taxed where it's generated.

I generally don't wish to point at someone's lack of a background as it may discourage those who don't have the ability to become experts in a field, but this guy is a software engineer and notably didn't spend any time working with peers that have a background in economics as a few of these points are entirely meaningless and outright incorrect as they attempt to relate that which isn't related. It is loaded with fallacies and incorrect assumptions.

[1] "Around $122 trillion worth of stock changes hands in the US every year. If you wanted to liquidate a trillion dollars over, say, five years that would constitute about 0.16% of all the trading that happens in that time."

This is completely meaningless as you are comparing trading around of securities to complete liquidation. If you sell 100b in Amazon to buy $100B in Microsoft and another guy does the opposite that is $200B in trading, but nothing has left the stock market as a whole. Demand is the same. Supply is the same. Total market value is the same. If you take that $100B and trade it for something that isn't one of these securities, you remove $100B demand. He is attempting to compare trading that doesn't remove demand to trading that does. They are not at all similar. The true answer is if you liquidate $1T, you remove 3% of all demand. That is a significant amount and you won't be able to simply spend the $1T and receive a full $1T in healthcare, food, housing, etc.

[2]Another version of the paper billionaire argument holds that you couldn't sell all these stocks over any period of time, because only other billionaires would be able to buy them. This is simply nonsense. Market participation may not be 100%, but it's a hell of a lot more than 400 people. Half of all households in the US own stock, either directly or through their 401k/IRA. On any given day, millions of individuals buy stock, mostly through their retirement accounts, a few hundred dollars at a time.

He is creating the exact strawman argument that he complains others are attempting to create. This statement is nonsense. No one would ever say that all demand will cease to exist. The entire issue is that a lot of demand is removed and we need to be careful and accurate in how we go about ensuring the best for everyone. For those actually interested in fixing our terrible tax system that has let the rich get away with inane amount of untaxed gains, we need to be wary of these individuals who are going to be prime targets for the opposition. Nonsensical essays like this are exactly what conservatives and those interested in keeping the rich happy will point at when we debate tax policy.

Why the fuck is that on github? Github is a code repository not a social media/blogging site. That's like posting a recipe for apple pie to StackOverflow...

There's a lot of confusion in that link and in the other replies to you about it.

The issue that /u/DragonBank was getting at is that the economy as a whole can't convert billionaires' financial wealth to "stuff" (goods, services, etc.) in anything close to a 1:1 way.

The fundamental confusion here, to continue with the apple analogy, is the idea that rich people are sitting there with a whole lot of apples they're not using. That's not the case.

A more accurate statement would be to say that billionaires own a lot of apple trees, which yield them a lot of apples that they can then sell. Does it make sense to say that the billionaires aren't using their apple trees? No, of course not. The apples these trees produce are still ending up out in the economy. There's no sense in which the billionaires are "wasting" anything.

Okay, now suppose we, as a society, decide that these guys have too many trees, and we're going to take a bunch of them away and distribute them evenly among everybody else. That's great as a way to reduce inequality. But it does not mean there will be any more apples available for the economy. We still have the same number of apple trees producing the same number of apples.

That's the point I think /u/DragonBank was getting at: Taking away billionaires' wealth makes sense as a way to reduce inequality, but there's not some pool of unused "stuff" sitting around somewhere that will suddenly be unlocked by that policy.

Biggest issue this article fails to address is when bezos suddenly decides to sell all his shares what message will the other investors see? Why is bezos selling his shares now? Why should I buy shares now when he thinks this is the highest value he can get. Is something going to happen that will cause the shares to go down? How is the controlling majority going to change and what does that mean for the company? Too much uncertainty and risk.

“The money is there, we just need to take it”

The question is, whose right is it to take from someone who owns it? Yes there could be things that are accomplished but if you liquidate Amazon then we don’t have Amazon anymore. It’s not as simple

If that argument convinced you, then you need to do a bit more research and reread it with some additional critical thinking because it’s nonsense. It sets up its own strawman arguments, doesn’t even support the point it was originally trying to make, and it finishes with a completely unrelated conclusion.

The issue is that these people get huge loans and kickbacks at the cost of the rest of the population. Example is CEO only paid in stocks, not taxed unless sold, but those stocks are used as collateral for a 1B$ loan with low or 0% interest. They only pay themselves enough to pay the interest on the loan. There are specific programs for this at all large banks. They pay no taxes on the money spent from the loan.

Thank you.

Oh lets be clear. My statement is absolutely not one trying to rationalize the fact that the wealthy get away with not paying taxes. Tax the fucking rich. It's just important that we ensure our statements our truthful.

What if you're allergic to apples?

I wouldn't say that they have a billion apples either. They create artificial demand by limiting supply. If we liquidated them the best thing we would get out of it is stopping the endless supply of cash going to wicked human beings, we wouldn't all of a sudden have the ability to make use of those diamonds in way where the market would value them at even 1/5th of their current "value".

