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Ballmer, Bezos Fund Effort To Undermine Bill Gates
theodp writes "You know what they say — it takes money to avoid paying money. TechFlash reports that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos have contributed $100,000 each to an effort to defeat an income tax on individuals in Washington state making more than $200,000. The backers of Initiative 1098, which is set for the November ballot, include Bill Gates (Sr.), who has emerged as one of the most vocal proponents of the income tax. Under the proposal, which has drawn the ire of the Bezos and Ballmer-backed Defeat 1098, no tax would be due on the first $200K of income, 5% tax would be owed on income between $200K and $500K, and everything above $500K would be subject to a 9% tax (cutoffs are doubled for joint returns)."
Living in a state that does have an income tax, I have to say that I don't have much sympathy for the billionaires who are crying over the fact that they might get taxed on the part of their income over $200,000 per year. Aw, isn't that just too bad.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
>>>"contributed $100,000 each"
It would be cheaper for them to just pay the tax.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If you live in the metro, own a home, and your wife stays at home with the kids - making $200,000 hardly qualifies you as "rich". Especially if you are a small business owner.
But then again, the government will stop at nothing to take all the money it can away from the people and organizations who create jobs.
Obama? Since when is he the governor of Washington State? Personally I don';t care because I don't live there. Me worrying about WA's tax would be like some guy in Poland worrying about a tax increase in Portugal.
However I like the idea of 0% income tax on the first $200,000. I wish my state had that. Heck I wish the whole continent had that.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Complaining about having to pay to support the poor? Then help them stop being poor! Henry Ford knew it - when he was asked why he paid his workers more than the competition, he said "I want them to be able to buy my cars."
Looks like Gates Sr. also gets it - growing the tax base takes money, and you can't get that money by taxing people who don't have it.
The middle and lower classes are no further ahead after 3 decades, after inflation, while the top income earners have seen real increases in their finances.
First, "Obama" (really the US Legislature) wouldn't have this revenue to stimulate with. That titillating pleasure would go to Governor of Washington Chris Gregoire. Second, if the choice were Balmer and Obama, I'd say Obama would more likely spend it in a manner that benefits the most people in the USA; just look at the value of Micrsoft stock since Balmer took the reigns at MS.
Third, why does every time taxation and government spending come up, does Obama get blamed? Taxes were too low during the GB43 admin to support the level of spending his administration endorsed. The proposed increases in taxes of the Obama administration would be lower than during the Reagan administration. And a vast majority of the spending that has so far occurred during the Obama administration was congressionally scheduled spending from the GB43 administration. And of the remaining optional government spend, it went toward correcting the GB43 caused recession.
I wish I had a -1 Space Cadet for you...
The latter. Trickle-down is bullshit.
Stimulus is best applied to the people at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, as they're going to spend that cash immediately. The state is best to enact this extremely modest tax increase, and then to put the funds toward local improvement projects (which hire labourers and tradesmen), and funding a social safety net for the many many people who are under- or unemployed.
Uh Ballmer and Bezos don't use their personal money to hire more people.
They use their corporations money for that.
So it's a fallacy. :)
That extra 9% would actually be sitting in their investment portfolio.. probably in Dubai
That's such a straw man argument -- were both Bezos and Ballmer planning on:
1) ...using the money they would otherwise be taxed on to give their employees raises? ...bringing jobs sent to low-cost overseas work centers back to the US? ...repatriating H1B visa workers, allowing demand to increase wages and allow greater work opportunity for Washington residents?
2)
3)
I'll take a wild guess and assume "none of the above" and that both men are merely parroting vague anti-tax sentiments, following the advice of paid consultants & lobbyists, or, perhaps, merely greedy and have no plans to pay higher wages or offer greater work opportunity.
>>>The latter. Trickle-down is bullshit.
The former. Government only returns 45% of the money it takes. The rest gets squandered on internal corruption, white collar welfare (my previous no-work job), and interest payments to China.
And trickle-down isn't bullshit, when you consider that it's the rich who hire the workers. If the government takes away all the rich person's money (say 100% income over 1 million) then the rich can't hire anyone.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You assume that some sort of rationality is involved in this equation, trust me that it isn't. I can assure you that they will still blame Obama.
And trickle-down isn't bullshit, when you consider that it's the rich who hire the workers. If the government takes away all the rich person's money (say 100% income over 1 million) then the rich can't hire anyone.
Except that neither of these CEOs are going to be using their personal income to hire new workers. You might have something of a point if this was a corporate tax initiative, but it's not. Secondly, trickle-down is voodoo economics no matter how much the right tries to spin it.
