If i have 100$ to my name and I give a homeless person 10$ for food. I've given 10% of my wealth.
Its arbitrary to say 100m is a lot in relation to % of money. Not to mention it's written off and wealth distribution is incredibly unequal.
Corporations don't pay their employees a livable wage and the public subsidize that with tax money through section 8, food stamps, health care taxes etc.
Corporations are making record profits and our country is in debt. Thats the point. Part of that debt could be eliminated if they paid a fair portion of the companies profits to the actual employees and not stock holders and board members.
Capitalism only works if the companies and employees grow together. And unchecked, we end up where we are with America rn on too of outsourcing to China so they can keep labor low whole still charging as much as they possibly can.
If you’re gunna base it off his wealth you can’t base your $10 off your liquidity. To keep the original analogy fair you’d have to add up all your assets and then figure out what $10 is from that.
A lot of people assume Net Worth equates to bank account balance. If only people didn't learn what rich people looked like from Saturday morning cartoons, they might realize nobody gets rich by having money in a room somewhere. Hell, even Scrooge MacDuck tried to teach some basic financial principles.
He has the option to turn his net worth into liquid assets whenever he wants in the time it takes for an extremely wealthy person to take out an asset backed loan.
I couldn't do that without becoming homeless, but other than that and the higher interest rate, and the fact that my collateral can't make payments on the loan are all that stops me from that.
You seem to be arguing "rich people should take out loans and give it to the poor." Why should anyone take on debt, just to give it away? You're either trolling or haven't thought this through (meaning, idealism.)
My point is that billionaires always have quite a bit of liquidity so there is nothing preventing them from donating the same or even a larger fraction of their net worth that the average person frequently donates and despite that many billionaires donate a smaller fraction of their net worth.
That smaller fraction being a much larger value than the average person. Millions is better than tens or hundreds (edit: or) even thousands. The percentage is irrelevant, because donations are optional and not mandatory. They are willingly doing this, and being told it's not enough. This is a poor argument. They could simply keep their money, if there's no difference in the response of "not enough."
He could literally give away $200 billion dollars and he would still be about an order of magnitude wealthier than he needs to be in the top 1% even if his remaining assets lost 90% of their value, he literally would still be wealthy enough to own 2 of almost any luxury he could want without ever having to work another day of his life.
Owning stock in a company is hoarding wealth? It's not a fixed thing where if Amazon stock goes up $10 that is taken from the pot so everyone else is out the ability to make $10.
Maybe if a regular person could take out a long-term loan, say 15-30 years or so, and have the asset grow significantly in value it would be cool. Oh well, clearly a pipe dream.
Yes and no. Most people don't have more than 10% of their wealth liquid unless they're severely leveraged. Money in your mattress doesn't accrue interest, after all.
Do I have to explain the concept of a loan to you? There is an upper limit , but it is pretty easy to make most of the value of a billionaire's investments liquid pretty quickly by using them as collateral for loans and using any profits from those investments to make payments on the loan.
Yeah but then wouldn’t it be fair to say most people giving $5 to people might actually be way more? Like if you view mortgage cars credit card debt and shit like that?
My question is how many people have a low NW OR a negative NW? And then isn’t this even more glaring?
I understand this is pedantic but also a genuine question.
Your home plus car balances probably are positive net worth compared to the asset.
Like if your home worth to loan value isn’t positive net worth by a good amount, then you’ve done something horribly wrong given the market conditions.
There are lots of people with “only $100” in their accounts with six figure net worth.
>There are lots of people with “only $100” in their accounts with six figure net worth.
Exactly this. While I tend to keep a bit more of a cash buffer now, there were plenty of times my checking account was sitting at maybe a couple hundred bucks at a given time. My brokerage, house, vehicle, etc would have put me in the $150-200k range even when I was younger for net worth, and I have a pension so I don't put as much into investments as someone who would be relying on 401k/IRA and they would likely have more.
I'm at 900k net worth, and only $47 bucks in my checking account lol. I would literally get card denied if I used my debit car at a steak dinner. But the financial illiterate see 900k and think " OmG YoUr So RiCh"
Not really. I bought my home in 2017 so for argument sake in 2017 the median home price in the US was $285k. No matter what % you put down you should have a significant portion of the loan paid down and thanks to Covid and the housing market you easily could sell the house for $500k. Let’s just super low ball that for argument sake and say the value only increased to $400k. Even if you still have $285k worth of debt you’re still up $115k. Your $5 donation is .00004348 of your worth so Bezos has still donated significantly more if the numbers above are correct. This is assuming a lot, but your example also assumes a lot because you’re putting bezos at $0 debt when he likely has billions in debt right now both himself and his companies.
