Economics: billionaire's tax (2023 Update)

And if you simply donate twice what them leftists would've stolen from to you to my conservative super PAC, we can prevent them from stealing our mone...er I mean those billionaire's money.

We could even buy up some media outlets to then produce high-quality independent journalism to ensure people know about why it's a very bad idea:

Sounds good, how can we help send them to Mars

You talk about shipping Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to a remote island together like it would be a BAD thing.

Just goes to show that nobody understands economics.

What is the gap insurance on a car ? After settling on the price of a new car about 3 years ago I told the salesman Toyota has the 0 % load for 7 years. He did not want to give it to me, but I told him that or no deal. Got the deal.

For most cars as soon as you sign the the paper work you are already under water on the loan.

While I could pay for the car, I perfer leaving the money in the stock market where with any luck at all I will make 5 to 10 % or more every year on the average. I have not calculated the savings of money during the years, but should be a lot over 7 years on a $ 30,000 car.

One thing the 0% did do for me was to make me want to trade in a 10 year old car that only had about 35,000 miles on it.At my age of 70 I may only buy one more new car as I doubt I will put 5000 miles on it a year and then only because I want a newer one with more features.

"Thankfully" the process of funneling wealth upwards doesn't require much understanding of economics at a macro level to accomplish; the mechanisms aren't more than the sum of their parts and in the US the parts accomplish that pretty good.

I watched the movie "Atlas Shrugged" never read the book, I read "The Fountainhead" though that was sufficient Ayn Rand for 17-year-old me. So I don't know how accurately it holds to the plot of the novel, my guess is fairly well or they'd have 100,000 Ayn Rand fans on the internet berating them.

But beyond just the bad acting and absurd plot it was amusing just how self-assured the main characters are throughout the whole stinker in the surety their madcap technological schemes will work out with no testing, simply because they thought them up. Like I guess test-driven development isn't a thing in their world.

How was wealth funneled upwards to Gates or Bezos or Zuckerberg or Musk? In my opinion, they created wealth. Jealousy is a bad basis for economics. Besides, they don't live all that much better than we do.

Maybe Venezuela or North Korea should be our models for economic justice.

She was a really bad writer, even by teen fiction standards.

On a sunny day (Thu, 28 Oct 2021 10:52:10 -0400) it happened bitrex snipped-for-privacy@example.net wrote in <vOyeJ.1459$I% snipped-for-privacy@fx36.iad:

This is all so silly it seems to me the Byethen administration ultra left mob is trying to blame the failure of their agenda on just a few billionairs It is not American it is communism. Most people are working hard to get some money .. Elon Musk is doing a great job for less money than all the dollars wasted by NASA a NASA that cannot even design a spacesuit after spending a billion or so or a Boeing that failed to launch to space, etc etc He, Elon should be honored as a hero, not attacked And the silly Byethen needs to go. I wrote in us.politics:

Has the Medical Industrial Complex taken over the government? Is Dr Faulty the new US precedent? Is demoncratic Byethen their sales droid??? Are we all PIGS, Guinea pigs? We are treated that way with all those covid shots! RESIST!

The best person to be in charge of an economy is everybody. That way, at least a few people will be right.

Oh golly, Facebook Inc. should have been anti-trusted ages ago, Zuckerberg is a robber-baron gangster for the modern age. How do you ever "get" at a guy like Zuckerberg, though? Can't oust him as CEO via market means he's written the rules such that even if he doesn't have a controlling share of FB stock he's not going anywhere. Legislate? He's got enough of Congress in his pocket that they'll never agree on anything.

Maybe tax him more and get him on tax evasion, it's how they took down Al Capone. And he's not a CEO as much as he's a social media Al Capone.

Bezos is building a personal yacht the size of a small break-bulk cargo freighter (but I expect far more luxurious), I don't have one of those, so don't know about this "don't live much better"-stuff. Can't say I'm much jealous of not owning a floating cinema, though, even pre-Covid I never much liked going to the regular kind.

Maybe not construct silly false dichotomies.

Also you just said a couple months back or so something like "all that Elon Musk's ventures do is lose money." Make up ya mind.

Yeah but ideally you're not underwater forever, you pay off the initial depreciation and have some equity in the vehicle sooner rather than later. But I think with these really long-term loans like 7 years you sometimes run the risk of being underwater near the end of the loan term also, depending on how fast it depreciates year over year after the initial whack.

Perhaps less likely now that used cars are holding their value rather well, but historically this is a risk with long-term loans on vehicles. The depreciation curve acceleration on some luxury cars in particular is nuts when it get out towards 7 years.

Well surely if you have a portfolio that can return 5-10% yoy for 7 years consecutively. I would like to meet your financial advisor :)

Some men were just made to serve their betters. I can't fault them for that I guess. Give Musk a medal, build him a 40 foot high statue, suck his dick, whatever they gotta do.

I am my own advisor for the most part. Look at many of the mutual funds. Here are 2 that I have AGTHX and AFIFX out of several . They are both better than 10 % for over 10 years. This year they are both up around 20 %. You do have to be brave as they may dip a lot some years,but for the long term they have been good to me.

They are just mutual funds as I do not have the time or real skills to research each company. I do play around trading some stock like QRVO that goes up and down a lot almost every day just for the fun of it with a small amout of money. There was a local telephone company that did the same ,but a few years back they changed and I quit fooling with them.

I do have the IRA with JP MOrgan Chase and deal with a man that is very efficent on doing what I want. He is in charge of about 1/3 of the IRA money and does well with it.

Right now may not be a good time to be in the stock market as it seems too high. A few months ago I put about 1/3 of the money in a cash account so if the market does crash I will have enough to take the required minimum deduction as I will be 72 next year and have some extra to put buy back in at a lower price.

Didn't Zuckerberg move to Japan or some other country a while back ? I have read where some of the big money people like him became citizens of other countries just because of the high taxes.

Usually the billion dollar people have found ways around most of the taxes. The do like the Clintons, start a foundation that is non profit and hire in the relatives at high wages.

Other ways to launder money. Like Hunter Biden is now selling his art work for $ 500,000 each. Or getting paid a few hundred thousand by companies to give speaches to.

I think it's a decent strategy for an older person to take on more risk contrary to the conventional wisdom that one should be reducing risk at that point. as there is the fallacy of time-diversification of risk, which is that staying in the market longer has the effect of "evening out" the ups and downs. It doesn't, time in an investment doesn't decrease risk by its lonesome, you simultaneously end up with more to lose on the dips, and losses now always hurt more than later gains can help in compound interest.

Shorter time-horizons on risky investments can limit your risk, as you have more limited amount to lose in the first place.

IOW if I were 70 I might be splitting between no-risk (like cash account) and big risk, not putting everything in mild-risk. You can still lose big with everything in mild-risk.

I do lots of option trading on oil stocks in my IRA. It's been great past year. My account dropped 30% last March, but back up 50% since then. Net gain of around 25%.

My mistake was not converting to Roth sooner. I still have 90% of it in regular IRA.

Go all in on that fund if you feel lucky punk!!! do itttt