They do. Thats why they pay people to lobby on their behalf.
I don't make anywhere near enough to be hit with this tax, but I still oppose it. Lawmakers have tried multiple times to get a State income tax set, once they get it in place they will be able to make changes to it with a simple majority vote.
If any state income tax passes and is upheld in court (a state income tax is believed to be against the WA St. constitution), I can see it quickly expanding to encompass much more than those making just more than $200,000.
They are trying to sell it as a tax break, which it might be for the majority of people at first since they bundled it with a property tax cut, but come the first budget shortfall (like they have right now) it is quite likely an increase in the property tax and expansion of the income tax would be done to 'fix' the problem. I think if this passes it is likely the majority will be paying a higher percentage of their income in taxes in 15 years than if this doesn't pass.
Uh, no. The rich get richer by investing their money. It doesn't just sit in a bank account doing nothing. Those investments are what create jobs.
So, you're saying that if we insert money at the top, it benefits the guys at the bottom because high level executives and such create lots of jobs directly from their personal income?
From my PoV it makes more sense to insert money at the bottom. The guys at the bottom are most likely to spend it, which in turn puts in in corporate coffers, and the corporatations as an entity are the ones creating the jobs, not the executives from their personal wealth.
And trickle-down isn't bullshit, when you consider that it's the rich who hire the workers.
That's garbage. The government can take care of us all! We don't need the private sector to create jobs when we could all be government-employed like in Greece. Oh...
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Bullshit. Mathematically impossible, unless your earnings in the new higher tax bracket are taxed at greater than 100%.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
Then why not vote with your feet and move to Washington State or somewhere else instead of complaining and continuing to pay the Illinois taxes you oppose? If enough people do it, maybe even Chicago will get the message (although it will probably take nearly everybody moving out of state for them to get the message.)
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
There's a reason that Washington state has avoided an income tax for so many years... because they already have other taxes in place of an income tax.
For instance, one of my favorites is the cost of registering (and renewing) a vehicle license plate. The cost of a license tag is a percentage of the value of the car. Every year. And it has an odd impact on the auto market. When you finance a car purchase from a dealer, the first year's license fee is usually rolled into the financing, so you don't really notice it much. Then, in the second year, you get a bill from the state for potentially thousands of dollars for a license tag, and now you're scrounging. Or, you sell the car, and buy another one.
Anyway, adding an income tax is contrary to the spirit of the road use fee, which was enacted instead of a state income tax. But I doubt that they'll get rid of the road use fee if they do pass an income tax, they'll just squander both.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
We've tried trickle-down economics for the better part of 30 years, and the result has been a steady drop in real wages for the poorest Americans, a stagnation of real salaries for middle-class Americans, and a massive increase in income for upper-class Americans. Given that, please explain the evidence for the trickle-down effect, where the upper-class Americans hire middle-class and poor Americans at good rates.
I am officially gone from
The government inserting money anywhere is a bad idea. It mostly gets wasted with no real benefit to show for it. Just look at the effects of the stimulus and such. For the "bottom," they spend several hundred thousand dollars per job to create a job that pays the worker $40k or so per year. They also paid a lot to people in unemployment benefits and welfare, and a lot of those people are simply sitting back largely doing nothing until the government stops paying them for not working. For the "top,", they bailed out banks, who largely used the money to pay off their foreign-held debt rather than loan it out to Americans. None of that helped the U.S. very much, but we're stuck paying hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars for it. All of this exemplifies how poorly the government does when it tries to "stimulate" the economy by spending. It's a lot like trying to dig yourself out of a hole.
Tax cuts are NOT the government inserting money; the money is yours and the government simply takes less of it. If you want people to have money, why not let them keep it instead of taking it from the people, running it through the government, and then giving only some of it back to the people, because you had to spend a good amount of it on governmental overhead?
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
When did contributing 5% of the personal income above $200K to the running of a civilized society become too burdensome and greedy? You certainly deserve most of that money, but to say that 1-2% of your total income is too big a price to pay is pretty selfish and counter-productive.
E pluribus unum
Note that "five and more employees" also includes Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and so on. If you look here you'll read that only 2 or 3 percent of "small" businesses fall into the top two tax brackets ($250K or more, this article discussing the Obama plan). In that 2 or 3 percent, you find business like:
Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts
PricewaterhouseCoopers
the Tribune Corp.
Bechtel
This is NOT a tax on the "heart" of small business, as you claim.
I note, also, the implicit assumption that people who earn a lot, worked hard for it, in some sort of a positive sense of the word "work" (as opposed to the sort of work that a bank robber or an embezzler does). You did notice, surely, that the rocket surgeons on Wall Street who devised all this CDO madness that so thoroughly trashed our economy, were extremely well paid?
