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Topic	I feel like there needs to be a limit on wealth.
Zeus 07/18/20 10:20:27 PM #51:	A wealth limit is fucking stupid since it generally includes speculative evaluations and things with fluctuating value. Jeff Bezos is the perfect example since he's the "wealthiest" man on the planet, but most of that wealth is just Amazon stock. And how do you cap that? Do you set maximum evaluations for companies? Do you just hand control of his company over to the government and let it run things into the ground (while gutting the company for profit)? adjl posted... Rather than a hard cap, if you want to cut down on wealth disparity, minimum wage should instead be defined as a percentage of the highest wage (including bonuses) in the company. If a CEO wants to make more money, they must first pay all of their bottom-rung staff more money as well (and, by extension, everyone else in between). Growth remains possible, just not to the explosive, exploitative degree that's currently standard, and that growth benefits everybody that contributes to it. Which is also a stupid idea, considering that it punishes companies for having more workers. The secondary idiocy is that this is often brought up in relation to fast food, despite the fact that most major fast food chains are franchises so the super-rich CEO is completely unrelated to somebody working for a franchisee. adjl posted... This is always the response to such ideas, but I think it fundamentally misrepresents the issue. The vast majority of people saying such things do feel that, for the most part, the financial elite have earned the privilege to live the rest of their lives in complete luxury. Nobody's saying they don't deserve to be rich. The problem is that they've often hoarded enough money to live thousands of such lives, more money than can ever possibly be justified as useful or meaningful for a single person, and their removal of that money from the economy is very bad for it. Again, given that the "wealth" is often tied to stock and generally shares needed to maintain control over their company, they aren't hoarding shit. Unless you're really arguing that once a company hits a certain value, the owners should be forced to sell. Not to mention that changes in share value when shares don't change hands has no real impact on the economy as a whole (at least until they go to sell). WastelandCowboy posted... Hell, the elite rich buy entire apartment buildings or apartment floors and never live there, with the sole purpose being to hide money in investments to avoid taxes. They do this with land, too. Invest and just let the money sit so it goes unnoticed. That's more of an issue. However, you can't really solve that with a wealth tax, you'd need to limit what people could buy and then they'd just get around it. faramir77 posted... If everyone had a full conceptual understanding of how much one billion dollars is for one person to own, there would be an uprising. Your wealth is closer to Elon Musk's wealth than Bill Gates is to Jeff Bezos. And if people actually understood what wealth entailed, they'd shrug their shoulders and go back to their boring lives. Almost all of Jeff Bezo's wealth is stock in his own company, yet people keep thinking he has a money vault he likes to swim in. Trespasser2003 posted... Allowing Jeff Bezos to amass TRILLIONS while millions of Americans starve is criminal. He could buy everyone on the planet a years supply of food and not even notice anything was spent. And the guy has done NOTHING that warrants hoarding that much. Nothing, unless you count screwing over everyone who works for him. This post takes stupidity to an entirely new level. Again, Bezos's wealth is almost entirely in STOCK. It's not just cash sitting around around. You have him confused with Scrooge McDuck. Even if Bezos wanted to sell every single share he owned, he wouldn't get a fraction of its full value because the stock would very quickly tank as he flooded the market. And all of his "hoarding" right now is just shares in his company which allow him to maintain control of his company. --- (\/)(\/)\|-\| There are precious few at ease / With moral ambiguities / So we act as though they don't exist. <cite>Zeus posted [p:942288818] in I feel lik... [t:78854639]...</cite> <quote>A wealth limit is fucking stupid since it generally includes speculative evaluations and things with fluctuating value. Jeff Bezos is the perfect example since he's the "wealthiest" man on the planet, but most of that wealth is just Amazon stock. And how do you cap that? Do you set maximum evaluations for companies? Do you just hand control of his company over to the government and let it run things into the ground (while gutting the company for profit)? adjl posted... </cite> <quote>Rather than a hard cap, if you want to cut down on wealth disparity, minimum wage should instead be defined as a percentage of the highest wage (including bonuses) in the company. If a CEO wants to make more money, they must first pay all of their bottom-rung staff more money as well (and, by extension, everyone else in between). Growth remains possible, just not to the explosive, exploitative degree that's currently standard, and that growth benefits everybody that contributes to it.</quote> Which is also a stupid idea, considering that it punishes companies for having more workers. The secondary idiocy is that this is often brought up in relation to fast food, despite the fact that most major fast food chains are franchises so the super-rich CEO is completely unrelated to somebody working for a franchisee. adjl posted... </cite> <quote>This is always the response to such ideas, but I think it fundamentally misrepresents the issue. The vast majority of people saying such things do feel that, for the most part, the financial elite have earned the privilege to live the rest of their lives in complete luxury. Nobody's saying they don't deserve to be rich. The problem is that they've often hoarded enough money to live thousands of such lives, more money than can ever possibly be justified as useful or meaningful for a single person, and their removal of that money from the economy is very bad for it.</quote> Again, given that the "wealth" is often tied to stock and generally shares needed to maintain control over their company, they aren't hoarding shit. Unless you're really arguing that once a company hits a certain value, the owners should be forced to sell. Not to mention that changes in share value when shares don't change hands has no real impact on the economy as a whole (at least until they go to sell). WastelandCowboy posted... </cite> <quote>Hell, the elite rich buy entire apartment buildings or apartment floors and never live there, with the sole purpose being to hide money in investments to avoid taxes. They do this with land, too. Invest and just let the money sit so it goes unnoticed.</quote> That's more of an issue. However, you can't really solve that with a wealth tax, you'd need to limit what people could buy and then they'd just get around it. faramir77 posted... </cite> <quote>If everyone had a full conceptual understanding of how much one billion dollars is for one person to own, there would be an uprising. Your wealth is closer to Elon Musk's wealth than Bill Gates is to Jeff Bezos.</quote> And if people actually understood what wealth entailed, they'd shrug their shoulders and go back to their boring lives. Almost all of Jeff Bezo's wealth is stock in his own company, yet people keep thinking he has a money vault he likes to swim in. Trespasser2003 posted... </cite> <quote>Allowing Jeff Bezos to amass TRILLIONS while millions of Americans starve is criminal. He could buy everyone on the planet a years supply of food and not even notice anything was spent. And the guy has done NOTHING that warrants hoarding that much. Nothing, unless you count screwing over everyone who works for him.</quote> This post takes stupidity to an entirely new level. Again, Bezos's wealth is almost entirely in STOCK. It's not just cash sitting around around. You have him confused with Scrooge McDuck. Even if Bezos wanted to sell every single share he owned, he wouldn't get a fraction of its full value because the stock would very quickly tank as he flooded the market. And all of his "hoarding" right now is just shares in his company which allow him to maintain control of his company. --- (\/)(\/)\|-\| There are precious few at ease / With moral ambiguities / So we act as though they don't exist. </quote> ... Copied to Clipboard!
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