Billionaires Blast off

[Loren Pechtel]

I realize you think you are, but you are not.

Going to capital gains at ordinary rates but indexed for inflation will have a very minimal effect on the average tax bill, but there will be winners and losers.

Just like there are winners and users with the current system. Just different winners and losers.

I do agree there would be different winners and losers but I don't think it would matter in the big picture.

There's a hidden "problem" with the indexing approach, though--to be fair it should be applied to interest, also. That would take a big bite out of the taxes collected on interest income.

There is no problem. First, interest income is earned during the tax year just like wage income, and wage income is not indexed. Second, nominal interest rates include expected inflation, so indexing is not necessary on the income. So, there would be a hidden problem with the difference between actual inflation and expected inflation, but that problem is dwarfed by the inherent issue of not indexing capital gains (something you have no problem with).

Regular rates with indexing would be somewhat fairer but I don't think it's worth the headaches that would come from changing the system. I do not hold a strong opinion either way.

While the interest is earned during the year the money is tied up making that interest--it is degraded by inflation the same as a capital investment is. Thus if stocks are to be indexed then interest likewise should be. What you are missing is that currently you are taxed at your marginal rate for both the nominal rate + the inflation rate. If you index it you're going to do something like halving the tax take on interest.

 

[DBT]

Why this defense of excessive concentration of wealth into the hands of a small percentage of the population?

The situation clearly does not benefit society or the economy....so why defend it? What is the motive?

So what's your solution? Expropriation?

The question in this instance was: why is the situation being defended? What is the motive?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Stupid "Billionaire's Trolly[sic] Delima[sic]" meme

How is Bezos or Branson sending people to the edge of space running over any groups exactly?
The opposite is true. Blue Origin has created over 2000 well-paying jobs. Virgin Galactic also employs people.
Even at Amazon, the much maligned warehouse jobs pay more than comparable warehouse jobs elsewhere.

Workers not getting a fair market share of the wealth they help to produce, consumers paying too much, higher taxes for the top tier, funds that would benefit society as a whole.

In other words, once again a case of eat-the-rich.

I do not believe consumers are overcharged by getting a better deal.

 

[DBT]

Workers not getting a fair market share of the wealth they help to produce, consumers paying too much, higher taxes for the top tier, funds that would benefit society as a whole.

In other words, once again a case of eat-the-rich.

I do not believe consumers are overcharged by getting a better deal.

Once again: nothing to do with 'eat the rich' and everything to do with power and position...the balance of power being weighed heavily in favour of you know who.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Why this defense of excessive concentration of wealth into the hands of a small percentage of the population?

The situation clearly does not benefit society or the economy....so why defend it? What is the motive?

The problem is you are neglecting the cost to innovation from taking it away. Your dream world would not have SpaceX--we would still be throwing away rockets and still paying the Russians for rides to the ISS.

 

[untermensche]

Large parasites pay a fraction of what they steal from workers in taxes.

Define "stealing".

Taking what you did not earn because you have the power to do it.

 

[DBT]

Why this defense of excessive concentration of wealth into the hands of a small percentage of the population?

The situation clearly does not benefit society or the economy....so why defend it? What is the motive?

The problem is you are neglecting the cost to innovation from taking it away. Your dream world would not have SpaceX--we would still be throwing away rockets and still paying the Russians for rides to the ISS.

Nothing of the sort. Are you suggesting that the highly profitable companies are unable to pay their workers more? The reason that they don't is not that they are unable to, but that they are unwilling.

Their business practice is to pay a little as possible in order to maximize profits. They pay what they need to, and an imbalance of negotiating power prevents workers from securing better pay. Collective bargaining goes some way in addressing this imbalance of power.

