duga

I just don't understand the thinking. It's not like your tax dollars are being taken and the feds get a summer house. Your tax dollars are still going to things that are meant to benefit the tax payer. Instead of sitting in some kind of swiss bank account, the money will help keep a bridge from collapsing.

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duga

That's what I mean. I get that it feels like your money is being taken away. It's not. That money is still going towards things the federal government thinks will benefit you. How they spend that money is up for debate, but that's it in a nutshell.

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Chula Vista

And that CEO has a massive factory that requires infrastructure like stable electricity, running water, and paved roads throughout the community so people can drive to work. Your electric and water bills pay for consumption, not the infrastructure. That's tax dollars.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Anteater

I own a hosting company with large scale infrastructure with customers all over the U.S.....never thought I'd say this, but Chula's right.

Honestly, people who have never run a business before shouldn't try to lecture other people on economics, profit, etc. The majority of economics majors are completely clueless of just how expensive it is to run, sustain and grow any kind of business. And without people like me, you wouldn't have jobs. And if I get to the point where my wealth far exceeds the "effort" I put in to earn my money, then I'll invest it wisely in companies and causes that are creating real opportunity.

Paying taxes is one thing, but there's no such thing as a society where you don't have the "have's" and "have nots" because, news flash...not everyone is equal. Equality does not exist. Some people possess more insight and ingenuity than others or know how to leverage their resources better. This is something that you can't do anything about regardless of the political or cultural environment you call home. Inevitably, some people rise up in the world and others don't.

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duga

And the roads we all drive on and healthcare (at least until the Reps blow it up) and environmental protection and all the federal workers who keep the whole thing running and the list goes on...

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Chula Vista

New personal record for fastest New Year's Resolution wish coming true. Cool!

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Anteater

You are completely and utterly clueless. Without the infrastructure I created, those job opportunities that make people's livelihoods do not exist. People looking for jobs, however, would continue to exist whether I'm hiring or not. I pay my taxes: I'm not obligated to do more because then it becomes economically unfeasible to even own a business. Without people willing to own businesses, take more risk, etc....you don't have a society that supports the life you yourself have lived until now.

I'm sorry kiddo, but unless you intend to live your life as a farmer (to sustain yourself on the food you grow) and do nothing else with your career-wise, then you need to grow up and realize that you live in a society that will always be a fundamentally "unequal" place because of a million different factors and viewpoints. The idealized form of any Marxist-inspired society or even socialism is impossible as long as human beings are part of the equation. Individuals who have even the slightest shred of ambition in life to work a little less for even a little more reward will always prioritize themselves and their immediate friends/family, etc. above a communal, charitable view of strangers.

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Anteater

I think you are the one with a fundamental misunderstanding of how economics work. But again: you have never owned a business and have no real world experience.

There is ALWAYS, without exception, a demand for SOMETHING in any society. It doesn't even matter what that demand happens to be. It's up to entrepreneurs to observe demand in order to create the infrastructure and jobs. Thus, businesses are created out of demand. The working class establishes these conditions as a byproduct of simply existing: it is inescapable. There is never gong to be a society where demand does not exist, so your theoretical point is moot.

There's a symbiotic relationship between workers and businesses, but businesses ARE the engines that drive economies and that drive education as well. Workers, on the other hand, will come and go for all kinds of reasons. Without infrastructure, a society stays in the stone age and people simply fare for themselves as best they can. But you somehow think that the working class can conjur today's standards of living out of magic or something without businesses willing to hire and innovate like mine.

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riseagainstrocks

I don't think many people would make a serious argument to say that mandated equality is required or even a desirable end-goal. What should be required and is a desirable end-goal is equal opportunity.

'Guaranteed opportunity, not guaranteed outcome' used to a mantra that the political left and right in this country agreed on. Use of influence and power, which are generally tied to money, to capture segments of the government is what the majority (I'd imagine) of modern leftists are angry about. We should be able to all agree that a billionaire should not have greater, easier, or more influential contact with members of Congress. There is a conflict between reality and idealism here but there are several steps that Congress could take to mitigate the risk of conflicts of interest, or the appearances of them, including what I think is the most important: taxpayer funded elections.

But that's a tangent. The crux of this discussion appears to hinge on the relative merits of 'keep what you earn', with earn being somewhat subjective, and the 'you didn't build that' camp, to borrow Obama's misquoted soundbite. I don't have the time or inclination to write a dissertation on the topic, but fortunately someone else did!
A History of Wealth Inequality

I am not for seizing wealth. I am for changing tax incentives to prevent the top .5% from simply banking a certain percentage of their income. What this would look like requires more economically-minded people than myself, but if someone is used to living on 5 million dollars a year, they could probably manage to live a comparable lifestyle for 4-4.25 million a year. And that money could then be funneled into homeless shelters, job training programs for displaced factory workers, infrastructure improvements, mass transit, etc etc.

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One note timeless, came out of nowhere...

Anteater

He's a Communist who doesn't live in the real world. Life is all about choices. I chose a path in life that leads to the maximum amount of recurring profit because I want to invest and create opportunites for others. I'm not going to be able to do those things if I become a public school teacher or someone who dedicates themselves to a career that isn't scalable. That doesn't make them less "important" or "valuable" as human beings, but again...this is an "unequal' world where nobody will ever be rich on some hourly wage. Some people want to do just one thing with their lives and that's it: forgoing greater economic opportunity is part of the trade-off.

But again, that's the point of wanting to own business: I'm taking more financial risk so the profit I could potentially earn is obviously more than what some worker is going to make doing (generally) lower level tasks that have nothing to do with management at scale. I also pay more in taxes because I own an entity, ON TOP of having all the same taxes and individual burdens that they do.

Someone doesn't like that? Tough shit.


Agreed for the most part. Unfortunately, one of the problems that governments always face is trying to figure out how to keep the wealthy from leaving for somewhere where their wealth is "better off". That's one of the reasons some people really hated Hillary Clinton's proposed tax plan during the election, because she was raising things on the highest bracket to a "breaking point" according some economists. That point being where they'd say "fuck it" and take themselves and all their assets to the Cook Islands or something.

I'd probably propose some kind of program that funnels money into the things you mentioned (plus more tech job training, sales training, etc.), but maybe with other kinds of incentives for the rich so that they'd stay in the U.S. and actually want to pay into it.

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