people like warren and sanders are just two more on a long list of demagogues.
they prey on people who are incredibly financially ignorant.
Robert Heinlein quipped that democracy only works when the common person has the knowledge of an aristocrat.
Yep. Big companies with lots of cash have been doing that but they are getting heat for stifling competition. There's a change in oversight these days so we'll see if they have any luck going forward.
There's some nice tax loopholes for investors in start-ups. They get a $10M tax free write off and they can duplicate that via gifting to family and friends. Funny how tax laws that might make sense end up poorly written.
Tax law is vastly complex to begin with and unscrupulous legislators slip easter eggs into tax bills for their buddies in the flurry of amendments and nobody notices until the poor sods who have to implement the new law comb through the details.
I read that around 1964 there was a hefty tax credit slipped into the tax code for people born in 1929 on Long Island, New York with a net worth in some narrow range. It was a one time hand out to Jackie Kennedy.
Earlier someone was talking about billionaire money, realized, and unrealized assets. One way Elon gets by with no salary is taking loans from Tesla via his Tesla stock/stock options while avoiding payroll taxes on income and deducting loan interest. Win-win.
That may have been me. When you have the kind of assets Elon has without a desire for a "look at me" lifestyle, there are many ways to generate income to live on. He has sold some Tesla stock before. Invest that money in something that returns an income and you have a nice steady stream of money to live on.
Right now he's sitting on a pile of cash from selling all his houses. He made a healthy profit on all of them. Even if he hadn't sold any Tesla stock this year he'd be looking at a tax bill that would make most of us faint.
I've thought about the scale of wealth. For someone whose net worth is $10,000, an expense of $100 is 1% of their entire net worth. For someone worth $1 million, the same expense is 0.01% of their net worth. Upper middle class people don't tend to sweat an unexpected $100 expense from time to time because it's down in the noise.
For someone worth $10 billion, an expense that is 0.01% of their new worth is $1 million. Sometimes people who have been very wealthy most or all their lives say some pretty insensitive things because they can lay their hands on what most people consider vast sums of money with little effort.
Elon may have borrowed against his Tesla stock, but up until 2020 he was paid a salary at Tesla, though it was only around $50K. His compensation at SpaceX has not been disclosed because it's a private company, but it might have been a couple of hundred thousand a year. His Tesla salary went to zero in 2020 and he may have done the same at SpaceX. If he invested the proceeds from his houses in some kind of income producing investment, that would more than replace his salary at both companies.
He had a pretty decent payout from Paypal back in the day too. I know he invested most of it in Tesla and SpaceX, but he may have held back a bit for personal insurance and that might have been invested conservatively.
Once you have a few billion, making another billion is not difficult. Most of the developed world has taken the attitude that wealthy people need more government help than the poor over the last 40 years. The stupid wealthy are quite capable of blowing their entire fortune and ending up in poverty, but anyone with wealth and a little wisdom can remain wealthy pretty much no matter what happens.
The wealthy who only think about being seen being wealthy don't want the bottom tiers of society to get anything, but if they have two brain cells to rub together they would realize trickle up economics benefits the rich in the end. If the bottom of the economic scale gets a boost, they spend that money very quickly. Some of it will be wasted, but the bulk will go into necessities they couldn't afford before.
That money in turn will circulate in the economy and have a multiplier effect. In the end the rich, who own most of the capital, will see bigger returns on their investments and will get richer. There is a lot of hand wringing about how the rich got richer in the pandemic, but it's because of this effect. Some companies like Amazon were in the perfect position to grow from the pandemic and made insane profits, but most companies that weren't hurt badly by the pandemic came out of it fairly healthy financially.
, thank you for that. Societal addiction management is an interesting issue that has no clear cut right answer. If I wasn’t so lazy, I’d research more about what they do in places like South Korea. Their huge capital city Seoul, has (compared to American big cities) no homeless. They have addiction treatment centers. Do they use coercion? You will be cured or have your addiction managed whether you like it or not? Probably. They have a very strong conservative culture which includes a heavy dose of shaming. While I am as a free choice proponent as anyone else, I have a hard time seeing how the Korean approach is wrong.
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