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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
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...
Except that if you're married and she stays at home and you file jointly the cut off is $400,000. Personally, paying 5% state income tax on the portion of my household income that exceeds $400,000 sounds like a good problem to have.
Oops, my bad, they're creating the jobs overseas. I correct myself.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
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.
Simply put, if you're making over $200,000 and you're finding it hard to make ends meet, you're living well outside your means. Don't look for sympathy because you can't afford your million dollar home, your five cars, and the yacht.
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.
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.
The worst political development in American history was that it gradually became ok to just vote other people's money to yourself.
No, the worst political development in American history was that it suddenly became ok to run the country into the ground so the greedy rich could hold onto a little more of their money, and managed (brilliantly) to convince the gullible poor to support them.
Maybe they also figured out that with the fear of unemployment and difficulty getting another job looming over many people's heads, that many workers are willing to work harder and longer in order to make sure they keep their jobs, so the companies can more easily increase profits by overworking their workers rather than hiring new ones.
America didn't invent taxes...
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.
You know, I was writing a whole rebuttal and just decided to delete it.
This is such a simple concept. Just because someone makes more money, that doesn't entitle them to being "off the hook" when it comes to funding the country. The simple truth is, the government needs $x to run the country and the citizens need to foot the bill. There are those that are in real danger of losing everything because their situation puts them in that predicament. Then there are those that make more than enough to fund their expenses and toys. One of those two should be responsible for a larger chunk of the $x the government needs.
When I get my next raise, I expect to bump up to the next tax bracket. And rightfully so...
If you can't figure out how to budget your $200,000+ salary to accommodate the above, you're living outside your means.
End of story.
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.
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.
From the Summary:
(cutoffs are doubled for joint returns).
The way I take this is they'd have to make 400K before they hit the tax.
Also note that the small business owner doesn't pay himself a $400k+ salary, he pays himself $30k-$100k or so and reinvests the rest in the business, hiring workers and increasing the value of his assets (the business) - which lets him sell it for a profit and pay just 15% capital gains tax and 0 income tax on those gains. His car? Company property, he pays no personal tax on it it - ditto for the insurance on that vehicle. Don't you wish you could deduct the cost of your car insurance too? Ditto for medical insurance and damn near everything else.
So that tax on quarter millionaires (Etc) doesn't hurt the small business man at all.
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
You keep parroting this bullshit notion that the personal income of the rich is used to "create jobs". More jobs are created in their businesses when the _business_ expands and/or otherwise has the funds to create new positions/salaries. If Ballmer makes another $100k this year, he isn't going to immediately create a new $100k job and redistribute his personal earnings to support the new position. That's an absolutely ludicrous notion.
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?
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.
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.
Isn't that what he said? The rich have voted for themselves to acquire and keep more and more of the poor's money.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
The biggest conservative BS myth is that they *earned* every dollar they've made - as if they're an island unto themselves and society had nothing to do with it. I suggest we drop those millionaires into Jamaica or some other destitute third-world country. When they fail to become equally rich in Jamaica as they did in America, then we've proved that the society around them has something to do with their wealth.
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.
Demand creates jobs. To increase aggregate demand, we could lower taxes on the people creating that demand by taxing the suppliers at a higher rate. Suddenly, there is more money to fuel greater demand, increasing profits and creating new jobs. Providing more government services and directly stimulating the economy (subsidizing education or health care, providing unemployment benefits, hiring workers for construction/bureaucracy) also effectively puts more money in peoples' pockets. The money being taken from the rich is money that was not necessarily going to be injected back into the economy but could be saved or invested outside of the country, taking money out of the economy, at least in the short term. The less money you have, the more likely you are going to spend every dollar of it in your local economy; in effect this wealth transfer allows more money to be injected into the economy through purchase of consumer goods rather than being hoarded or gambled with through the stock market and other investments, which may not show returns at all, and probably not in the short term, which will keep money out of the economy. So yes, through wealth transfers, increasing taxes can create new jobs by shuffling funds away from higher-level investments to middle-class spending on consumer goods.
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.