Now I need to do the math on space karen/ henery ford 2.0 aka Mr my autism makes me prone to outbursts of fascist apologia.
I did the math recently and if you took the assets of the wealthiest 1% and divided only half of it amongst the remaining 336.3 million Americans it would be a check of approximately 68,000 for every man woman and child and those bloated blood sucking leaches would still have an average remainder of just under 6 million dollars each.
I like the energy, but you’re not going to sell 92 Billion dollars worth of stocks for 92 Billion dollars.
He could just hand over the stocks.
though they would drop in value very fast thereafter, no? My naive understanding is that a good share of people would sell them immediately, causing a price crash.
That’s a specious argument. It might be technically true, but not by nearly a big enough margin for it to make any difference to the underlying point. It’s not like you’d have to unload them all in one month.
I got into an argument years ago with someone who appeared to start on the conclusion that co-operatives must be bad and tried to work backwards from there.
There was this notion that it was somehow unfair for one delivery driver to earn $1,000,000 and another to earn $10,000 just because they worked for different companies, since it was mostly the efforts of other people in the company that gave it its value. He wasn’t able to then take the tiny extra step required to apply the same logic to CEOs and shareholders.
I realized there’s a kind of proximity bias; billionaires are so far removed from our lives that we just accept their existence as part of how the world works, whereas if a regular employee like us is getting something we’re not then the jealousy becomes palpable. It’s the same thing that drives hatred towards minorities and immigrants.
And then the State Department starts flooding Amazon warehouses with drugs and guns to ruin the co-op and make people nostalgic for the good ol days when the Bezos junta was around to control the gangs.
He’d have to give them this as equity in the company, he’s not liquid for that amount. None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have.
This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho
That’s not really how that works. Sure, it isn’t liquid, but you can still borrow against it, and you don’t pay tax in this like you would if you sell. That’s how the wealthy can still buy things without having to pay any reasonable amount of tax.
And if amazon gave their employees stock options (like they did at one point) the employees could also borrow against it. But amazon stopped doing that once they reached a point where their employees were impacting their bottom line. They now rob their employees of that option to entrench wealth amongst the elite
Musk paid $44 billion in cash for Twitter. Billionaires only have wealth on paper until they want to buy a company, then magically they have the cash.
It’s my understanding that Musk borrowed heavily from investors for that cash.
Buy, Borrow, Die strategy.
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Buy something that potentially increases in value (real estate, companies, stock etc)
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Borrow money against the appreciated value of step 1, this borrowing in not taxable.
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Die and leave assets to whoever and never pay tax on the assets.
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It’s called leveraged borrowing, it’s how the billionaire class pays for things. The banks typically give them super low rates and generous terms on these types of loans.
So what Elon did was took a loan against his assets, Tesla stock, at a low APR with very loose repayment terms, then paired that with money pledged by a few other minority investors and that’s how he was able to quickly come up with 44 billion to buy Twitter.
IIRC they basically use some of their shares like a credit card, since the value of their shares keeps appreciating the interest is much easily paid off
Musk paid very little for twitter. He paid $0 in real money. He traded (iirc) like $13b of Tesla stock. The rest was filled by Saudi investors and western banks, who were greatly encouraged to own and control one of the primary modalities of communication in the 21st century. Either way very little actual cash transferred hands
he’s not liquid
Who gives a fuck? Wealth is wealth and his equity is his security for the low to zero interest loans from where all his spending money comes.
None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have
Again, yes they do. Illiquid wealth is still wealth and is the basis of rich people getting to spend as much as they want with little to no risk compared to people who DON’T have a dragon’s hoard in stock for the above infinite money exploit to work.
This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho
Nah, when people say that workers should own the means of production, they’re talking about ACTUAL ownership, not bonuses from the owner.
No, they’re saying they should own the means of production. Which in the modern context means equity in the company. All 876,000 employees could be given a 105,000 bonus in terms of stock and then they’d own Amazon equity, done
So THAT’S where you want the goal posts now?
Equity isn’t the means of production. The means of production are what produce the products and services, not what produces the capital. What you’re talking is the means of profiting.
If you were talking about a financial company where wealth for the sake of wealth IS the only product, you’d be right, but Amazon isn’t that.
There are no goal posts here. The workers can’t own the machinery in modern times because American companies rarely manufacture anything so they they own stock. Instead of jeff bezos and a small handful of executives (plus uninvolved “shareholders”) owning the bulk of the amazon the workers own the company. I don’t get why this is hard for you to understand and why you are making strange semantics arguments to defend the right of billionaires owning an obscene amount of wealth.
I don’t get why this is hard for you to understand
I understand perfectly fine, I’m just pointing out the fact that you’re wrong when conflating the means of PRODUCTION with the methods of wealth accumulation in a company that actually produces nonfinancial goods and services.
to defend the right of billionaires owning an obscene amount of wealth.
I would never do any such thing. Billionaires shouldn’t exist and in fact neither should the stock market.
Except that shareholders vote on the board of directors, who make decisions like hiring and firimg the CEO, executive compensation, and overruling executive decisions. It’s two levels of indirection, but in the end the shareholders DO control the means of production.
There are exceptions to this when thete are multiple classes of shares - one voting and one nonvoting for example. This doesn’t apply in Amazon’s case that I can see.
You could just use the top .1% and not drop that figure much. The differences as you go up are huge.
What was that thing about the band in ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ being so so unbelievably wealthy that the accountants prove that space/time is not just curved, it is warped, please internet tell me i’m not insane?
Yup! You’re remembering that right. Also, the frontman Hotblack Desiato was temporarily dead as part of a tax avoidance scheme 😄
Going by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis the 1% are valued at ~49 Trillion works out to be ~$145k per person. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLT01026
So that was 5 years ago. Which means he could give them all a $20,000 annual raise and still be making money.