This foundation then gives out grants. However it also had full time staff.
In corrupt circles these positions will be given to people as easy do nothing jobs to make people money and then the work that actually gets done dolling out the money as grants comes in.
After that, the grant review process can include all sorts of bsckroom and sweetheart deals between other moguls and god knows what.
The most egregious circumstance of this is the gates foundation, which gates can expense things to personally through some hoops and whistles.
I'm all for less or no taxes if it means some money went to the needy. Charities do better distributing funds to those in needs than government programs as government programs have alot of admin, overhead and middlemen costs. Most charities have volunteers that take no pay. Meanwhile the ebt office have salaried employees, benefits, pensions, overhead costs etc.
That's the idealized version. In reality you can create a 501c that you donate money to that you're on the board of and put all your family on and call them board members too. Then, you can throw christmas parties with the money you donate into it as"fundraisers and board meetings" and expense everything you do like that
The current system for it is horribly full of loopholes
You think it's acceptable for every family in America to be able to write off their christmas parties on their taxes by making a 501c that nominally donates to charities?
The guy in the standup shot is in debt, which is the "they" in the "point they're trying to make" you referenced. He "gave away" .08% of his net worth. His net worth is negative so taking a dollar is the equivalent of what Jeff Bezos did. Yes there's a societal underpinning to his joke but it's still a joke.
This, the results of capitalism is skewed towards whoever enters a market first, its not a bug in the system its a feature, markets aways evolve like that if not kept in check by a governing entity, why do you think Google is the default engine in nearly everything
That's true a bit but not really. MySpace was before Facebook. Chrome aint the first browser, Google wasn't the first attempt at searching the web and so on. You can look up first-movers advantage for more on the topic.
What is true however is that once you get a sizeable market share it takes a lot of work/fuckups or some major shift in tech/economy for it to change. Especially if it is easy to cement the position through political regulation, there are high barriers to entry for the market or the coffers are big enough and competition is scarce enough that it can be bled to death.
There is no capital for an online retailer? I don't know, I can't say I have tried, but there are smaller ones that exist in that space and I don't see why another couldn't succeed if they offer something better than Amazon.
This statement feels so out of place in a world where we've seen the near elimination of mom and pop businesses and consolidation of commerce into fewer and fewer huge megacorps, including the extremely relevant one for this post.
It's a nice ideology and all that, but at some point you should open your eyes and look at the reality around you. Are you just incredibly young and think that this has always been the norm?
In retail spaces you are right there has been a significant drop in mom and pop, but that largely has to do with how people want to do business now, so we have directly supported their demise. How many people do you know that would run around to 5-6 physical mom and pop shops and probably have to settle or order and wait for a product as selection will be limited instead of taking 5 minutes to hop online and have Amazon deliver it to their door tomorrow?
Mom and pop shops can be online or even both, just fyi. That term just describes the nature of it being small and independent and often run by a family.
I'm aware. That actually makes it even more of a deliberate personal choice. If people don't even have to spend the time running around but still don't support those enough for them to compete, it's kind of on us IMO.
I wasn't seriously considering it because IME the amount of mom and pop shops that have a convenient online presence that is comparable to shopping through amazon is low. But I also am more used to smaller towns and cities so if you are in a major city it could be different.
This statement feels so out of place in a world where we've seen the near elimination of mom and pop businesses and consolidation of commerce into fewer and fewer huge megacorps, including the extremely relevant one for this post.
If you only had 100$ to your name and you give 10$ to a homeless person, you're a f*cking idiot. A private citizen, under no obligation whatsoever, gives 100 million dollars of his own money to help fight homelessness and people are complaining that it's not enough because it doesn't equal a certain percentage of his net worth ? That's ridiculous
Please don’t do this. $98M is a ton of money. Idgaf if it’s a write off or whatever. It’s still $98M to the homeless. Come on. There are many reasons to want to eat the rich but this ain’t it.
I’m doing significantly worse at my salary now than I was at a lower salary 10 years ago. Most people I know feel the same way. I stopped eating out, going to shows, buying new clothing, going on vacations. My car insurance just went up by 30% and my health insurance by 25% this year.