 

[Swammerdami]

There aren't enough billionaires in the US to really make that much of a difference. US billionaires have a cumulative wealth of $4.6T. Even in the very unlikely case that we were to implement the Cherokee Princess' 6% wealth tax, that would bring in less than $280G. ...
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It is disingenuous to write about tax burdens without including payroll taxes. (The employer-paid portion should be included also, since it is in lieu of higher pay.) When a graph or article ignores that giant tax burden, it may be a tip-off just to ignore the presenter.

Dollars paid for SocSec and Medicare funding are real dollars too! The right-wing Babble Machine certainly has no problem including SocSec and Medicare when they want to babble about high government spending.

It's also very cute how some want to describe $280,000,000,000.00 annually as a small amount of money. Turn the subject to spending a fraction of that sum on improving the lives of poor Americans and the same folk will be shrieking about the huge price-tag.

 

[Elixir]

The problem is you are neglecting the cost to innovation from taking it away.

You can't demonstrate that any such cost exists.

Your dream world would not have SpaceX--we would still be throwing away rockets and still paying the Russians for rides to the ISS.

We got to the moon without any help from either Russian or Billionaire financing.
J. Paul Getty had nothing to do with the successes of any of NASA's pioneering space programs.
We could get re-usable rockets, space planes, and space based manufacturing the same way - if the fed wasn't broke from trickle-down economics.

 

[laughing dog]

While the interest is earned during the year the money is tied up making that interest--it is degraded by inflation the same as a capital investment is. Thus if stocks are to be indexed then interest likewise should be. What you are missing is that currently you are taxed at your marginal rate for both the nominal rate + the inflation rate. If you index it you're going to do something like halving the tax take on interest.

What you are missing is that the same thing is true for wage income and any other income that is not indexed. There is no special reason to index interest income that does not also apply to any source of income that is not indexed.

 

[lpetrich]

Where does outer space begin?: Physics Today: Vol 73, No 10 - "As suborbital space tourism gears up, the decades-old debate about the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere continues."

At the lower limit is the  Armstrong limit, where water boils at human-body temperatures. That is at about 19 km / 62,000 ft above sea level, where the atmosphere's pressure is 6.3 kPa (63 mbar).

But that definition has a problem.  Flight altitude record

• Balloon (lighter-than-air gas): 53 km
• Hot-air balloon: 6 km
• Fixed-wing air-breathing airplane (jet engines): 36 km
• Piston-engine propeller-driven fixed-wing airplane: 20 km
• Helicopter: 13 km

In the other direction, the Earth's atmosphere gradually fades off into interplanetary space. It is very thin but detectable at 1000 km altitude.

One might even go as far as to use the distance to the Earth's interplanetary bow shock, roughly 90,000 km or 14 Earth radii on average.

 

[lpetrich]

Aerospace pioneer Theodore von Kármán argued that the point where orbital dynamics forces exceed aerodynamic forces is a sensible place to set the limit—now known as the Kármán line (see figure 1, in which k = 0 defines the Kármán line height). His proposal is the most widely accepted definition of outer space and was originally popularized in 1963 by space lawyer Andrew Haley.

Modern commentators often assume that the order-of-magnitude estimate of 100 km for the Kármán line’s altitude is actually its definition. But that assumption is not historically correct. In a 2018 paper in Acta Astronautica, I showed that von Kármán’s argument places the line close to 80 km, largely independent of atmospheric variations and satellite properties.

Von Kármán’s original point was that an altitude exists where generating lift with a wing is impossible. That’s because you would have to fly so fast in the thin atmosphere that you’d exceed the Keplerian velocity, the speed at which a satellite flies in a circular orbit at that height. But a basically identical calculation shows that drag dominates gravitational forces on an orbiting satellite at a similar height.

The precise number depends on the area per unit mass of the satellite, but our planet's atmosphere falls off exponentially, so the limiting altitude is around 70 - 90 km, with 80 km a reasonably representative value.

