Wealth taxes are a symptom of a broken tax system. If you let someone get to hundreds of billions in net worth and then realize they haven’t been appropriately paying back into the system, it’s already too late. Like the article says they can simply say “no” in a variety of ways, from fighting in court to simply leaving.
Larry Page owns about 5% of Alphabet, which is worth $4T, so he has $200B give or take. Which part of that do you think reflects a "broken tax system"? Companies should get kneecapped if their market cap gets too high? Founders shouldn't be allowed to keep even a single digit percent of the company?
The broken part is that there is third world-level poverty on the streets outside Google’s offices, working class people cannot afford to live in the Bay Area, and a fifth of California lives in poverty.
This has basically nothing to do with with market cap of Google or Larry Page's percentage ownership of it; and the state government taxing it more will not make this situation any better.
This is almost completely traceable to Californians' failure to allow sufficiently dense housing to be built on their doorsteps. The only thing Larry did was bring prosperity to the region.
(I'm in agreement with the thesis of the article)
Read somewhere that SF spends roughly 50k$-80k$ per homeless person per year.
Taxing more doesn't solve a massively inefficient system at it's core. Just like US education, we spend more than any country on earth, why is it still bad?
Answering that question with a "if only we had more money" is a really poor argument. The CA tax fundamentals are bad, pooring more cash onto the fire will not fix that.
You can't solve a shortage with demand subsidies. You need to expand supply. SF has too little housing relative to its population, and has perennially tried throwing money at the nonprofit industrial complex which has (obviously) perennially failed to solve the problem because it doesn't generate new housing units, it just bids up and reshuffles the existing ones (and steals a lot of money in the process).
And, many people who are poor have persistent mental/physical disabilities, so part of that spending is because many of these people have it the hardest.
With that said, we could likely fix all of these things and significantly unequal wealth distribution would still result in a lot of poverty.
96k$?! Those are rookie numbers. I propose a mclaren for every homeless person. We will weath tax all stocks in the fortune 500 to pay for it, crash the stocks and solve inequality.
I agree that that's the major problem; the poverty is inexcusable. But that's not caused by the $300B (or whatever) of equity. It's caused because the homeowners of the Bay Area decided that once they got a house, nobody else should, and that they should get to exclude others from the opportunities they had.
This same thing was observed during the Gold Rush in California in the 1800s; extreme wealth also resulted in extreme poverty. And there's a great way to solve this: tax the land and redistribute it equally to everyone. Land can't be moved, it's something that belongs to all of us, and you can't make more of it.
You sort of can make more land -- by building tall buildings. Unfortunately the Bay Area has mostly outlawed that, too. And we can't blame that just on homeowners. SF "tenant advocates" are just as violently allergic to developers building new structures as homeowners are. But the worst offenders are definitely Peninsula and South Bay homeowners.
That distinction between tall buildings and shorter buildings on the same plot of land is exactly why the land should be taxed.
Economic land is any capital that has a fixed amount, that you can't make more of. When the local governments in the Bay Area started capping the amount of buildable square feet, they greatly accelerated inequality by converting regular living space and working space into economic land, just like the real land it sits upon.
This is why economic inequality skyrocketed so much. Rentierism resulted in so much being stolen from anybody who doesn't own the land, and blocks out so many people from even having access to the economic system.
Tenant advocates recognize that eviction is an existential threat to their way of life and so understandably they are fighting for their short term future. I disagree with their efforts in the long term, but I understand why they'd do what they're doing.
In contrast when you have enormously wealthy people like Marc Andreessen fighting against higher density zoning there is no such excuse and it's pure greed. Nothing could actually be an existential disruption to the wealthy in the same way. There is no reason to listen to the rich like Andreessen at all.
The equitable thing would be to focus on redeveloping wealthy homeowner areas and limit redevelopment in areas occupied by poor renters, but somehow that option never seems to be on the table. Only the reverse.