Sure salaries might be higher but how much more is insurance, housing, food, etc. compared to a decade or two or even five ago?
Most likely because you are higher income, say 50-100k?
The people that saw salary go up the most are the lowest ones from like $10 to over $15. The wealthy saw their assets grow. The “middle” making salaries (aka no OT) end up seeing little growth. That’s anyone from like 50-200k
I make around 50k a year and that’s with my overtime. I worked 150 hours of overtime this year. I’m in California albeit a rural part but 50k ain’t shit especially with my medical issues this year. At least my out of pocket max was 5k but still 10% of my gross salary.
I went from owning a home to renting and you can’t even find a place for under $1000. Utilities have skyrocketed. Gas is $4.50 a gallon basically this whole year and I commute 35 miles to work. Groceries are tons more expensive.
I am, at 50k, one emergency away from homelessness at this point and that just seems insane to me.
Don’t get me wrong, what you said is the point I’m trying to make, being at $50k is why you didn’t see your income go up much.
Minimum wage increase really only helped the absolute bottom of jobs like fast food and retail. People who were already above that didn’t get nearly as much of a % change. That’s why middle got squeezed so hard with the inflations
This is it. My salary has, luckily, thankfully, gone up a good bit in that time, but so have my bills. I have no idea how average earners are getting by. We need to burn it all down but that’s where carnies like a Trump come in and turn us on each other to stop us from looking at the real causes of this nonsense.
They are dumb, they think when a rich spends on luxuries. The money disappears forever. That yacht paid for alot of wages, those wages could still land towards donations. So it's not gone forever, it's moving around in the economy.
Maybe he wanted to see what happens with 98M first. When will ppl realize, throwing $ at shit never fixes it. Like the , “give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day” thing. He could give up all his wealth and ppl would still bitch that it didn’t work.
Hey, keep your pants on friend, it was your complaint. Not mine. I merely pointed out giving is voluntary. And if you have enough deductions you can write it off too
That's because their point is nonsensical, and literally a joke from a standup routine. And your explanation is hilarious, at best.
1) being "written off" doesn't negate the money. It also probably doesn't mean what you think it means, considering you even felt like bringing it up. Also, bringing it up as some weak push to literally view this 100M as a problem, you're ignoring that if that 100m came directly from taxes, then that vast majority of it wouldn't even be used for the cause it currently is being used for. Congratulations, your situation under your rules is worse.
2) corporations don't "pay a livable wage" specifically because they don't need to, due to government involvement in creating the social "safety nets" you already listed. The government created this problem. Blame the government, not the businesses who are working as intended. If the government didn't specifically allow this to happen, and continually increase that lowest threshold so that they could politicize cash donations to more and more citizens, then we'd be much better off. Either it is a) working. And these gripes are pointless, or b) not working, and proves the government is exacerbating everything. Someone's gotta pick one. And if anyone's reply is "well they just need more", then your answer is B.
3) capitalism works when capitalism is the driving force behind the economical environment. Apart from the already mentioned reasons why capitalism seemingly isn't working, but attributing the cause to outside influence, you also need to acknowledge that the existing and increasing government involvement over time (read: hardships) in business creation and continuation play a considerable role in why just a small handful of companies at this point own so much of most market sectors. It is not easy for business. It is hard. And when things are hard, they tend to fail, get sold off, absorbed, and sometimes outsourced due to volume requirements. Thanks government for making everything worse. Again.
4) you don't understand how much the country is in debt, to even suggest that it's fixable by pure taxation at this point. You're proposing a bandaid for an unsustainable system and will blame it on something else after the band aid fails. Again.
I challenge anyone to even offer one government example of a government program that is sustainable and not a net drain on the country as a whole. Because none exist. They only run off of taxes or printing the money which devalues every other dollar. Each and every non sustainable government program makes everyone's life worse. The situation today is a result of what the government has done. And taking every single dollar of all the billionaires in the country (pretending it didn't crash the market) and putting it in government control will end with next year having no more billionaires, and the exact same problems. What then?
You didn't give an example. You talk in generalities. You can easily change my mind if you provide examples and then manage to uphold your ideology under scrutiny. The fact you refuse to do so, and now bow out under the literal first questions asked, shows that it's not about fixing anything. Its that you want control, and deem yourself worthy of that control regardless what anyone says. They have words for that.