The edge of space: Revisiting the Karman Line - ScienceDirect

Practical evidence suggests that the 80 km line is a reasonable boundary. An analysis of 60 years of archival satellite orbital data shows that elliptical-orbit satellites can survive for days or weeks with a perigee (low point of the orbit) between 80 km and 90 km. At each perigee, the braking effect of the upper atmosphere reduces the satellite’s velocity and causes the height of the next apogee (orbital high point) to be somewhat lower. Once the perigee drops below 80 km, however, the satellite does not survive more than one orbit.

So 80 km is a good limiting value.

The 80 km boundary also has historical resonance: It is closely equal to 50 statute miles, the boundary used since 1961 to award “astronaut wings” to US military pilots, including several who flew the X-15 suborbital space plane. Pilots have made 8 suborbital flights above 100 km and another 14 above 80 km, most recently the flights by SpaceShipTwo and the emergency abort of the Soyuz MS-10 launch.

That was back in 2020.

"The 80 km boundary corresponds reasonably well with the typical altitude of the mesopause, which is the highest well-defined boundary in the atmosphere and thus provides a physical reason for the choice."

At the United Nations and in other international forums, Russia and other spacefaring countries have repeatedly suggested adopting the 100 km boundary, or something near it. The US government, though, has long resisted any official legal definition of space. Instead, US officials argue for a functional definition, in which different rules would apply to different kinds of vehicles, but they ignore the issue of what happens when vehicles interact.

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With the 80-km definition, Richard Branson made it up into outer space, and with both the 80-km and 100-km definitions, Jeff Bezos made it up into outer space.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Workers not getting a fair market share of the wealth they help to produce, consumers paying too much, higher taxes for the top tier, funds that would benefit society as a whole.

In other words, once again a case of eat-the-rich.

I do not believe consumers are overcharged by getting a better deal.

Once again: nothing to do with 'eat the rich' and everything to do with power and position...the balance of power being weighed heavily in favour of you know who.

But you're presenting no actual argument, it's just jealousy.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Why this defense of excessive concentration of wealth into the hands of a small percentage of the population?

The situation clearly does not benefit society or the economy....so why defend it? What is the motive?

The problem is you are neglecting the cost to innovation from taking it away. Your dream world would not have SpaceX--we would still be throwing away rockets and still paying the Russians for rides to the ISS.

Nothing of the sort. Are you suggesting that the highly profitable companies are unable to pay their workers more? The reason that they don't is not that they are unable to, but that they are unwilling.

Their business practice is to pay a little as possible in order to maximize profits. They pay what they need to, and an imbalance of negotiating power prevents workers from securing better pay. Collective bargaining goes some way in addressing this imbalance of power.

You're trying to keep people from accumulating large sums of money.

SpaceX was the result of one of those guys who had already accumulated large sums of money putting part of it into an idea. Likewise Virgin Galactic (which probably won't amount to more than tourism and we don't really need) and Blue Origin (which is aiming to be a competitor to SpaceX.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The problem is you are neglecting the cost to innovation from taking it away.

You can't demonstrate that any such cost exists.

Your dream world would not have SpaceX--we would still be throwing away rockets and still paying the Russians for rides to the ISS.

We got to the moon without any help from either Russian or Billionaire financing.
J. Paul Getty had nothing to do with the successes of any of NASA's pioneering space programs.
We could get re-usable rockets, space planes, and space based manufacturing the same way - if the fed wasn't broke from trickle-down economics.

We got to the moon and then went home because doing it the government way wasn't practical. The political forces outweigh the economic ones.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

While the interest is earned during the year the money is tied up making that interest--it is degraded by inflation the same as a capital investment is. Thus if stocks are to be indexed then interest likewise should be. What you are missing is that currently you are taxed at your marginal rate for both the nominal rate + the inflation rate. If you index it you're going to do something like halving the tax take on interest.

What you are missing is that the same thing is true for wage income and any other income that is not indexed. There is no special reason to index interest income that does not also apply to any source of income that is not indexed.