I tend to keep quiet on the following critiques, because it can be counterproductive to larger goals to speak the truth sometimes, but something in this comment got to me and I need to share my truth. You're too kind on the "tenant" advocacy groups here. They are nearly 100% funded by wealth foundations that have exactly the same motivations as Marc Andreesen, and the people carrying out the wishes of the wealthy foundations are merely woke-washing really bad behavior.
If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!
I say this as someone who continues to advocate alongside tenant groups on policy for better protections, for rent registries, etc. And as someone who spent many years giving small donations to local tenant advocacy groups. At least Andreesen is transparent in his greed, and not hiding it. I regret all those years of donations to the groups that hurt people, but when it comes to the few good things they do I'll be there with them still.
Well I'm speaking from first hand experience knowing working people who live in such situations. Their existence is so precarious that a change in housing situation is indeed existential. So even if there are some disingenuous tenancy orgs out there, it doesn't change the reality that this is a real problem.
> They are nearly 100% funded by wealth foundations that have exactly the same motivations as Marc Andreesen, and the people carrying out the wishes of the wealthy foundations are merely woke-washing really bad behavior.These "tenant" groups fight the types of change that would redevelop wealthy areas, precisely because of their funding sources, and they do it just as hard if not harder than stopping housing going up in other areas.
Certainly not the case in my jurisdiction of Vancouver, where such political groups (eg. COPE) have explicitly advocated for apartment development in the wealthiest areas of the city. Maybe this is the case but a big [citation needed] here. If there are somewhere tenant advocacy orgs that aren't in favour of turning low density detached homes into apartments for workers that's certainly not one I recognize.
> If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!
Yes this is the point of my last comment. The solution is to increase the amount of people who have their forever home. The most equitable way to do that is to "destroy" the forever homes of the very rich for whom that is really no big disruptive deal, not to destroy the forever homes of the poor for whom it would be incredibly existentially disruptive. It is not "greedy" for people to keep their toehold on their long term home. To be clear the stakes here are not simply moving somewhere else but being priced out of the city entirely.
that has ZERO to do with the tax system... You can't be serious? Have you looked at the data at all? have you seen how much money is spent "combatting" homelessness in San Francisco?
just not his problem. not a single motherfucker on this website lives their life as if wealth disparities are a genuine problem anyways. you are motivated by resentment
Why does it matter how much the shares of his company are worth? They just represent ownership of a company. It's not like their existence is somehow holding back wealth from the market or from other people. And if he wants to sell the shares to make some cash, then he's going to have to pay taxes on that, which is good for everyone else. And he wouldn't do that unless he planned to spend or invest the cash receives, which is also good for everyone else. I fail to see the harm.
I think one could argue that taxation should be higher, and harder to dodge, and I would agree with that.
But once you start saying that some people shouldn't have more than others to some degree, that's a very slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? Why is it okay for middle class Americans to buy nicer clothes and move into bigger apartments when people are out there starving? If it's not okay for someone to have the net worth of Qatar, why would it be okay for someone to live in an apartment that's worth more than a poor township in South Africa?
At some point we have to accept that inequality exists, and that although almost everyone could do something to minimize it, there's an ethical and practical line that needs to also respect individuality to a large degree, if we want people to feel incentivized to do things, to feel ownership, to maintain autonomy. And where to draw that line is tough to say exactly, but it probably shouldn't be a line, it should probably be smooth, or at least smooth-ish. So I feel like we're just coming back around to progressive taxation. Which we already have.
That, exactly, is the problem. It's not even about money and tax evasion but power. Why should one person have more say over the company they work for than 10,000 other employees? Or even worse they don't even work there anymore and just control it from outside?
Even if they are a perfectly good and business smart person who never makes bad decisions or abuses their workers. They will eventually die or sell their share, and in either case it will end up with people who care less about the company's long term health than the founder did. Profit maximizers with no ethics and no feeling of responsibility.
