Yeah, I get that this thread is a nice cathartic exercise in spitting the taste of sour grapes out of our mouths, but that's just incorrect. Advancing technology, providing entertainment and easing communication, reducing physical labour, creating jobs, generating tax revenue - if these aren't being "productive members of society", then what would qualify?Drathnoxis said:
[Politics]How long until we eat the rich?
- Thread starter Drathnoxis
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Of course, the NYT has just managed to get hold of Trump's tax returns 1985-1994. And they are apparently atrocious: losses of $1.17 billion across the period.Lil devils x said:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/07/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html
It's kind of fascinating that a business loses money, and this can be subtracted from taxation of the owners' personal income. I understand this isn't an LLC but a partnership, and they're probably taking a hit to their wealth with bankruptcies and write-downs, but even still, this seems to me dodgy: it's really getting the state to subsidise failure. Or the depreciation that article notes, where real estate holders can depreciate the value of their holdings and claim it back. Fuck that shit: make them deal with it. That's like you or me arguing our car is worth ?1000 less this year than last, so we deserve a ?1000 tax break. What a scam.
What's also objectionable is that this tax deduction seems to roll on year after year. So Trump lost a loads... and then didn't have to pay taxes for many years thereafter. Not exactly like welfare, is it? Lose your job, the state won't cover your losses, nor indefinitely into the future.
Then there's his hilarious tactic of buying shares in a company, publicly suggesting a full takeover to induce share prices to rise, and then quickly flogging them. In a way, this is of course very smart, until everyone eventually wised up. But it's also basically a scam.
Trump may or may not have conflicts of interest. But what is certainly interesting is to shine a light on the arcane fiddles that people with his kind of money have somehow managed to squeeze into the tax code. Trump of course made hay pointing out how easily abused the tax system was when he was up for election. Now in power, of course he's done nothing to deal with it. He got your votes, now he'll carry on taking your money.
Being a productive member of society implies being rewarded for the producing one does for society. Yet look up the figures and they fairly clearly show that changes in remuneration do not equate to increased productivity. Workers are creating more and more wealth per unit hour worked... and not seeing anything like that increase in their salaries.Batou667 said:
Meanwhile, certain members of the rich certainly seem also seem to have their earnings de-coupled from productivity. Lord Adair Turner, one time head of the Financial Services Authority in the UK noted that a great deal of financial trading was of no societal benefit. Plenty of it is glorified gambling: it doesn't help our societies make anything, it's just various rich people being paid large sums to trick each other out of money. Corporate board members pay themselves ever increasing sums with no real justification whether they're worth it, and if they gloriously screw up have to be bought out with a "golden parachute"; you or I just get fired. Lots of the rich, of course, are so just because mummy and daddy (or some earlier ancestor) happened to be successful. Most of them aren't even running their wealth themselves, the real productivity is done by professional managers deciding where to invest it for maximal return.
So whilst you are right that a large number of the rich earn their money mostly fairly and usefully, equally we accept that a substantial number of them are doing precious little of benefit to wider society.
I don't think that is true. I could choose to hoard my wealth, but I choose to keep the free clinic open instead. I work with many physicians that choose to use their wealth to save lives instead of hoard it for personal gain. Where do you think the vast majority of funding for medical charities comes from? It comes from the doctors themselves. There are plenty of people out there that choose to use their money to help others rather than hoard it and do not "wish to be rich" because that would just mean that they are part of the problem, not the solution. The wealthy that want to tax themselves more, that spend their money helping others and agree to donate their money when they pass are a part of the solution, people like Trump however, are why this is as bad as it is. He did not pay his bills and stole their money instead and bought himself tacky gold and diamond encrusted doors. His diamond and gold encrusted doors made people lose their jobs, took their children's college fund away and made people suffer. His house does not even look good, it looks horrible because he seems to think that putting gold everywhere means he is somehow " better" than others, when all it does is make it look grotesque and repulsive. That is not something to be " envious" of, If I am envious of anyone it would be those that spent their life finding cures for diseases, building hospitals and making this world a better place for everyone in it, not some scum bag who screwed people over to feed his own gluttonous greed. With Trump, there is nothing to be "jealous of" only pity tbh. Who would want to be the person who has caused so much grief and despair? Who would want to be the person who stole from a cancer charity to hoard more for themselves? It is not "jealousy" people feel, it is disgust and nausea thinking about how gross his life's actions have really been and how sad that his entire life has been a waste and the world would have been better if he had never been born.Samtemdo8 said:
The world is full of people promising you things, you shouldn't believe all of them.Silentpony said:
Also, Trump was simultaneously promising to destroy the lives of a great many people. People have no excuse for hearing (and believing) only the former, and somehow missing the latter.
