Why are billionaires good or are they not?

How it's the same model as now? You can order everything online. Many local companies do this now too. If there is no Amazon there is a marker for niche goods. Hardware only, car parts, gardening. Not Amazon who sells that all.

If people were paid fair wages with unions goods would have to be produced in America. We allow the 1% to make a few more billion over paying fair wages in America. This is another talking point of people who really need it. The poorer people will say unions are bad since it taxes them. Even minnium wage is very expensive compared to China. So Americans are at fault for a few people's greed when they demand fair wages? One of the expense of a business is paying workers. In America in low skill jobs there is a culture of "if you don't like it find someplace better". Ok well that is not always possible. People have needs now and it places all the responsibility on the worker and none on the job. Some on the right wing don't think there should be any minnium wage. You hired the person so you owe them a fair wage. Any human employee is an expense. It's why Amazon made a fuss of raising their salary. They are hiring less humans and long term it's all machines. They can work the pace the world demands for overnight shipping for free until you maintain them. Humans will always bitch.

Just because Americans like online shopping does not mean Amazon should not be taxed especially once they don't hire people for warehouses anymore.

 

besides the fact that i haven't seen a "local" hardware store since elementary school.

 

Do you have a source to support that view?

 

'The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid roughly $538 billion, or 37.3 percent of all income taxes, while the bottom 90 percent paid about $440 billion, or 30.5 percent of all income taxes'.

 

Its not about tax rates, its about tax deductions.

Why be led down the path of discussing higher tax rates when exemptions and deductions are so large?

Previously, these millionaires were allowed to deduct the full amount of local property tax paid.

Now that deduction is capped at $10,000. Is this a good thing?

 

I think that if America's policy to become a politician is that you need to be a billionaire is pretty shithouse.
Why not be more open instead

 

because the people who set it up that way in the first place wouldn't make a bunch of money they don't need that way?

 

Oh, come on, Suzanne. Neither Biden nor Hillary, nor Sanders not any of the Dems other than Bloomberg are billionaires. Whether or not Trump is one is a matter yet undetermined, although he has claimed to be one. Buttigieg is hardly wealthy, at least by the Bloomberg standard.

What is much more important than how much money they have, is how they got it. So far as I know, Bloomberg made it in honest trade. Trump, well he was not entirely on the up and up, but he didn't make his money out of politics, unlike the Dems. Biden enriched himself and his family through political influence. That is what I find to be excremental.

 

“Nobody needs (insert arbitrary amount of money or goods here)”

Well, sure.

But having the ability to acquire anything beyond bare subsistence is what makes life worth living. Without it, humans become all reduced to basic livestock

 

So personal greed is all that matters in your life. And unless you are free to be greedy you have no purpose? What a sad world view.

 

Relative to what percent of their income? It seems like a lot of money to us it's not for them. Even less so when they get public good will and tax write offs. For example it's odd that as soon as the heat was up on the Amazon guy he made all those donations to charity. It worked people said it was unfair to be so mean to him. I mean look he just gave 100 million dollars away. He makes 15 million every 30 minutes or something ridiculous like that. It's an average person giving $300 to a charity at Christmas when they make 60K a year.

A beer company spent 100 million on a super bowl ad to say they would donate 1 million to charity IF and only if we buy all their beer of which they will profit way more than 1 million. I don't fall for things like that. Percent wise the middle class pays far more in tax. Despite what some may think I don't want to "punish" wealth. A billion is just a nice cut off. It's thousands of times beyond what you need. There are things in the world like rare cars or classic art work that could fetch 100 million or more so you "need" that billion but you don't need those things at the expense of your fellow man. Why build society around those few people?

Hardcore capitalism is to say anyone can have have anything. A limit is unfair. And it's natural that to have your own good life you will have to limit someone else who is not as smart as you. So it's only right you pay no tax and offer low wages. Someone else will pay more if they can. Yet when you get a greedy rich person who did that so they have no limit we just assume they will decide to have a very communist hippie free love outlook and just decide to give more money away then taxes could ever take. It's a double standard hat makes excuses for why middle class life only get worse in America. Why would they self impose a limit when were too blind too see what the government does for them? I think there is a reason few if any academics with a serious background in economics favor a late stage capitalist free market.

The right wing can sometimes pull up an business major but that's not the same thing. Business school teaches how to use capitalism without regard to others. It's not education of the ripple effects of personal gain.