I think the concept of shareholders is the problem. Layoffs, cartels and price inflation happen when the people who make decisions get all the benefits but none of the downsides. If it was up to me I would ban stocks and replace them with time limited shares that give you a right to part of the profits for 1 or 5 or 10 years, but zero control over the company. Leave power to workers and returns to investors but never bind the two together.
> Why should one person have more say over the company they work for than 10,000 other employees?
Why shouldn't they?
That's how pretty much every organization works. Every military, every government, every sports team, every space mission, every classroom, etc., they all have some person or small group up people with more more decision-making power, or "more say," as you put it.
I fail to see the problem with that. In fact, there's a very real benefit in that it's generally more effective. For example, today people are completely free to create organizations that work differently, and they rarely choose to, and when they do, they rarely out-compete the alternative. So the proof is in the pudding that there's something less effective about it.
If I had to wager a guess: decision-making isn't something that scales well. Bodies might have dozens of organs, but they only really need one brain to control them all.
> They will eventually die or sell their share, and in either case it will end up with people who care less about the company's long term health than the founder did. Profit maximizers with no ethics and no feeling of responsibility.
1. There are plenty of counterexamples where the leader of a company ensures its long-term success after their tenure ends.
2. Even if this were somehow a downside of owner-led companies, you always have to ask the question, "...compared to what?" It's not like the alternative doesn't have its own slew of downsides, as evidenced by the dearth of competitive co-ops that compete successfully with owner-led companies. In other words, organizations are always going to have issues and errors and flaws, no matter how you set up decision-making.
People trying to apply the principles of democracy to corporations are misguided. And therefore, corporations function most efficiently, essentially, as autocracies with fascist features. It is not difficult to compare the corporate style with fascism in many elements: certainly more similarities there than a liberal democracy, or a socialist nation, where we've often said that politicians shouldn't be businessman, at least insofar as you cannot/shoudn't run a state like a business.
After all, businessmen often use strategies like aiming to be acquired/purchased by a much larger company, merging with their competitors or partners, or anticipating bankruptcy by draining every viable resource and asset they can reach.
At the same time, observers such as JB Crawford have also pointed out that very large corporations function like a religion. For example, telecommunications. <a href="https://computer.rip/2024-09-08-private-lines.html" rel="nofollow">https://computer.rip/2024-09-08-private-lines.html
Of course I mean this metaphor internally, as if we were regarding each corporation as a sovereign microstate, which they aren't... hopefully...
If the ideal CEO has psychopathic qualities, and the ideal capitalist corporation is comparable to a fascist organ, and the corporations are the primary unit of American culture, then where does that leave us?
Yes perhaps there should be wealth caps. Did Larry Page really do 5% of all that labor that made google as big as it is? And should a single company get so big and have so much power? Yes, I get that they took risks and invested early, and we shouldn't take away that type of incentive, but perhaps it should have caps, or an S curve tax schedule.
Google doesn't have much power. It can't arrest you or pass laws or vote. It just happens to produce a lot of profits for its shareholders (who are, overwhelmingly, average people with 401Ks) and a lot of profits means a big market cap.
If we need revenue to fund useful government programs, great, let's tax Larry. But I don't understand what problem is solved by expropriation qua expropriation.
it does have monopoly power and anticompetitive power all over the place though.
google bans are quite intrusive, but google could pretty easily with their graph knowledge apply secondary or tertiary sanctions, at which point you would not be able to do much of anything, same as if the US government sanctioned you
> Companies should get kneecapped if their market cap gets too high?
Yes. They should be broken up because competition is good for consumers and society. If we had functional anti-trust enforcement Google would not have a near-monopoly on search ads where they own both the ad inventory and the marketplace where you have to buy those placements.
That's fine, I don't care as long as they are legitimately competing and not colluding to the detriment of consumers/employees/citizens.