Assuming what you are contending is true, (which I do not really admit is not-simple enough to be true), what makes you think you know how to rig a system to achieve the ends you desire? (nevermind the fact that you want to take from your peers to achieve your ends, and nevermind questioning why you ought to be able to obtain the authority to do that.) Why is your system more viable and better long term for all or even any? And furthermore, who are you econocluelessts who think that poor people buying food and toilet paper is somehow a more productive use of the 9% capital? Safety nets are good. Stop trying to reingineer society under the guise of concern for such noble inventions.
In the US there are a plethora of ways to invest money that have little or nothing to do with creating jobs in the US. Would someone investing in IBM be creating jobs in the US or India and China? How about investing in Boeing? To a lot of people it matters where the jobs are created.
Ummm what do those rich guys do with their personal income then? Make wallpaper out of cash?
They either buy things, or they put it to use in the most productive ways. Well, and maybe donate some (those donations are 100% loses of course). But otherwise they invest.
And why do you suggest that they do not seek the most productive investments of their capital? (that would be those with the best returns, generally) Have you given thought to what exactly "most productive" means? (jobs are likely involved).
Ah... I see what you are about to do there. Don't cite foreign investment as cause for giving their investment capital to the poor instead. If politicians pandering to the poor (and otherwise attempting to re-architect our society) did not create such an inhospitable business environment all around the country, it might be less of an issue. So, let us "fix" the core issues. Not use our screw ups to do more screw ups.
Billionaires only exist because the people let them. They can either graciously return a very small fraction of what they have taken in a gesture towards keeping those they've exploited well fed and educated, or they can be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. Their choice.
Civilization is expensive. Since the benefits of civilization accrue disproportionately to the rich, they should bear a disproportionate amount of the cost. If you don't like it, we don't have to have civilization. But I don't think you're going to like the alternative.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I live in Seattle, which has a sales tax of about 10%. That tax system is unbalanced, as it causes the people who make the least amount of money to pay the highest proportion of their income.
Assuming that the lower class spends more or less all of what it makes, that sets up a good 10% tax on total income (more if they borrow; statistics show that on average, Americans spend more than they earn), whereas someone in the proposed income tax bracket of $200,000+ spends closer to 1-2% of total income on sales taxes. So there's a 10% tax on the $20,000-homeless crowd, and a 1-2% tax on the most well-to-do. Applying a 9% income tax to the upper bracket at least gets it close to an even 10% across the board.
But I'm playing devil's advocate here. I can't in good conscience support what amounts to a special tax on a minority group, even if that group is better off than I. Skipping the sales tax altogether and just putting a flat 10% income tax across the board would be the most appropriate, I think.
Lets put this in simple terms. Imagine you're a farmer with 30 acres. It takes 20 acres to feed your family. 66% of the crop takes care of your immediate needs and 33% goes to savings and taxes. At a rate of 25%, the government takes 1/4 of your crop and you have 9% for savings. The government is having a bad year and decides to raise taxes. The rate is going up from 25% to 30%. No problem, you say. That leaves 3.3% of what you farm as a buffer to sell and use for savings. Last year you saved your profits to eventually invest in new equipment that will increase your yields by 25%. You can't buy that equipment this year because you won't have enough savings. The economy doesn't grow. Equipment doesn't get bought, crop yields don't increase and you're less secure against bad weather and rising costs. What about when the taxes go up to 35%? Now you can't feed your family because you've got less than two acres for yourself. You dip into savings or you take hand-outs or you give-up farming. But that's not how it works, you say. The government taxes income for individuals and profits for businesses. Taxing income is just like taking 25% of the farmer's crop instead of 25% of the farmer's profits. Your work isn't profit. It's time and effort that belongs to you and there's no provision for the government to have any right to it. When taxes are too high, the economy suffers and eventually suffocates. Government can't grow the economy, It can only get out of the way to let the economy grow. This means that the government can't really help you. Every benefit you get means we all lose something greater and we sacrifice future growth.
Those investments are what create jobs.
Buying 100,000 shares of already issued stock is an investment, but does nothing to create jobs. Only some sort of venture capital (defined loosely, e.g., funding a new company or increasing production at a company) creates jobs.
I also suspect that the state of Washington believes it has created an economic climate that allowed people to become very rich, but many of those very rich are investing in things outside the state of Washington. This tax keeps more of the money in the state.
