> while the office TV is showing billionaires take off into space in personal rocket penises.
Stripped of the emotional phraseology, I 100% agree with your point. There is something pointedly psychotic about flying rockets just because when your employees are not paid or treated fairly.
I assume we're talking about Bezos here, Amazon pays above the prevailing wage in most markets and if workers don't feel they are being treated fairly they have the choice to work elsewhere. Bezos is flying to space not "just because", he's flying to space in order to build another company we all might benefit from, like AWS or Prime. He's flying to space because he's earned it, by improving a lot of developers and consumers lives. The timing was just unfortunate and a "gotcha" moment for those who complain about anyone with more than $100 in their bank accounts.
I have no beef or chicken with our wealthy elite. As the old saying goes - Don't hate the player, hate the game.
But I had to qualify why the current or prevailing idea of capitalism really is just regressing to a revamped version of some hybrid socialist-monarch rule, complete with peasant-aristocracy economics and welfare. I don't think we can escape and think our way out of the oldest forms of governance. And the peasants feel some type of way about it.
Its completely fine to jerk off Bezos and make claims of his angelic presence, totally cool. But mans no astronaut. The space administration agencies around the world sent highly trained, highly specialized people into space to find answers for humanity. Some scientific, some philosophical. So it was televised, the public was told, and mankind was taking a step forward even though we still hate each other because of skin colour. Monkeys though we are, one little step.
And you just claimed Bezos is making who's life better? Developers? Consumers? The folks who pay him money? Can I at least reserve the right to complain in that case?
This fetishizing of the rich is exactly the problem. How dare these socialists take this wealth and give it to the unthankful moochers!
No one is talking about "punishing" the ultra-rich, but I would like to see them pay around my percentage tax rate, which is 28% - that's just Federal. I challenge you to find a wealthy person paying anywhere near that.
The top tax rate in the US, decades ago, was 90%. It effectively capped the wealth, preventing entities from becoming more powerful than the government (good luck with that anti-trust action), which had the added benefit of forcing them to reinvest the money into the business and wages.
What are the incentives now? The IRS is gutted. White collar crime, outright fraud. Profit, ruin a company, walk away with untaxed riches. No one is looking.
> The top tax rate in the US, decades ago, was 90%.
Which pretty much no one paid because there were so many exceptions to it. Starting with the fact that the top long-term capital gains tax rate was 25%, not 90%.
A lot of those exceptions got eliminated as part of the process of reducing the top marginal rate to the levels we observe now. The current "top" Federal rate is 39.35% on earned income, 40.8% on interest, non-qualified dividends, and short-term capital gains, and 23.8% on qualified dividends and long-term capital gains. That assumes a large enough income that we're not worrying about Social Security in any way, or phaseouts of various sorts or whatnot, but _are_ hitting the extra medicare tax and net investment tax provisions of the ACA. It also assumes that the employer side of the 1.45% Medicare tax is not incident on the employee, which of course it is, but we're comparing "headline" rates.
So specifically for Jeff Bezos, most of whose "income" is presumably long-term capital gains due to AMZN price appreciation, the difference between the "decades ago" utopia you describe and now is the difference between a 25% and 23.8% marginal rate on that long-term capital gain income.
All that said, are you paying a 28% _marginal_ rate, or a 28% _effective_ rate? And are you specifically talking about "wealthy" people or "high-income" people? I ask because last I checked the top 1% of incomes paid something on the order of 25% _average_ Federal tax rate for the last several years (i.e. after the tax cuts a few years ago), and the top 0.1% of incomes paid closer to 27-28%. That's just counting income and payroll taxes, not the incidence of corporate income taxes or whatnot. And again, just Federal; state taxes are a separate story.
I haven't researched this at all, so perhaps these type of studies are out there, but I think it would be interesting to see how exemptions/credits and deductions were actually utilized over time. We have roughly 200B tax returns filed since the income tax was created (not counting corporate returns).
It would be good to be able to visualize how tax collections changed over time etc.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57061 and similar for other years (this is data through 2018, but published this year, presumably after they are pretty sure that various delayed tax return filing has happened and whatnot).
This only goes back to 1979, though. If you find something with data older than that I would be interested.
Of interest in the document I linked to is "Exhibit 11. Average Federal Tax Rates, by Income Group, 1979 to 2018" and "Exhibit 12. Average Federal Tax Rates Among Households in the Top 1 Percent, 1979 to 2018", with the latter showing top 0.1% and top 0.01% average tax rates. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57061#data has links to various xls and csv files, including the data tables those graphs are generated from. Note that per "Appendix C" of this document, the tax rates in these graphs include some sort of individualized attribution of corporate income tax incidence and that attribution could easily be quibbled with. The more detailed data tables include more breakdowns into what fraction of tax is attributed to this source, but I didn't find it more finer grained than "top 1%".
It's not fetishizing the rich it's acknowledging that they are entitled to the spend the money they've earned in the way that they want. Bezos wants to build a space company.
I'd like you both to pay the same tax rate too, 0%. You should feel entitled to keep all the money you've earned, so should he.
Bezos doesn't pay the rate you do because his income is lower than yours. It was about 90K/year. His has paper riches, stock. Which is worth nothing until you find a buyer and agree on a price.
It's surprising you mentioned companies not reinvesting in the context of Amazon, which is almost the perfect example of a company reinvesting all of their profits in pursuit of a long term vision. That's why Amazon never posts a profit, they just expand.
Hmmm... the Wright brothers flew airplanes "just because" and now we have relatively cheap, ubiquitous air travel. I'm happy to see Bezos and Musk investing in space travel - I think the end-result will be a positive for human civilization.
This was done half a century ago, and neither of these got even close to the true orbit. A Soviet dog went further - in 1957. At least Elon Musk's SpaceX has practical, monetary benefits to the taxpayer.
This is not opening up the dream of space travel for the commoners - it's ultimately a joy ride for people who got rich from a broken, corrupt, and an imbalanced system.
I frankly do not understand HN's glorification of this morbid excess.
You telling me the guy who owns a company that can deliver my toaster faster is in the same league as the guys who pioneered the aeroplanes that changed the course of human history?
You are trolling me hermano. Woe to the Wright Brothers. Bless them. Their work reduced to Alexa's boo thing
Positive for human Civilization? Those few thousand Amazon shareholders are the beneficiaries on humanity's behalf? Bless them too. I suppose we can make a few more millionaires get into the 9 figure club. Trickle down economics right?
Stripped of the emotional phraseology, I 100% agree with your point. There is something pointedly psychotic about flying rockets just because when your employees are not paid or treated fairly.
But that's just psuedo "capitalism".