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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.
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.
UPS Sucks
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
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.
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.
In Washington state currently, people earning less than $20,000 pay 17.3% in taxes. People earning over $537,000 pay just 2.9%
Even with this law, the richest will be paying less as a percentage of income than the poorest in the state.
This study (pdf) gives the numbers.
Washington has the most regressive tax in the nation. The poorest are paying the majority of the taxes. The poorest pay 17% of their income to taxes, while the richest pay less than 3%. This law will even it out a bit, but the poorest will still be paying more as a percentage than the richest.
The people most likely to put the money back into the economy are the people that need it most. The poorest are most likely to spend whatever money they have at local businesses. The richest people don't need to spend the money, and are very likely to spend it outside the state anyway. Remember, this is a state tax. We want the money to be spent here, to stimulate the state economy. Buying stocks with the money in some foreign company (something the rich might do) does nothing for the state. Buying a beer at the local pub does.
This Republican idea of giving all the money to the rich and they will take care of everything is complete bullshit. It doesn't work.
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.
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!
The top American marginal income rates from 1944 to 1963 were 92%. Yes, 92% of income made over the top amount, went to taxation. In 1944, if you made over $200,000, 92% went to the government. In 1963, it was $400,000. And yet, this was a period of profound economic expansion and middle class comfort. Kind of makes you want to question the "conventional wisdom" that all taxes are bad.
This is a list of American historical tax rates: http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/fed_individual_rate_history-june2010.pdf
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
When these guys build new houses for themselves they create jobs. When they hire help to maintain those big homes they create jobs. When they buy new cars they create jobs. When they invest their money they create jobs.
I believe it was Napoleon Hill who gave the advice that if you want to get wealthy yourself you need to hang around with rich people, because just the opportunities they let slide because they might think they are "too small" will be enough to give you a good start on your way to wealth if you're ambitious enough to go after them. It wasn't stated in those exact words, but the meaning was the same.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
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.