Will that keep them from parking like assholes?
Math is beautiful.
This particular case would be great! But yeah, but give out all the billionaire money and money wouldn’t be money.
Dad: “Money’s valuable because it’s hard to get. If everybody had it, it wouldn’t be money.”
Friend argued with me in the 90s about the feds shredding worn bills.
“They could give those millions to people like us!”
Well, yeah, and they could give every American a million bucks. Want that?
“Fuck yeah!”
I mow lawns for $20 a pop. If I had a million I’d want at least $20,000.
“Yeah, but a meal at McDonald’s would still be $5! We could eat like kings!”
Tax the fucking snot of out 'em, but these dreams of spreading the wealth like peanut butter are childish.
Your Dad in particular is a moron.
Literally, definitionally, money is valuable because it is near universally exchangeable for any good or service.
Money literally is not money if basically everyone does not have at least some of it, to transact with.
Money is money because basically everyone has, uses, accepts it.
Money is generally functionally defined as money, at its most basic level, by the fact that a government requires it as some kind of tax or tithe or tribute; this definition holds for the vast majority of human history and civilization.
…
If things were valuable by their rarity alone, their difficulty to possess…
Then the world’s last pristine mint condition pog or beanie baby or funkopop of some particular type… would be immensely valuable, universally.
A random fingerpainting by someone you know, the only exact one of its kind in existence, would be so valuable you could buy a house with it.
…
I say your Dad in particular is a moron because his view represents a much, much more deepseeded misunderstanding of what money even is than your friend who is simply ignorant of the concept of inflation.
That is something you can sit down and explain the basics of in like 5 to 15 minutes.
Your Dad on the other hand … seems like he would require unlearning about 50 years worth of a horrendously malformed worldview.
…
Money and taxation are inextricably linked in modern societies… and it is very, very well known that highly wealth lopsided societies are unstable, prone to collapse, and are less efficient in terms of actual real economic productivity than societies with a more equitable distribution of wealth.
The capitalist lie is that concentrating wealth upwards results in a trickle down effect that makes everyone wealthier overall.
We are way, way, waaaay past the point of wealth inequality where that could be theoretically possible, and it just literally is objectively false for at least the past 40 years in the US.
What actually would cause the vast majority of people to be more wealthy, and would then also make billionaires more wealthy also, in real terms, would be the trickle up effect that would occur if you taxed the fuck out of the wealthy, gave that money to the poorer, and then they would increase the velocity of money and thus actual economic growth considerably.
The wealthy do not want this, becauss even if they gain in absolute terms, they would not be as well off in relative terms.
They want to be better than everyone else.
Not just ‘better off’.
They want power, they want monopolies and oligopolies, to sit on their hoards of extremely low velocity wealth that generates no real material gains… because this dragon-like hoarding makes everyone else far, far worse off in relative terms.
They want the power differential.
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Billionaires do not need their excess money.
It just sits there, does nothing, other than destabalize the whole financial system by haphazardly seeking the greatest ROI, untill too many bad bets are made for too long and it all blows up (ie, what is happening right now).
After a billion, congrats, you won capitalism, 100% effective tax rate after that, dear god do we need to repair and upgrade our failing infrastructure, and mitigate climate change, dig in for its already baked in, now unavoidable, massive, massive future losses in the tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars over the next 25-50 years.
We are at the point now where it is basically either than, or literally billions will die in the next 25 to 50 years, from statvation and climate disasters, increased crime rates as people become impoverished, increased war and genocides as mass migrations from disaster areas are gunned down or enslaved, nation states fight over the last remaining bits of non cost prohibitive resources that can be extracted.
I love how hard this comment goes
I am, among other things, an econometrician.
Fucking with the money is one thing.
Fucking up the concept of what money is… is another thing.
Easily triggered? Yeah, dad’s point was, more to the point, “if everyone had a bunch of money”, which was kinda the theme of my post. And I gather you understand inflation quite well. Would have hoped you could tease the theme from a couple of sentences.
This fucking place. Everyone ready to go off on the “bad guys”. No wonder it’s the worst echo chamber I’ve ever participated in.
In the 50’s and 60’s, the CEOs made 10-15x as much as the average worker, rather than something like 300x as much.
A strong middle class makes for a strong economy, because more money is flowing. Inflation can be managed with proper fiscal discipline.
Why the fuck should anyone be worth $100 billion dollars plus?
I have zero arguments with any of that and can’t imagine why you think I would.
The bills to be shredded aren’t legally money. They’re shredded because they were exchanged for new legal tender
however giving out money that already exists doesn’t magically make money
You get it. I get it. My buddy Mike didn’t get it.
I explained the replacement thing.
“But they could still give us the old bills!”
There are so many issues with this but the primary one is that you’d be an idiot to try and never work again with only a million bucks in your hand.
Inflationary as giving everyone a million bucks would be, this was the 90s. $1M would net you a fair retirement.
Google says $1M in 1990 is worth just under $2.5M today. I guess in the 90s houses were worth more like a 20th to a 10th of that rather than the 5th to a 3rd it is today, but I think you’d still have been pretty short sighted to give up working on that kind of windfall.
Giving every American $1M is not anything like what the original post is talking about. It’s talking about taking half of Bezos net worth and giving it to Amazon employees, which equates to maybe 2 years of a shitty wage, and would likely only be deliverable as stock in Amazon. The other point about redistributing some of the 1%s wealth to the wider citizens of the USA again only nets each individual 70k. Noones quitting their job over that and most people will be either be dumping it straight back I to the economy or paying down some debt.
