And you can add Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, England, China, France and the US to that list. Such policies have a very long history that even go back to ancient times.
Wealth! How much is enough?
- Thread starter Birdjaguar
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Amazon has already tried to buy politicians/unseat hostile politicians in Seattle and NYC and failed in both, you can stop pretending that resistance is futile.
Patine
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The publicized failures to bribe politicians tend to be the minority of such cases. The ones where the corruption works (the majority) you rarely hear about. I wonder why...
And what is your actual evidence that there have been any successes?
Patine
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Consistent government policy favouring big corporations over the common people despite the known sentiment of the majority of voters, under-enforced campaign finance and lobbying "gifting," laws, the very existence of PAC's and Super PAC's operating with impunity, the mere fact that the act high judicial treason against the nation that is the Citizen's United ruling actually was made, taxation laws having long been what they have almost consistently, with only minor variation, relatively, and the new wave of deterioration of labour and corporate regulation laws, as well as corporate bailouts and corporate welfare. Wars fought mostly to enrich big corporations, but with lied about casus bellis (the Iraq War comes to mind, as well as the earlier Desert Storm). Open your eyes! These policies (which tend to be more bipartisan than many admit to) come from somewhere!
Lexicus
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You're not actually gullible enough to think that the billionaires added more than half a trillion dollars in value to the economy during the pandemic, are you?
Patine
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The big corporate ones, who do major scale delivery and Internet business across the nation - or even organized food delivery across a city, and have the overhead and infrastructure to handle almost a year with reduced store outlet business and sales employees. They're prospering more than you know. The "mom-and-pop," businesses, and smaller corporations are languishing and dying, and the COVID-19 business restriction laws as they're written with legislate that gross imbalance in effects on different business sizes probably also have corporate lobbyists - with checks written from their plutocratic masters - involved in the writing of those too.
This is on the authoritarian side of things, which I am hesitant to go into without being careful. I don't mind changing the rules, if the rules are bad, but "forbidding and/or taking" will just be words to watch out for, because you know that way lies oppression.
I suggest there's a very easy alternative: "we stop defending their property". If they want to leave, that's fine. But if they want us to continue protecting their property (or contracts) without them being beholden to the society that defends it ... well, no. Our society is happy to protect property, but that protection comes with the cost of "you have to pay income taxes".
Hygro
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Gardening is fun and nice and for me not self-actualizing.
Hygro
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But one the ones who own the industries we needed to function during the crisis certainly weren't hurting us.
It's true, there were some essential industries that *I* certainly didn't build that were essential. I do have to say that I am not satisfied with the way we've handled the crisis. The fact that the 'owners' of the economic engine are wealthier now than when we were at peak optimism in early 2020 is ... well ... weird.
Hygro
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Yeah, well, Republicans.
I believe that the question was about Jeff Bezos buying election races and not anything about adding to the economy. BTW, Amazon hired over 100,000 people in 2020 and now has almost a million employees. If their average wage with benefits is $25,000 per year ( a guess), how much have they added to the economy in terms of worker wages?
Much of that additional wealth is stock market wealth. The Stock Market is a forward looking engine (that can be volatile) that in Jan 2020 was optimistic. With the pandemic it went way south and saw a bleak future (recession). Since the summer things have looked better for 2021. The market goes up. Biden gets elected and a vaccine is coming; investors are positive; the future looks bright; the market goes up. Tomorrow? Who knows. The stock market is its own entity and hardly a measure of short term crisis management.
I know this, but the TL
R is "investors expect that their capital will rake in more money next year than they were expecting before a literal crisis happened". It's the very example of the rich getting richer. The "people who own" benefit from both the good times and the response to the bad times ... and you know there's a problem when that happens. It's literal evidence that wealth is migrating upwards due to systemic imbalances in the economy.I understand why I own less than I did when the crisis started - I've had to work way less. But that the rich are richer, despite the fact that the world is literally worse off is .... well ... weird.
How much have they displaced from small businesses that pay local taxes? This question must be asked and answered before we can determine the net effect.
This is a huge problem, but less for tax reasons than employment reasons. State sales taxes are usually charged and paid to states by out of state companies. So when you buy from Amazon rather than your local mall, your state still gets the sales tax. The problem is that all of the service workers and small retail businesses have cut back or closed and those employees have no money to spend. Local economies are drying up.
I agree completely. The rich are still getting richer and the bottom half of the nation suffer more. The stock market is not the economy. We are conservative investors and the stock portion of our portfolio is up 15% ytd; the bond portion about 4%. It was a great year. A windfall and totally unexpected given the way things started in the first half. My goal is preserve capital and throw off some income to add to our SS checks.I know this, but the TL
I understand why I own less than I did when the crisis started - I've had to work way less. But that the rich are richer, despite the fact that the world is literally worse off is .... well ... weird.
ummmm........
Extremely normal.
Picked three million, but I would only have it as a cap on how much a person could inherit. I don't care much about how much more a person generates or accumulates over their own lifetime . . .
A cap on inheritence is good. The problem comes with the excess. there is usually an excess. Say, I die with $20 million estate and two kids. each get $3 million leaving $14 million. What happens to that money or those assets? Must it be donated? Taxed? Granted to the government? Assets are often not very liquid and can be a problem to turn into cash. If you are going to cap the amount that can be inherited, you need a path for the excess estate to follow. Dispersing a large estate can be both troublesome and expensive.
ummmm........
Extremely normal.
To my mind the only way to 'force' ppl to stay under the 3mil limit would be to send the remainder to taxes/forfeiture. Presumably ppl would see that as undesirable and create an estate plan that divested the decedent of the excess. It's not like the limit would be a surprise, ppl would just have to plan accordingly. Like if you want a 20mil house, you'd be aware in advance that you can't leave it to your children so plans for the house on your death would just be part of the process of buying/building the house. Just leave it up to ppl to plan what to do with the excess and if they drop the ball then the government gets it . . .