The part where he has access to essentially unlimited untaxed cashflow by borrowing against that asset. Especially with how the market has been lately, the gains erase any burden of the loan. Something has be done about this, at least. Otherwise broken sounds about right.
Larry has sold tons of Alphabet stock and paid lots of capital gains taxes. This is easily available public information. The whole buy-borrow-die thing is sort of a stupid myth. Actual centibillionaires diversify because the risk of having a huge concentrated position is much greater than the liability of having to pay some capital gains taxes.
Well, why does something have to be done about this, exactly? Who is getting hurt here? It's not like his ownership percentage of Google is somehow keeping wealth out of the market.
> Just like anyone else, he has to pay back what he borrows, he immediately owes an equal debt. And that requires actual income, which gets taxed.
In theory, maybe, but in practice that is not what happened over the past decade(s). Instead our retirement funds are paying it back.
When the market grows it makes the collateral worth more, which lets him keep refinancing the debt instead of selling assets and realizing taxable gains. As long as the assets appreciate faster than the debt grows, the borrowing can effectively roll forward for decades. Eventually the estate pays the debt out of the assets themselves, but this is not necessarily out of taxable income earned during his lifetime. The US markets has seen exceptional genuine growth, but the trillions of 401(k), IRA, etc money flowing in to them over the last 40 years is no small consideration.
> Well, why does something have to be done about this, exactly?
The something here is what's required to have a functional tax system. Without addressing this situation I do see an argument that we have one. How important that is to one is another question.
the people getting hurt is anyone who would have bought something but was outbit by larry page's free money glitch.
he doesnt necessarily have to pay it back either. he could just take out another loan against his same now higher valued assets to pay off the old loan
like, if a company's market cap gets too big, the law should stop applying to them? they should be allowed to start their own militaries and enforce martial law a la east india company?
how does a founder keep a single digit of their company after theyve been dead for a thousand years?
These arent nearly as absolute as you are making them to be.
a founder can keep their percent by paying their taxes with other money they have, or by decreasing the worth of their company. theyre a founder, they have control. Maybe founders wont be so keen to enshittify their products if theres a downside to continued growth forever. considering google dropped "dont be evil" in exchange for making larry page's 1% grow for the sake of growing, how's society at large benefiting from continuing to subsidize it?
If you taxed him half of that wealth he'd still have single digit percentage of the company.
The broken tax system is that I get taxed about 50% on my marginal income dollar --- the system doesn't wait for me to spend it first --- but when his stock portfolio appreciates by a dollar, he's not taxed! Not until he sells in order to spend. Why are we taxing labor so much more than capital?
And no, I don't think that inventing pagerank really entitles two people to $200B. Although in their case I don't think they've done as much harm with it as some other billionaires.
When your job pays you a dollar, you get an actual dollar. Your job never claws that money back. Unrealized capital gains are not money, and they routinely get clawed back. Unrealized capital gains just means someone in New York traded GOOG/GOOGL at a higher price than they did yesterday.
And, sure, super-rich people can in theory use the appreciated stock as collateral for loans and not pay taxes, but in practice Larry and most other centi-billionaires actually sell loads of stock and pay a lot in capital gains taxes because having your status as super rich dude who owns a huge yacht be totally dependent on Google's stock price is a dumb risk to take on, and it's worth paying some taxes to eliminate that risk.
> When your job pays you a dollar, you get an actual dollar.
No.. many cents of it are withheld, by law.
Elon uses his vast wealth to influence, intimidate, and generally get away with lawlessness. He effectively took huge loans from banks to buy a giant bullhorn in Twitter. Those loans are collaterized by unrealized capital gains. And more generally, billionaires have the ear of politicians because of what they could do with their money. So you don't need to realize gains (gains which are taxed at a more or less flat rate!) to make use of your wealth.
Though like I said, Larry is not really a bad guy in the world of billionaires. I would only support taxing him more than I would support levying additional taxes on w2 income assuming CA actually had a provable need for more money. (Right now I think they waste most of the budget.)
