I looked it up not that long ago and I’m pretty sure Amazon nets about a billion in less than a day. Not Bezos, but Amazon. And that’s net, not gross.
Idk it’s pretty gross if you ask me
He’s not worth $257 billion, that’s just what he’s been allowed to hoard.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
If he’s worth that much does it go to the person with his head?
Financial obesity is a great term.
He could have given each of these employees a million dollars and still had 13,000,000,000 left over.
amazon has a habit of shedding 10s of thousands of employees after hiring them, for tax breaks. almost right after, usually it only targeted the “low skilled workers” now its the higher skilled people too.
He could have given each of these employees a million dollars
- The $2.9 billion is not money, it’s the number on a price tag.
- Amazon lost over $200 billion in net worth in one day on 2022. Should employees be paying Amazon to work, when that happens, then? That’s only fair; anyone who financially benefits from a net worth figure rising, should experience equivalent financial detriment when the same net worth figure falls. Wanting only the upside is like demanding that your roulette wheel bet should pay out normally if you win big, but should be refunded when you lose.
Slurp slurp
Correcting a false statement isn’t bootlicking. Use your brain.
That wasn’t a bootlicking sound. That was you sucking rich people off.
My point still stands in its entirety. Consider actually thinking about it instead of imagining me fellating people.
Explain how your “point” makes any sense or stands at all, outside of a 5 year old’s version of fairness?
How is it ‘fair’ to make poor people pay to cover up the fuckup of a multi trillion dollar company? One that doesn’t even pay its fair share in taxes. Is it ‘fair’ that the people making the fuckup keep their employees at starvation levels while they buy jewelry worth more than they’ll see in decades?
No? Then your point is meaningless when the fairness doesn’t go both ways. You can say your argument stands all day, but its as meaningless as telling me you can jump to the moon.
Explain how your “point” makes any sense
It is a fact that net worth changes are not an injection of cash money, and it is also a fact that profiting when the net worth of the company you work for goes up, is only a fair arrangement if you also are on the hook when the net worth goes down. To restate the simple analogy:
Wanting only the upside is like demanding that your roulette wheel bet should pay out normally if you win big, but should be refunded when you lose.
These are plain facts. Explain precisely how either of those doesn’t make sense.
How is it ‘fair’ to make poor people pay to cover up the fuckup of a multi trillion dollar company?
It’s not, if said people aren’t being paid in company stock. However, if a worker expects to benefit from the net worth going up, they should expect to be on the hook when the net worth goes down, too. You can’t have it both ways; that would be unfair. You want the benefits of being compensated in stock without the risk that owning stock inherently carries, namely the volatility of its value.
I know exactly what you’re saying. You’re using the same “fairness” arguments that people like Jeff Bezos use to keep you from focusing on his literal mountain of wealth. As if the only fair solution is to let them hoard money while people starve to death. To that I say again, slurp slurp.
Considering many Amazon employees are paid heavily in RSUs, by your logic they were paying Amazon to work when the stock price went down
Both things you say are true. And let me just say, Amazonz efficiency is a really good thing. Cheap products are good. And Jeff Bezos is a visionary for his part in making it happen.
Still, greed is bad.
I have read every single Ayn Rand novel cover to cover. She is a phenomenal literary talent. Her themeweaving never holds together in the final act. Because things are more complicated than simple rewards and punishments. Gifts are important (not just kinky ones).
His tax rate isn’t related to his net worth, though. He didn’t get a check for $59b.
You don’t pay taxes on unrealized gains from investment vehicles, which is a good thing for the average person. Imagine having to pay a (mostly) perpetually increasing income tax on your 401k every year.
What needs to happen is the loans that banks give them against their non-liquid assets should be taxed as income.
Nah, let’s tax them as realized gains, because if you are using your unrealized gains as collateral, is that not a form of realizing their value?
I don’t care TBH, whichever one costs them more.
That’s basically the same as taxing the loans as income, but I’m down to double tax them.
I don’t think so. Just trigger a tax event on anything used as collateral for a loan.
That doesn’t work. Houses are already taxed to hell, even unrealized gains on a house is taxed. So triple taxing when you use a house as collateral would hurt small business owners.
The value of the collateral would equal the value of the loan, though. It’s effectively the same thing.
There is certainly some careful wording there that more intelligent people than us need to be writing. Both of you make sense, but I’m sure there would be ways to weasel out of one or the other. Something like “this or that, whichever is greater” would be a good start.
It would be fairly trivial to word it properly. The fact that loopholes exist is a feature, not a bug.
We absolutely pay taxes on unrealized gains. Property tax is the tax of unrealized gains. We do it for houses why can’t we do it for stocks? He’s getting dividend checks worth moillions every quarter.
If only there was a way to make sure the tax isn’t levied on normal people… Oh well.
The problem with taxing unrealized gains is that the value is always changing. It’s not real money.
You’d have to pick a point in time to capture the stock/asset value, and the wealthy would just tank the value right before.
How about the moment they use it as collateral for personal loans they use as income?
You’d have to pick a point in time to capture the stock/asset value
You mean like the bank does when they loan the money?
The loan shouldn’t be able to be disbursed without realized gains/capital behind it, and they can’t tank the value without impacting their loan.
You don’t pay taxes on unrealized gains from investment vehicles
That’s the problem.
Imagine having to pay a (mostly) perpetually increasing income tax on your 401k every year.
