The ongoing X and Elon Musk Transgressions Thread

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Just a guy

Not trying to be in bad faith, just making the point that there can be a different arbitrary number and you explained that, same as the $100M number. The number moves depending on perspective. I have always enjoyed our discussions and they have always enjoyed polite and informative.

Didn't set an intervention level. Just the perspective that prior to Industrialization the wealth gap was even greater. I just happen to believe that we (society in general) need these people to change the world and in most cases in a positive way..

I have read your posts and definitely sense the undertone that anyone ultra rich
Is seen In a negative light.

Billionaires being Unnecessary for capitalism to provide benefits to society is not a negative light.

[Wormius]

Originally Posted by Just a guy

Agree. If you read what I have said is that I wouldn't want to be that. I have interacted with highly successful people that are good people, but they have given up more than I ever would.

Why do you keep repeating this mantra? I don’t think it has anything to do with whether the ultra rich are needed by society to function.

[Maritime Q-Scout]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

https://twitter.com/user/status/1649466728542347266

Way to shoot your shot my friend.

Bra-freaking-vo

[Ozy_Flame]

The last line in the text screenshot hahahahaha

[Senator Clay Davis]

"Hey everything is a disaster right now, wanna go out sometime?" lol.

[Fuzz]

I really do want to see how the rest of that chat went.

[FormerPresJamesTaylor]

https://www.businessinsider.com/twit...rce=reddit.com

Dead celebrities are the latest to endorse Twitter Blue — at least according to the verification badges applied to their profiles.

Kobe Bryant, Norm Macdonald, Anthony Bourdain, Chadwick Boseman, and Michael Jackson were among the celebrities who each got a posthumous blue check added to their Twitter accounts as the site began to purge legacy verifications on Thursday, pivoting to only displaying the checks on the profiles who pay for the subscription service.

[Reggie Dunlop]

I wonder what Herman Cain has to say about all of this.

[edslunch]

This discussion is moot while capital can flee to other countries, but here’s a formula that might work. Legislate that everyone must declare an annual income of at least 1% of financial assets, whether you take the income or not. For example, if you have $1M saved you need to declare income at least $10K. If you have a job your income will be well more than that so you just declare your actual income. There would be no impact on the average person.

If you’re a high net worth individual, on the other hand, and have $100M in stock and minimize your income by taking loans instead of cashing stocks or other gamesmanship, you’ll still be on the hook for a ‘virtual income’ of $1M. You’ll need to sell shares to pay your taxes but you won’t be forced to liquidate your holdings or have them ‘confiscated’ by the government.

If you’re Elon or Bill you would have taxable income in the $100Ms or 1Bs.

With this minimum income in place everything else is just normal taxation. The government can play with rates and could ratchet up tax rates for high incomes e.g. 50% for the highest bracket. Even then it only amounts to 1/2 a percent of net worth, which is a rounding error compared to what a portfolio earns, but it would apply to everyone’s net worth so the tax base is huge.

Again, it won’t affect the average person. Someone making $100k per year would need more than $10M is savings to get hit with extra tax.

Why wouldn’t this work, ignoring the portability of capital?

[Just a guy]

Originally Posted by GGG

Billionaires being Unnecessary for capitalism to provide benefits to society is not a negative light.

Not necessary just a consequence. I can't believe that I am arguing on the side of corporations (no billionaire is without one that I can think of), but many people require them to be employed and to maintain our standard of living.

Is your position that once a person gets to the arbitrary line they must give up what they built? I am sure that the system is not perfect, but I am not hearing anything that is reasonably any better and in most cases would be worse.
Again not a big fan of corporations but that horse left the barn a long time ago.

[Just a guy]

Originally Posted by edslunch

This discussion is moot while capital can flee to other countries, but here’s a formula that might work. Legislate that everyone must declare an annual income of at least 1% of financial assets, whether you take the income or not. For example, if you have $1M saved you need to declare income at least $10K. If you have a job your income will be well more than that so you just declare your actual income. There would be no impact on the average person.

If you’re a high net worth individual, on the other hand, and have $100M in stock and minimize your income by taking loans instead of cashing stocks or other gamesmanship, you’ll still be on the hook for a ‘virtual income’ of $1M. You’ll need to sell shares to pay your taxes but you won’t be forced to liquidate your holdings or have them ‘confiscated’ by the government.

If you’re Elon or Bill you would have taxable income in the $100Ms or 1Bs.

With this minimum income in place everything else is just normal taxation. The government can play with rates and could ratchet up tax rates for high incomes e.g. 50% for the highest bracket. Even then it only amounts to 1/2 a percent of net worth, which is a rounding error compared to what a portfolio earns, but it would apply to everyone’s net worth so the tax base is huge.

Again, it won’t affect the average person. Someone making $100k per year would need more than $10M is savings to get hit with extra tax.

Why wouldn’t this work, ignoring the portability of capital?

The most reasonable approach I have heard.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Just a guy

Not necessary just a consequence. I can't believe that I am arguing on the side of corporations (no billionaire is without one that I can think of), but many people require them to be employed and to maintain our standard of living.

Is your position that once a person gets to the arbitrary line they must give up what they built? I am sure that the system is not perfect, but I am not hearing anything that is reasonably any better and in most cases would be worse.
Again not a big fan of corporations but that horse left the barn a long time ago.

Not give up. Be taxed at the rate of growth that the market regularly returns to prevent the long term concentration of capital. And as already discussed they could maintain control if you are concerned about that in a similar way to the Rogers or Shaw families did.

That’s just it if they are an unnecessary consequence of capitalism why not tax them out of existence. (I realize the wealth flight problem but this is a philosophical question rather than a practical one)

[Just a guy]

Originally Posted by Wormius

Why do you keep repeating this mantra? I don’t think it has anything to do with whether the ultra rich are needed by society to function.