 

Do you think it's greedy to desire a more fulfilling life than a life of bland mediocrity where one simply just "gets by?"

 

I'm in business school. I've never been taught this. We literally have classes on ethics

 

money makes no one better or worse. how people act is the only value they have.
its not whether you're rich or poor, what you have or don't have, its how considerate you are,
because that affects everything and every one.
and yes, fake consideration to someone's face while stabbing them in the back, and promoting policies that do so to everyone, that is where tyranny comes form.
really, narceisstic aggressive thougtlessness is the very seed and core of tyranny.
and yes, resentment can motivate it, but all levels of resource or status, can do so by indifference as well.

 

when it is at the price of others, when it threatens their very lives, yes it is. and gratification doesn't come from accumulation. it comes from creating and exploring.

 

There's no such thing as "a more fulfilling life." It all depends upon the person. Being rich can't guarantee you intensity of experience if you're not an intense person.

What I've noticed about you, 6, is that you don't dig very deep. You have a very shallow and superficial worldview, perhaps because you feel there's nothing to look for within. Stop being so superficial. Turn to God.

 

There is limits. You don't need a billion dollars to have more then most people. If you made thousands of dollars every day from the time of Jesus with no tax you would still not have billions of dollars. That amount of money proves the flaws in a free market system. You can't spend it all and it stops others from spending. Like money has value because there is only so much of it.

The idea that we should let society exist around a few people is kind of silly. Someone like the Amazon guy did not work for that money. He's a poor example of your capitalist dream. Like most 1% he monopolized a market before it was a market and through the labor of others he gets most of the wealth. On what ideal? That he created the job seems to be the right wing norm.

I went to school so I could be paid. Like I've said before it's not that I don't like nice things. I could have bought a 5 thousand euro Honda but I didn't. For some reason I spend more to accomplish the same task. I separate myself from others and have something purely for me. It's selfish I guess since I did not share the money and for you selfish is good and the only logical way for the world to work.

I just don't need or want a billion let alone several billion to prove my success.

Ethics that go out the window as soon as there is profit to be had. I don't know guess it depends on the employer but the average buy out in America is often pretty hostile.

 

well i don't need to prove anything to anything. not even a god.
but i would invest in the kind of infrastructure i'd like to see more of,
voluntary social expariments, and science generally.

i've known one or two very rich people who choose to live very modestly.
one who built fire trucks, the real ones, for his local rural volunteer fire department.

its not good or bad what you have, its what you do.

i'm not supporting those who try to claim the wealth gap is a good thing.
sooner or later, that's where revolutions come from,
and too often those don't result in better conditions, just a lot of people dead.

 

What utter nonsense. I see that elementary arithmetic is not your long strong suit. But making vast pronouncement about human action, and how to structure complex societies is something about which you consider yourself gifted. Just to expose the intellectual bankruptcy of your bilge, let's assume you make $3000 daily for the past 2000 years:

$3000 x 365 x 2000 = $2.19 billion

Not to tax your brain too much, but if you made $6000 per day for the past 2000 years, you’d have $4.38 billion.


So your claimed fact is erroneous. But even if you could handle sixth grade arithmetic, your conclusion that “That amount of money proves the flaws in a free market system. “ in fact proves no such thing. Your erroneous “fact” in no way even connects with your insipid “conclusion”, except perhaps in your hopeless muddled, unfocused mind.

Of course, your trite little example which you think proved something significant does not take into account such arcane concepts as interest on, or investment of, capital. Those, done half-intelligently, would have multiplied the numbers I came up with many times. I could go on with critiquing your twaddle. Perhaps I'll consider other aspects of this particularly insipid comment later, but why bother, eh?

I realize I have been harsh with you. You deserve it, but I am saddened that apparently nobody in your formative years to think critically, to connect proposition with a logically sound conclusion. It’s not only that you start with erroneous facts, but you cannot connect them. You were able to get through life by being supported by those who were, and are, able to connect cause and effect. You, and people like you, rely on the ability of others to do that for your daily sustenance. I pity you.

 

One does not have to be rich to live a fulfilling life. I’m not rich at all myself. But I refuse to adopt the mindset of being a cog in a machine where I have no goals, and I’m living paycheck to paycheck on the bare minimum. We are all unique individuals who all have one life to live. If you or someone you know is ok with that lifestyle, fine. As individuals, we all have our own set of needs and desires in life