I think all those methods of support and investment have a place in a functioning, modern economy and it’s necessary to find a proper balance between them. Small banks and community investment funds are awesome for individuals and small businesses such as “Joe’s Plumbing” or “Phil’s Landscaping.” However, I don’t think they’ll cut it when you need a few hundred million bucks of cash to put towards designing a next generation airliner that hopefully will do something to break up the Boeing/Airbus effective duopoly, for example (and yes, there are a few startups out there that are trying to do just that).
Plus my thoughts and feelings center on the fact that people, by and large, are greedy bastards. They’ll only do something if they feel like there is some reward for them in exchange and, given the way most people are, money is the most commonly desired reward. Now, if this was a Star Trek-style utopia where people only cared about bettering themselves and society as a whole, things would be different, but we aren’t anywhere near that as a species. In fact, I think that probably can only be achieved if we ever achieve a post-scarcity society, which Star Trek is for the most part.
So I’m of the opinion of letting the greedy bastards enjoy making their filthy lucre so long as they are required to give back enough to society as a whole to keep those who aren’t as fortunate from suffering. Absolute caps on the profits of economic activity that could benefit the general economy as a whole go against this notion. Absolute caps on the profits of economic activity that benefit only individuals are definitely okay. High, but not 100%, tax rates on uncapped activities for those who are the wealthiest are also okay. Again, let them have their fun making money and even let them keep some of the rewards so long as there was some sort of net benefit to society and/or the general economy as a result.
In this 100% tax after a certain amount, work for just individuals or would it include institutions?
I wonder about this uber-capitalist with tens of billions of dollars and the government taxing them at 100% of the income and wealth past, say $200MM, and them just sitting there going “well, I made the cap for this year, guess I’ll do nothing”
Could they just “work” for some company, that they wholly control, and the benefits of doing so is having every whim and want taken care of? It’s not that I own 50 yachts, but the company I “work” for does and I get unlimited use of them!
Even if I personally were capped to “own” $200MM, is the corporation I control 100% capped in the same way?
Would you just be placing all this generational wealth into corporations, control of which just passes down through the generations?
So the wholly oversimplified explanation is that if they own a company. That company’s value, including it’s bank account and all it’s assets are theirs as a matter of law. So that company better be worth less than 200MM or else they’re gonna have to divest down to that amount and that assumes they don’t have a dime more than that to their name.
So the only way that we could have a company like … No, a better way of thinking about this is to imagine what the most wealthy corporation could be.
This is just a weird exercise for me, if we’re going to put caps on how much wealth there can be in the US, it immediately makes me wonder if we could replicate today, abet with a much more even distribution of wealth.
If I am understanding the implications of what you’re saying then a company’s assets would technically be divided amongst all the people who own it, that is the shareholders. So the most a company could be worth is 200MM * the number of shareholders, assuming that the shareholders had only that stock as their only items of wealth. I guess this then could technically be the total amount of wealth to be held at one time?
327 million people in the US, $200MM ~= 6.54x10^16 ($65.4 quadrillion?). Which is far less than the current amount of private wealth in the US now, by a few orders of magnitude. So yeah, possible!
Maybe we could restructure how publicly traded companies work so that any company which is publicly listed always has the majority of its shares in the hands of the employees themselves. That alone would be far from enough to fix everything but could have the possibility of pushing more companies towards sustainability instead of constant growth by having the employees have more say in strategic direction.
Regardless of what the Mueller report says, nothing Adam Schiff says in this video is under dispute. And to answer his question, no, I don’t think it’s ok.
We’ll see how redacted it is. I still think the House Democrats are going to push for a completely unredacted version, at least for the Intelligence Committee to review privately.
Interesting idea… hmm… of course I wouldn’t consider some of those write-offs to be illegitimate. Depreciation is a real thing, for example. Of course, it comes down to how those write-offs are reported as well.
I tend to like to take a more baby steps approach to see if things would be better off if we instead forced companies to include all the write-offs that they use for their tax liabilities to their share holders as reduced profits. So that if Amazon et. al are doing anything sketchy with their writeoffs, they’ll report zero profits to their shareholds as well as to the IRS.
Unfortunately, they left out why Eucador revoked his asylum - because he published a bunch of leaks of emails that were damaging to Lenin Moreno, the Democratic socialist president of Ecuador. He literally fucked himself with his own far-right advocacy, talk about getting hoist by your own petard.
Edit - Well, that, and he was also reportedly doing things like smearing shit on the walls. It is at this point unclear if it was his cat’s shit, or his own.
It seems the big takeaway on the Mueller report is they know -something- went down (duh) but everyone they interviewed lied, stonewalled, invoked the Fifth Amendment, claimed privilege, or destroyed evidence that they don’t have enough hard evidence to prove anything criminally. So they obstructed justice so hard they can’t even prove obstruction of justice.