It was no secret that he used other people's money to make businesses that usually failed and bankrupt. Trump was 100% known as a shitty sleezeball businessman. It was actually ALL he was known for! It would be like if you suddenly were surprised that Kim Kardashian had a fat ass.Silentpony said:
"When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality."Samtemdo8 said:
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Sounds like someones been exposed to the lies the right likes to tell us. Its one of their tactics, to try and make all politicians look just as bad as they are. Cause when everyone is bad, then there's no point to trying and they win.Here Comes Tomorrow said:
Eh, while there may be an element of that, most people don't want to eat all rich people equally, or even proportionately to their wealth. Or proportionate to how much meat they have on them.Samtemdo8 said:
It should also be noted that the US actually had a pretty good relationship to capitalism right up until the 1970s/80s when that shareholder-maximization ideology went mainstream thanks to Milton Freedman (arguably one of the most damaging economists to the modern economy) and the ascendance of the conservative movement within the Republican Party that promoted a "hands-off" approach to regulations, taxation, and social services that allowed this form of capitalism to get turbo-charged with all but the government's explicit blessing. That's when wages start to stagnate, unionization begins to fall, and both executive salary and wealth inequality really take off (though inequality has been an issue since before the Gilded Age).stroopwafel said:
I like to use the analogy of a garden to describe capitalism. Some gardens can do well with minimal oversight, but that tends to be under very narrow circumstances that are unique to the time and place (ex. Desert Gardens/Hong Kong). Most gardens require substantial maintenance and observation to insure that they are not overgrown or killing off themselves. Sometimes that's giving it the proper food and nutrients to insure some smaller ones grow, other times it's pruning the larger ones and pulling up weeds to make sure they don't choke out the rest of them and prevent other plants from growing, and occasionally removing dead or rotten plants so that something can grow in their place. The plants cannot do this themselves, so it is up to the gardener (i.e. the government) to do it themselves.
I think that's a pretty good description.Tireseas said:
I feel that a lot of capitalism has become extremely ideological rather than pragmatic. There's this huge drive to free markets, deregulation and non-interference on the assumption it must be the best thing, without really identifying whether it truly is or not. In particular, I feel ideological capitalism seems to take the stance that the point of society is to enact capitalism, not that capitalism is to be enacted for the benefit of society. A lot of these pour over narrow and reductionist measures of economic success (e.g. GDP growth), and seem to be blind to forms of rot developing elsewhere.
Saelune said:
Coincidentally, I was thinking yesterday about why I chose not to be rich. Years ago I was going to real state seminars and everything. But when the strategies shown involved taking advantage of people in financial trouble (i.e. house-owners without enough money to pay their mortgage), I realized I didn't want to be that heartless. I couldn't dehumanize such situations to see them just as business.
Correct, capital is not produced by ownership, capital was at some point earned. If I work very hard and am rewarded a lot of money for my labor that's my earned capital. At that point I can decide to invest that capital to help companies or people produce more value. I believe it's normal the money i invested is remunerated because without my earned capital that company would have not been able to produce as much value.Seanchaidh said:
See above.
And nobody is preventing employees to buy shares and be part of the democratic decision making process during shareholder's assemblies.
Actually, yes they kind of are: by depressing the wages of workers, who therefore have less spare money to invest in buying shares.generals3 said:
Although even then, in practice, employees are extremely limited in power because of the tiny number of shares they own. They tend to invest via managed funds... and of course it's the fund manager who gets the vote, not the employees signed up to the fund. Even were employee shareholders a substantial percentage of the shares (say, 50%), chances are a few major institutional investors would run the show anyway because of the difficulty getting all those minor shareholders to vote the same way (or even at all).
How d'you propose to take the "cronie" out of "capitalism"? To be honest, the "cronie" element has been so overwhelmingly dominant in every significant form of capitalism that I'm starting to think it's a feature, not a bug. I'm not sure how you can have one without the other.stroopwafel said:
Is your list supposed to be ways of becoming rich or how the rich are productive members of society? Either way these aren't things the rich do. Because of how the copyright works, the people who advance technology are often not the ones who benefit from it, the company does. Games industry is notorious for having lower wages and worse working conditions than many other software development fields. Layoffs and cutbacks are all the rich seem to want to do. And rich people pay lower taxes than anyone else. You can apparently pay for your fancy cars and other expenses through a corporation with before tax dollars and then funnel whatever's left into an overseas tax haven for lower rates.Batou667 said:
And since you brought up entertainment, there's far too much focus on it in our society. Imagine if all the money and effort that went into making all the movies, music, and games out there went into something like space exploration. We'd have colonies on Mars by now.
You say that like its a bad thing. Why shouldn't we envy those who have quite often just been born into wealth and continue to hoard more of it for themselves?Samtemdo8 said:
The only positive thing capitalism ever brings to the table is market forces regulating investment and production. Which is, as proven multiple times, way better than people regulating investment and production.
Every single other aspect of capitalism is bad. It is a system built on competition, on being invested in the failure of your competitors, on making bargains to your benefit and detriment of others, on abusing any power you can get. It is inherently confrontational and wasteful.
As soon as we can have algorithms decide where to invest, how much to produce and how to distribute it, we can ditch capitalism.
That is kinda already how a big part of stock trading works. And ressource trading. Next it will hit banking and insurance because a computer can do risk and reward calculations already better than any human. Then B2B trading between established partners will be automated.
And soon all the big market decisions are automated. And then you don't need money as motivation for people as decision makers anymore, because algorithms don't need to get rich. Then you can get rid of money beyond household expenses and people buying stuff for themself and earning money by work.
Every single other aspect of capitalism is bad. It is a system built on competition, on being invested in the failure of your competitors, on making bargains to your benefit and detriment of others, on abusing any power you can get. It is inherently confrontational and wasteful.
As soon as we can have algorithms decide where to invest, how much to produce and how to distribute it, we can ditch capitalism.
That is kinda already how a big part of stock trading works. And ressource trading. Next it will hit banking and insurance because a computer can do risk and reward calculations already better than any human. Then B2B trading between established partners will be automated.
And soon all the big market decisions are automated. And then you don't need money as motivation for people as decision makers anymore, because algorithms don't need to get rich. Then you can get rid of money beyond household expenses and people buying stuff for themself and earning money by work.