I repeat to make the point. Most people don't understand what it takes to be that guy and only what they see, read or hear.

As per my answer to GGG not necessary but a consequence of capitalism, which benefits society. With the exception of Ed's Lunch post I have not heard any reasonable alternatives.

[Reggie Dunlop]

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

[Fuzz]

LOL, now CBC has gold check marks. But they haven't tweeted since they said they were pausing, which makes it pretty obvious CBC didn't pay the huge organization licensing fee.


NPR has a blue check now, but don't appear to have returned, either.

[dobbles]

Originally Posted by Just a guy

Sorry for the delay. Again I am speaking from my observations of real people that I have directly interacted with. This has lead to my perspective.

How many top corporate leaders or ultra rich have you interacted with enough to know how they actually live? I see a lot of people on here responding to what sou ds like a narrative rather than experience.

I don't know any wealthy people personally. But when I worked for Dell, I interacted professionally with plenty of top execs. Up to the level that reported Directly to Michael Dell. And in my experience, the higher up they were, the more likely they were to blow tons of company money flying around attending meetings they didn't need to be at. In my time in the corporate world, that was pretty standard.

I am back in higher ed at a major university and while the leaders here are not particularly high wealth individuals, I still find that the higher up they are, the more time they spend on travel and networking and appearences.


And in both situations, I would take a single mom juggling multiple part time jobs and kids over any of those execs in terms of hard work. And unless the billionaire class suddenly bucks the trend, I can't imagine there's many much that would change that. There's a difference between actually working hard, and schmoozing with other elite.

[PepsiFree]

Yeah, the whole fantasy of “you could never imagine what they’ve given up, I could never be a billionaire only for the reason that I could never make the same sacrifices!” while stumping for guys like Musk is a lark.

Most of these guys were born rich. Most of these guys work 1/10th as hard as the average person and most of their “sacrifices” are things they choose while the vast majority of the population has no choice at all.

Nobody is a sacrifice or two different from a billionaire lol. Absurd.

[CroFlames]

Originally Posted by Oil Stain

I'd just like to see a system where the guys at the top pay around 40%(Or more) of their income to the government just like you and me.

The system has backslid in such a way that allows the super rich to pay relatively less taxes than the middle class which is just broken.

"Following World War II tax increases, top marginal individual tax rates stayed near or above 90%, and the effective tax rate at 70% for the highest incomes (few paid the top rate), until 1964 when the top marginal tax rate was lowered to 70%. Kennedy explicitly called for a top rate of 65 percent, but added that it should be set at 70 percent if certain deductions were not phased out at the top of the income scale.[29][30][31] The top marginal tax rate was lowered to 50% in 1982 and eventually to 28% in 1988. It slowly increased to 39.6% in 2000, then was reduced to 35% for the period 2003 through 2012.[28] Corporate tax rates were lowered from 48% to 46% in 1981 (PL 97-34), then to 34% in 1986 (PL 99-514), and increased to 35% in 1993, subsequently lowered to 21% in 2018."
-The wikipedia.

Taxes on the wealthiest people in society have been cut continuously over the last 70 years and now we are seeing too much concentration of wealth in the top 1%. It's an easy fix, but the way I see regular joes argue against any kind of tax increase on the rich makes me think the propaganda used is too effective to overcome.

This is an important post, and really sums up the problems with our societies.

[Just a guy]

Originally Posted by dobbles

I don't know any wealthy people personally. But when I worked for Dell, I interacted professionally with plenty of top execs. Up to the level that reported Directly to Michael Dell. And in my experience, the higher up they were, the more likely they were to blow tons of company money flying around attending meetings they didn't need to be at. In my time in the corporate world, that was pretty standard.

I am back in higher ed at a major university and while the leaders here are not particularly high wealth individuals, I still find that the higher up they are, the more time they spend on travel and networking and appearences.


And in both situations, I would take a single mom juggling multiple part time jobs and kids over any of those execs in terms of hard work. And unless the billionaire class suddenly bucks the trend, I can't imagine there's many much that would change that. There's a difference between actually working hard, and schmoozing with other elite.

I can't and won't argue that single moms have a very tough row to hoe. Not really germane to the discussion either though.

Interestingly, I heard on 960 this morning Peter Loumbardius say how social media seems to make everyone an expert in everything. People look at the outside and think they understand and they just don't. That is clear in this post and so many others.

I have made my point and either you can accept it or not. I am not building up ultra rich/successful people. I just believe that it takes a lot of things for them to get where they are and hard work is a lot of it. The they are born rich is true in some cases and others it is not. As example my relative comes from a farm life and started with nothing. Are there others that had a head start. Absolutely! They are the bad ones if I read a lot of these posts.

Again, I have had my say.

[CroFlames]

Originally Posted by Just a guy

I can't and won't argue that single moms have a very tough row to hoe. Not really germane to the discussion either though.

Interestingly, I heard on 960 this morning Peter Loumbardius say how social media seems to make everyone an expert in everything. People look at the outside and think they understand and they just don't. That is clear in this post and so many others.

I have made my point and either you can accept it or not. I am not building up ultra rich/successful people. I just believe that it takes a lot of things for them to get where they are and hard work is a lot of it. The they are born rich is true in some cases and others it is not. As example my relative comes from a farm life and started with nothing. Are there others that had a head start. Absolutely! They are the bad ones if I read a lot of these posts.

Again, I have had my say.

No.

The billionaires of today didn't do anything different than the top business people of 60 or 70 years ago. The difference is that over time, the politicians were bought, so they changed the tax system to allow the creation of a billionaire class.