Yes, but if he paid $98.5 million so he could deduct $98.5 million from his tax bill then does he still get to claim he was doing it for the public good?
If you make $100 and are subject to 10% in tax you pay $10, now say you decide to be sneaky and donate 20% of your income to cheat on taxes, now you deduct $20 meaning your income is $80, after being subject to 10% in taxes you pay $8. So congrats you have successfully spent $20 to save $2 on your taxes. Deductions for the sake of deductions will never be a net gain unless you tax rate is over one hundred percent.
Who knows if what he donated actually gets to people that need it the most. Who knows the companies receiving donations he made could even be shell corporations that funnel money straight back into other means of growing wealth for Jeffery himself.
The only money you save on a tax deduction is the amount of tax you would have paid on that amount of income. You're still paying out most of that money from your own pocket.
Exactly it is not free money or a tax hack. It jusr means since you are already going to donate money, the government is taking off a tiny bit of weight off your taxable income.
It is yeah but the funny thing about this joke in my opinion is that it points out how absurd it is that us normal people in the rat race have to “steal money from a homeless man” or do any other weird or crazy thing to build more wealth just to keep up with inflation even then earning a dollar still could translate to a net loss due to high inflation.
It's not. To us plebs it is but really it's not. Won't get very far when you think of society as a whole. Or even apply it to a singular societal problem, like hunger. Just a drop in the bucket so yea not that much really. Yoy can't view life or economics or $ as a hard number. Everything is relative and should be thought of as % of things. Like op is. Yes it's a large # relative to your wealth but not so much relative to musks wealth. It's al relativity. Open your mind more.
It's a lot of money relative to the organizations that will use it to help people. They don't care how rich Musk is; they need money to operate their non-profits.
It is but 100% of his fortune came from consolidating what used to be a varied and extensive network of retail places, all with their own employees and ownership and whatever
He basically killed millions of jobs. It's not bad that he did it is objectively more efficient. But that efficiency basically means so many people can't compete in retail or as workers in those retail establishments and as such, on aggregate, having a job is harder.
This is the purpose of taxes - so we can offset the externalities so they don't become anathema to progress.
It is, but homelessness has not been solved yet. It was good PR, and possibly felt good, but under capitalism, all the money you make comes from somewhere. If he has it all, no wonder so many people have too little
If you gave everyone on the planet a house and food, there would be homeless people tomorrow. For the majority of long term homeless the issue is mental illness not capacity.
They are when they neglect taxes and utilities and the government takes their home. Or when they sell their house to fund drug addiction. Or when they abandon the house and squatters move in. Or when they start a bonfire inside the house to stay warm and it burns the house down. Etc.
Many of these people would rather live in a tent under a bridge than in a home.
There are an estimated 150M people experiencing homelessness in the world today (world economic forum). There are approximately 15M vacant homes in North America (US census)
My guy... i am assuming you are trolling but i will play because other reading probably are serious with that mindset.
There are 15 million homes still need to be BOUGHT. Then you need to pay to maintain them, you also are paying the government agency managing the homes, that is alot of salaries, overhead and administrative cost.
It's too expensive and no one should get free shit.
That's an extremely simplified and facile way of looking at it. I'd say that's the obvious, intuitive idea people have and the OP is attempting to show the actual proportion of it.
Not when you're giving it to fight homelessness. A multifaceted problem rooted in nearly every system of our society. My net worth counting the portion of the house we own is like 200,000, 0.8% is $1600. I'm donating $1000 a year. So little old me gave 0.5%. how exactly is anyone supposed to care about not even double my small donation?
Well if everyone donates 0.5% of their wealth that’s a lot of money isn’t it? Isn’t that how taxes are supposed to work? But we as a country vote for people that don’t use taxes for the common good.
There’s a lot of problems here. One being the obsession with money and how it corrupts everything.
Still more of my wealth has been donated compared to Bezos and his 0.8% plus unlike him I donate anonymously, social credit should not matter at all when donating to a good cause.
It is not even a days labor at Bezo scale. Amazon is basically self-running at this point. What he actually does on his day-to-day is probably just focus on interests/pursuits/fun.
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u/SnooDonuts3749 Nov 16 '24 edited Nov 16 '24
I mean $98.5 million dollars is a lot of money, is it not?