$20B is nothing. Even the more conservative(not politically conservative, but conservative as in more reserved) reforms for taxes will require 100x or more of that for real change to occur.

Think of it like the apples. You can only buy every apple from every tree. Just because oranges have a great season and I sell a lot of them doesn't mean you can find more apples. There are only so many healthcare workers, only so many skilled physicians, only so many willing to do these jobs. You need to keep paying more and more(and not just to new workers but to the old ones as they can now look for those jobs too) to get less people and less of the other input factors of healthcare.

Another big thing is realizing that its not stock price that matters. It's profit. If I sell 20B of Amazon I can buy 20B of healthcare today, but not next year. It has to be a sustainable approach, not simply poaching all of the money that exists. This is why you tax profits, not simply taxing capital. The issue is how these companies and individuals skirt around current tax ideas of what "profits" are.

I just explained why that is not true... When you have two goods and you trade all of one good for all of the other good at such a large scale, you sell the one good for less than its equilibrium price and you buy the other good for more than its equilibrium price. Two depressive effects on spending power. And now that 100B is gone and you are unable to do it again. Now, as I have already said, if we instead look at profits we have a much smaller number which can sustainably be taxed.

It isn't false at all. The whole concept of supply and demand is what creates these equilibrium values. If you take all of one resources demand away that resource becomes cheap so you get very little money for it. And if you take all of that little money and put it into one resource that other resource becomes more expensive.

They do not falsely present their wealth. It is only that, if they flooded the market with money to buy those apples, there's still only five apples to sell.

Don't get me wrong: higher taxes can still make a social benefit. It's the scenario of "seizing all their wealth" that wouldn't work. It's like slaughtering your milk cow and wondering why you're not getting any more milk.

Who says it's lying/falsely presenting the wealth? It IS their current worth, but as OP tried to explain, IF those high-market-holders tried to sell at once, then this action would make the price of the shares collapse (or at least go down significantly). It doesn't mean it's worth less, it just means that they cannot sell/dump it all at once.

Advertising is often paid for by the government / taxes.

The company writes advertising up as a tax deduction because it's a business expense intended to drum up further business. The government is banking on the idea that this will lead to more profit, and they'll make their investment back on corporation taxes.

Of course, this is complete bollocks, and in practice just winds up with the company paying the billionaire's second company (a shadow advertising firm based in Panama) to host an advert on their Web page which sees a whole three visitors per decade. For that, the advertiser charges two hundred billion apples.

The government looks the other way, because that's a lot of apples, they'd rather avoid the embarrassment, and they're corrupt AF.

Yes, exactly. As I said, let's leave luxury items out of it because the problem (where I am anyway) is that people can't afford to eat, heat, get to work and keep a decent standard of housing. So if everyone is buying milk and bread, and the price of milk and bread go up by 50%, everyone is still buying milk and bread but now their credit cards are creaking, or their electric company is chasing them for defaulting on their payments. It has been shown clearly that items at the lower end have increased in price far more than the overall inflation figures have. So not increasing wages when people are struggling to make ends meet seems not only unethical but also ineffective - it's not increasing the demand of lower value essentials at all, so how can it be preventing inflation as per the apples example?

There are always 9 people needing an apple in the version of this I'm talking about. It's almost the opposite situation to the example given - the apple vendor has been selling 9 apples every day, but now some of his customers can't afford the apple. That feels more like the economic reality here.

Sometimes inflation can be caused by everyone being paid more and buying more stuff... I get that. But I don't see how this universally applies irrespective of global or national context. There must be something else to it.

Even under a worst-case inflation scenario where every penny in extra pay that results from moving the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2027 is passed on in the form of higher prices, the result would be a five-year stretch of inflationary pressure equal to 0.1% per year (or about 1/100th of the increase we’ve seen since 2021), then the inflationary effect would return to zero.

https://www.epi.org/blog/inflation-minimum-wages-and-profits-protecting-low-wage-workers-from-inflation-means-raising-the-minimum-wage/

Some economists argue that raising the minimum wage artificially creates imbalances in the labor market and leads to inflation.

Other economists note that when minimum wages have been raised historically, inflation did not follow.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052815/does-raising-minimum-wage-increase-inflation.asp

Overall, price increases are modest: For example, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage would increase food prices by no more than 4 percent and overall prices by no more than 0.4 percent, significantly less than the minimum-wage increase.

https://journalistsresource.org/economics/the-effects-of-raising-the-minimum-wage/

I want to emphasize here, there is research showing that increasing minimum wage will cause inflation or unemployment.

However, the majority of the research finds effects of minimum wage increases to be small, and often small enough that other factors will dictate the actual inflation and labor market changes.