He has single digit percentage of the _company_ but double digits percentage of _voting stock_. My understanding is that he and Bring are holding together barely above 50% of the latter and understandingly do not want to lose the control.
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(I'm in agreement with the thesis of the article)
johnsmith1840 · · focus · HN ↗
Read somewhere that SF spends roughly 50k$-80k$ per homeless person per year.
Taxing more doesn't solve a massively inefficient system at it's core. Just like US education, we spend more than any country on earth, why is it still bad?
Answering that question with a "if only we had more money" is a really poor argument. The CA tax fundamentals are bad, pooring more cash onto the fire will not fix that.
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The population that's already living in those houses?
Note that "native-born Californians are ~37% of San Francisco County. That percentage has remained relatively flat over recent decades"
<a href="https://usafacts.org/answers/is-the-population-growing-or-shrinking/county/san-francisco-county-ca/" rel="nofollow">https://usafacts.org/answers/is-the-population-growing-or-sh...johnsmith1840 · · focus · HN ↗
I think it's more socialist/communist motivation to seize production I don't think they care about the rich as much as control.
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<a href="https://youtu.be/YKAD7l1a9hc" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/YKAD7l1a9hc
In addition, there should probably be changes to laws/regulations to address companies that exploit the poorest.
<a href="https://youtu.be/U9Rls-_7LdQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/U9Rls-_7LdQ
And, many people who are poor have persistent mental/physical disabilities, so part of that spending is because many of these people have it the hardest.
With that said, we could likely fix all of these things and significantly unequal wealth distribution would still result in a lot of poverty.
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epistasis · · focus · HN ↗
This same thing was observed during the Gold Rush in California in the 1800s; extreme wealth also resulted in extreme poverty. And there's a great way to solve this: tax the land and redistribute it equally to everyone. Land can't be moved, it's something that belongs to all of us, and you can't make more of it.
jdm2212 · · focus · HN ↗
epistasis · · focus · HN ↗
Economic land is any capital that has a fixed amount, that you can't make more of. When the local governments in the Bay Area started capping the amount of buildable square feet, they greatly accelerated inequality by converting regular living space and working space into economic land, just like the real land it sits upon.
This is why economic inequality skyrocketed so much. Rentierism resulted in so much being stolen from anybody who doesn't own the land, and blocks out so many people from even having access to the economic system.
Tiktaalik · · focus · HN ↗
In contrast when you have enormously wealthy people like Marc Andreessen fighting against higher density zoning there is no such excuse and it's pure greed. Nothing could actually be an existential disruption to the wealthy in the same way. There is no reason to listen to the rich like Andreessen at all.
The equitable thing would be to focus on redeveloping wealthy homeowner areas and limit redevelopment in areas occupied by poor renters, but somehow that option never seems to be on the table. Only the reverse.
epistasis · · focus · HN ↗
If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!
I say this as someone who continues to advocate alongside tenant groups on policy for better protections, for rent registries, etc. And as someone who spent many years giving small donations to local tenant advocacy groups. At least Andreesen is transparent in his greed, and not hiding it. I regret all those years of donations to the groups that hurt people, but when it comes to the few good things they do I'll be there with them still.
Tiktaalik · · focus · HN ↗
> They are nearly 100% funded by wealth foundations that have exactly the same motivations as Marc Andreesen, and the people carrying out the wishes of the wealthy foundations are merely woke-washing really bad behavior.These "tenant" groups fight the types of change that would redevelop wealthy areas, precisely because of their funding sources, and they do it just as hard if not harder than stopping housing going up in other areas.
Certainly not the case in my jurisdiction of Vancouver, where such political groups (eg. COPE) have explicitly advocated for apartment development in the wealthiest areas of the city. Maybe this is the case but a big [citation needed] here. If there are somewhere tenant advocacy orgs that aren't in favour of turning low density detached homes into apartments for workers that's certainly not one I recognize.