Non-investment income is generally spent soon after being made--inflation is not a meaningful factor.

 

[laughing dog]

While the interest is earned during the year the money is tied up making that interest--it is degraded by inflation the same as a capital investment is. Thus if stocks are to be indexed then interest likewise should be. What you are missing is that currently you are taxed at your marginal rate for both the nominal rate + the inflation rate. If you index it you're going to do something like halving the tax take on interest.

What you are missing is that the same thing is true for wage income and any other income that is not indexed. There is no special reason to index interest income that does not also apply to any source of income that is not indexed.

Non-investment income is generally spent soon after being made--inflation is not a meaningful factor.

Prove it. My father lived off investment income during his retirement - it was spent.

 

[bilby]

You can't demonstrate that any such cost exists.



We got to the moon without any help from either Russian or Billionaire financing.
J. Paul Getty had nothing to do with the successes of any of NASA's pioneering space programs.
We could get re-usable rockets, space planes, and space based manufacturing the same way - if the fed wasn't broke from trickle-down economics.

We got to the moon and then went home because doing it the government way wasn't practical. The political forces outweigh the economic ones.

Maybe.

But I prefer democracy over aristocracy.

A handful of people making the big decisions about the direction and future of human endeavour, selected almost entirely by their wealth, is a shit way to run a society. Even if it occasionally results in something you personally want to see happen, that might have not happened in a more democratic system.

It's astonishing to me that Americans, of all people, are so deadset keen on restoring an aristocratic system of governance.

I guess at least Musk will make the hyperloop run on time.

 

[Jarhyn]

You can't demonstrate that any such cost exists.



We got to the moon without any help from either Russian or Billionaire financing.
J. Paul Getty had nothing to do with the successes of any of NASA's pioneering space programs.
We could get re-usable rockets, space planes, and space based manufacturing the same way - if the fed wasn't broke from trickle-down economics.

We got to the moon and then went home because doing it the government way wasn't practical. The political forces outweigh the economic ones.

Maybe.

But I prefer democracy over aristocracy.

A handful of people making the big decisions about the direction and future of human endeavour, selected almost entirely by their wealth, is a shit way to run a society. Even if it occasionally results in something you personally want to see happen, that might have not happened in a more democratic system.

It's astonishing to me that Americans, of all people, are so deadset keen on restoring an aristocratic system of governance.

I guess at least Musk will make the hyperloop run on time.

Not all of us. But here's a question, and I ask it only of you, Bilby; I am wont to put anyone else who answers on ignore: let's assume that I, insane as you must see me, were to become one of those aristocrats. Let's say that by some turn of foreknowledge by whatever arcane means I have, I know how to get a large amount of money entirely legally. Let's say that I had the means to leverage that into a fortune grander than any of the other of today's young money. How do you think one ought go about dismantling this, or otherwise dispose of this grand leverage. How ought one wrestle with the maw of Mammon himself?

I ask because I am fairly certain the predicate of this gambit is true, and because, while I have many theories, I admittedly don't have a fucking clue in truth.

Or, perhaps, if Bilby had suddenly found themselves in front of the gilded teeth, how then would Bilby fight this dark god?

However you want to frame it. As advice or as virtue.

 

[Elixir]

You can't demonstrate that any such cost exists.



We got to the moon without any help from either Russian or Billionaire financing.
J. Paul Getty had nothing to do with the successes of any of NASA's pioneering space programs.
We could get re-usable rockets, space planes, and space based manufacturing the same way - if the fed wasn't broke from trickle-down economics.

We got to the moon and then went home because doing it the government way wasn't practical. The political forces outweigh the economic ones.

I beg to differ. NASA is still the cutting edge of space research. I’m perfectly happy to let the B team handle space tourism and the like, if it’s viable and beneficial to the entity that paid for much of the underlying tech infrastructure - us. Taxpayers. Benefits from this endeavor should be public property, at least in large part.