That's a retarded example. Farms are treated as businesses, and businesses only pay taxes on profits, not revenue. If you don't post any profits because all your food is consumed by yourself and family with no additional crops to sell, you don't pay any taxes. Even if you do sell some crops, that's only revenue, it's not profit until it surpasses all the costs of doing business (buying a tractor, buying a backhoe, etc.) In fact, the tax system -encourages- spending, because businesses can deduct expenditures from their taxable income. If you spent all your profits on re-investments, buying better equipment, hiring staff, etc., you don't 'lose' any money to the government.
Psst. You are forgetting where that money goes. Want to compare how much a Brit vs as U.S.ian pays for medical insurance, or treatment when they get sick?
The government inserting money anywhere is a bad idea. It mostly gets wasted with no real benefit to show for it.
Agreed. Let's stop inserting money into the large defense contractors first.
As far as Federal taxes go, the rates are a bit higher for higher income, but when you take into account deductions, the richer you are, the less you pay in general. Their are billion dollar corporations (and probably individuals) that pay nothing in income tax. In my own personal experience, as my income grows, my tax as a percentage of income has decreased because I can deduct more from my income.
The Republican philosophy is: Give all the money to the rich, and they will take care of everything. It hasn't worked, and never has. We are paying the price for that now.
In Washington state, there is no state income tax, so the state taxes come primarily from sales and property taxes, licensing, and business taxes. Everyone pays for these taxes. The less you make, the higher the percentage of your income goes to taxable items, so the tax burden as a percentage of income is much higher.
I understand from your comments below that you felt you were mistaken, but I find your comment
here and the high rating very interesting.
I'm wondering what the driving force is for people who don't make $200K, indeed anywhere near
it, that causes them to try to protect the people who make over $500K.
In short, there are lots of regular joes who want to pamper multi-millionaires.
I see this very often. I find it confusing when these regular joes aren't actually in the
bracket they're trying to protect, and most likely (looking at the quantity of persons who
are in the bracket v. quantity of supportive joes) won't even reach the bracket.
And... the people who are in the privileged bracket are already taking very
good care of themselves because of the power afforded them by their bracket. And...
they're doing it at the expense of or at least in disregard of the people in the regular joes
bracket.
Can one of you regular joes who wants to support multi-millionaires explain to me what
motivates you? I doubt it's because you have a lord-loving serf attitude. Maybe you believe
you will be uber-wealthy before long? Maybe you identify with the multi-millionaires, feeling
like others are always getting you down and being a drag on you?
To put it another way, if you earn $20k, after taxes you have $16k left to live on. If you earn $537k, after taxes you have $521k to live on. (or about 33x as much as the guy earning $20k).
That reminds me a lot of how the rich are bitching about having to pay another 4% on their income taxes, despite not having to pay Social Security taxes on income over $106,800 (6.2% from you, 6.2% from the person paying you). That means that anyone in the 25% or 28% tax bracket is actually paying a higher rate of taxes than the top level. Do people not realize this? I'd be more than willing to keep the top marginal rate on income at 35% if the cap is removed on Social Security taxes.
Again, this doesn't really affect people making $200,000 every year,
Actually, the people earning the most are those who mostly cause the most expense. They drive bigger cars, use more fuel (causing pollution which needs to be cleaned up), wearing out more roads (which need to be rebuilt), throwing away more rubbish (which needs to be cleaned out), demanding more policing (which needs to be paid for), having more lawsuits (which needs more judges) etc. etc. etc.
The big pile of garbage is that not only do they think they shouldn't pay for it, but mostly they can afford the politicians and voters to make that true. Yes, that's right, look at who's paying for your local anti-tax nut cases, and you will find that it's typically the people who cost your local administration the most.
The only way that you are right is that the services used by the poor (public transport, free hospitals etc.) are the ones which get cut first. Normally the services for the rich are untouchable (police, roads, courts, invading armies etc.)
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
So, you're saying that if we insert money at the top, it benefits the guys at the bottom because high level executives and such create lots of jobs directly from their personal income?
Why, of course they do! They create such high paying careers as: gardener, pool boy, cleaning lady, house cook, babysitter, nanny, and personal shopper, among others! And as we all know, these skilled positions come with great benefits and perks that provide more than enough to raise a family on! And when they're done hiring workers, they can invest the excess in assets that yield high returns and further create jobs like extra homes, the market, and companies that deal in derivatives!
But in all seriousness, the real reason is because business owners and executives don't want to compete for the money. If you gave it to the people on the bottom, they could choose which company to do business with and their choice would generate market competition. It's pure corporate laziness; they accuse the poor of just wanting a handout, when they want the same thing.
Don't even mention that without a functioning government, the farmer would have to build his own roads and pay the local gangster protection money.
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