> If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!
Yes this is the point of my last comment. The solution is to increase the amount of people who have their forever home. The most equitable way to do that is to "destroy" the forever homes of the very rich for whom that is really no big disruptive deal, not to destroy the forever homes of the poor for whom it would be incredibly existentially disruptive. It is not "greedy" for people to keep their toehold on their long term home. To be clear the stakes here are not simply moving somewhere else but being priced out of the city entirely.
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Landlords could have collectively agreed to keep rents at $1K/month, but they decided to be greedy instead.
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I think one could argue that taxation should be higher, and harder to dodge, and I would agree with that.
But once you start saying that some people shouldn't have more than others to some degree, that's a very slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? Why is it okay for middle class Americans to buy nicer clothes and move into bigger apartments when people are out there starving? If it's not okay for someone to have the net worth of Qatar, why would it be okay for someone to live in an apartment that's worth more than a poor township in South Africa?
At some point we have to accept that inequality exists, and that although almost everyone could do something to minimize it, there's an ethical and practical line that needs to also respect individuality to a large degree, if we want people to feel incentivized to do things, to feel ownership, to maintain autonomy. And where to draw that line is tough to say exactly, but it probably shouldn't be a line, it should probably be smooth, or at least smooth-ish. So I feel like we're just coming back around to progressive taxation. Which we already have.
tancop · · focus · HN ↗
That, exactly, is the problem. It's not even about money and tax evasion but power. Why should one person have more say over the company they work for than 10,000 other employees? Or even worse they don't even work there anymore and just control it from outside?
Even if they are a perfectly good and business smart person who never makes bad decisions or abuses their workers. They will eventually die or sell their share, and in either case it will end up with people who care less about the company's long term health than the founder did. Profit maximizers with no ethics and no feeling of responsibility.
I think the concept of shareholders is the problem. Layoffs, cartels and price inflation happen when the people who make decisions get all the benefits but none of the downsides. If it was up to me I would ban stocks and replace them with time limited shares that give you a right to part of the profits for 1 or 5 or 10 years, but zero control over the company. Leave power to workers and returns to investors but never bind the two together.
csallen · · focus · HN ↗
Why shouldn't they?
That's how pretty much every organization works. Every military, every government, every sports team, every space mission, every classroom, etc., they all have some person or small group up people with more more decision-making power, or "more say," as you put it.
I fail to see the problem with that. In fact, there's a very real benefit in that it's generally more effective. For example, today people are completely free to create organizations that work differently, and they rarely choose to, and when they do, they rarely out-compete the alternative. So the proof is in the pudding that there's something less effective about it.
If I had to wager a guess: decision-making isn't something that scales well. Bodies might have dozens of organs, but they only really need one brain to control them all.
> They will eventually die or sell their share, and in either case it will end up with people who care less about the company's long term health than the founder did. Profit maximizers with no ethics and no feeling of responsibility.
1. There are plenty of counterexamples where the leader of a company ensures its long-term success after their tenure ends.
2. Even if this were somehow a downside of owner-led companies, you always have to ask the question, "...compared to what?" It's not like the alternative doesn't have its own slew of downsides, as evidenced by the dearth of competitive co-ops that compete successfully with owner-led companies. In other words, organizations are always going to have issues and errors and flaws, no matter how you set up decision-making.
ButlerianJihad · · focus · HN ↗
After all, businessmen often use strategies like aiming to be acquired/purchased by a much larger company, merging with their competitors or partners, or anticipating bankruptcy by draining every viable resource and asset they can reach.
At the same time, observers such as JB Crawford have also pointed out that very large corporations function like a religion. For example, telecommunications. <a href="https://computer.rip/2024-09-08-private-lines.html" rel="nofollow">https://computer.rip/2024-09-08-private-lines.html
Of course I mean this metaphor internally, as if we were regarding each corporation as a sovereign microstate, which they aren't... hopefully...