That’s why a nuanced, well thought out tax plan is necessary. The average person doesn’t have extra money to pay even more taxes. Billionaires do. That’s the fundamental difference
The rich don’t pay taxes on unrealized gains. The poor do. You haven’t realized any gains on your house by owning it, but the taxes go up every single time it is re-assessed in value.
What needs to happen is the loans that banks give them against their non-liquid assets should be taxed as income.
But loans aren’t income. You have to pay them back.
Pretending a loan is income and in turn taxing it as such, just because the ‘wrong thing’ was used as collateral, is nonsensically-arbitrary, I think.
P.S. Home equity loans are also ‘loans against non-liquid assets’.
Fair enough, but if you want to start taxing the ultra wealthy, you have to start somewhere. Those loans are their main source of income.
Those loans are their main source of income.
Loans aren’t income. They only reason this ‘move’ works at all is because they are creating value at a rate that exceeds the interest rate + inflation. Other than the scale of the ‘tactic’, it’s no different from taking a home equity loan to improve your home so that the amount it sells for has increased by more than was lost from the interest on/repayment of the loan.
Realize that the lenders giving these ultra-wealthy these loans are not in the business of throwing their money out the window for fun. They make these loans only because they get repaid, with enough interest to make being without those funds in the meantime worth it for them.
Then the stocks used as collateral should be taxed as realized gains.
Since we’re talking about changes to the tax code, we could make it so that it only applies to loans over some arbitrary amount, say 10x the median yearly income of the bottom 50% of earners (within a certain time period to counter multiple smaller loans as loopholes).
Cmon, we can describe this process to discuss why it’s wrong, we can’t codify it into law that if you borrow against unrealized gains for the purpose of providing yourself a liquid income, you’re realizing the gains and must pay a tax on it?
People don’t take out home equity loans to spend on groceries, maids, or yachts. They spend it on improving or repairing their home. The purpose is the asset.
People don’t take out home equity loans to spend on groceries, maids, or yachts. They spend it on improving or repairing their home.
- Having worked in a financial institution for many years, I can tell you that this is not even close to universally true. It’s very common to use it as a debt consolidation strategy.
- Even assuming this is always true, you’re essentially saying that they use the money from the loan against which their house is collateral, to do things that increase the value of the house. But borrowing using your shares in a company as collateral, in order to invest into that same company to increase its value, is essentially an identical ‘strategy’. You’re just arbitrarily deciding it’s bad for one illiquid asset to be used as collateral, but not another, even if the goal (increasing the value of the thing used as collateral) is identical.
But that’s just the thing - they’re not borrowing against their shares to improve the company. They’re using that as their income, and when the loans come due they just take out another one to pay off the first one. Infinite money glitch.
When you use it as collateral it’s a realized gain and should be taxed the value of the collateral.
Tax their net worth. The tax should be progressive, so that beyond a certain value, they can’t get any richer even if their investment give high yields. Starting bracket can be 50M, 100M$, at this scale it doesn’t matter much.
The problem is to do that you’ll have to capture the value of all of their assets at a specific point in time. This would require them knowing about it, so they could tank the value before.
But, when they put it up for collateral, they’re saying the assets are worth the amount of the loan, so it should be treated as a realized gain.
I’m all for fucking Bezos up but he’s not the CEO of Amazon anymore. Hasn’t been for a while now.
Luigi them all.
Gee, would’ve been a shame if the government decides to tax those rich snobs
Preface: Fuck Bezos and how he treats the workers.
Actually it’s “trickle up”
The top 0.1% of ‘earners’ should be guillotined. No exceptions.
The new next top 1% have the choice to share until or be guillotined. They can still be rich, but not so disgustingly so.This carries on until £50 million is the most anyone person/entity can hold. No offshore accounts. Shell companies etc etc etc. one account per person or company
Let’s face it, if £50 million isn’t enough then they deserve the guillotine.
Two accounts = guillotine.
Hide money = guillotine.
Put money in to your another person’s/child’s account then you have access, or use it yourself = guillotine.
Forgotten account? = guillotine.
Try to loophole it at all = guillotine.Fuck the rich.
Edit:
Edited the percentage.I don’t think this will have the effects you think it will
If this is NOT another reason to study and read theory, then I don’t know what is. https://redsails.org/
Batman was a superhero because he was rich. Lex Luthor was a supervillian because he was rich. Bezos made his choice and should be treated like the villian he is.
Had Batman used the money spent on his batcave and bat-gadgets into social services, the criminality in Gotham would probably have gone down more than by punching some guys in the face.
I hate screenshots with the time/date stamp removed. It makes things so much harder to verify
Nice, I finally canceled my membership with them, uninstalled the app and this post makes me feel even better. I made sure to fill out their survey after saying fuck billionaires, they don’t deserve my money, and that Amazon has ruined small local business. Probably doesn’t mater but every little bit helps. I just wish I had done it sooner.
I always wonder what a modern day Robin Hood might look like in relation to people like this. How would such a person target a billionaire, and redistribute even some of that wealth to people who actually need it?
In particular, how would you do that at a billionaire’s scale, in such a way that financial institutions don’t or can’t immediately claw it back?
Honestly, MacKenzie Scott may currently be the closest thing?
Hah! I hadn’t thought of it from that perspective!
Have you watched Mr. Robot? It tackles a lot of these questions.
I haven’t; I’ll look into it!