If the ideal CEO has psychopathic qualities, and the ideal capitalist corporation is comparable to a fascist organ, and the corporations are the primary unit of American culture, then where does that leave us?
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jdm2212 · · focus · HN ↗
If we need revenue to fund useful government programs, great, let's tax Larry. But I don't understand what problem is solved by expropriation qua expropriation.
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it does have monopoly power and anticompetitive power all over the place though.
google bans are quite intrusive, but google could pretty easily with their graph knowledge apply secondary or tertiary sanctions, at which point you would not be able to do much of anything, same as if the US government sanctioned you
ForHackernews · · focus · HN ↗
Yes. They should be broken up because competition is good for consumers and society. If we had functional anti-trust enforcement Google would not have a near-monopoly on search ads where they own both the ad inventory and the marketplace where you have to buy those placements.
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In theory, maybe, but in practice that is not what happened over the past decade(s). Instead our retirement funds are paying it back.
When the market grows it makes the collateral worth more, which lets him keep refinancing the debt instead of selling assets and realizing taxable gains. As long as the assets appreciate faster than the debt grows, the borrowing can effectively roll forward for decades. Eventually the estate pays the debt out of the assets themselves, but this is not necessarily out of taxable income earned during his lifetime. The US markets has seen exceptional genuine growth, but the trillions of 401(k), IRA, etc money flowing in to them over the last 40 years is no small consideration.
> Well, why does something have to be done about this, exactly?
The something here is what's required to have a functional tax system. Without addressing this situation I do see an argument that we have one. How important that is to one is another question.
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he doesnt necessarily have to pay it back either. he could just take out another loan against his same now higher valued assets to pay off the old loan
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like, if a company's market cap gets too big, the law should stop applying to them? they should be allowed to start their own militaries and enforce martial law a la east india company?
how does a founder keep a single digit of their company after theyve been dead for a thousand years?
These arent nearly as absolute as you are making them to be.
a founder can keep their percent by paying their taxes with other money they have, or by decreasing the worth of their company. theyre a founder, they have control. Maybe founders wont be so keen to enshittify their products if theres a downside to continued growth forever. considering google dropped "dont be evil" in exchange for making larry page's 1% grow for the sake of growing, how's society at large benefiting from continuing to subsidize it?
lkjdsklf · · focus · HN ↗
Larry would still be rich as heck, but probably... less rich..
bagacrap · · focus · HN ↗
The broken tax system is that I get taxed about 50% on my marginal income dollar --- the system doesn't wait for me to spend it first --- but when his stock portfolio appreciates by a dollar, he's not taxed! Not until he sells in order to spend. Why are we taxing labor so much more than capital?
And no, I don't think that inventing pagerank really entitles two people to $200B. Although in their case I don't think they've done as much harm with it as some other billionaires.
jdm2212 · · focus · HN ↗
And, sure, super-rich people can in theory use the appreciated stock as collateral for loans and not pay taxes, but in practice Larry and most other centi-billionaires actually sell loads of stock and pay a lot in capital gains taxes because having your status as super rich dude who owns a huge yacht be totally dependent on Google's stock price is a dumb risk to take on, and it's worth paying some taxes to eliminate that risk.
bagacrap · · focus · HN ↗
No.. many cents of it are withheld, by law.
Elon uses his vast wealth to influence, intimidate, and generally get away with lawlessness. He effectively took huge loans from banks to buy a giant bullhorn in Twitter. Those loans are collaterized by unrealized capital gains. And more generally, billionaires have the ear of politicians because of what they could do with their money. So you don't need to realize gains (gains which are taxed at a more or less flat rate!) to make use of your wealth.
Though like I said, Larry is not really a bad guy in the world of billionaires. I would only support taxing him more than I would support levying additional taxes on w2 income assuming CA actually had a provable need for more money. (Right now I think they waste most of the budget.)
anabab · · focus · HN ↗