That's a big part of the various savings religions: focus on the cheap things that give you pleasure. The goal is financial independence and comfort, not impressing your neighbors.
I doubt that, seeing as inheriting wealth is not the same as inheriting values. The father could be the most noble person who built the business empire, but the son could be a deadbeat who ruins it.
You're thinking of the nouveau riche. No one in the American upper class has a living relative who has ever worked for a living - pretty much by definition. The upper class is the most rigidly conformist and tradition-bound group in America. Their whole social fabric is based on locking everyone into the same set of unchanging values. IMO evil values, but quite good at retaining wealth and power.
many 1%ers don't believe they have power, and/or don't believe their wealth translate to that much power. They think they're just "normal" people. Some might even think they are the oppressed ones
You are correct. And they are correct. They are not the ones in power here. Heck, most 1%ers have jobs!
First, there are 1%ers in the Establishment too, so it doesn't have to be "someone outside" that try to seize power. The guy from the inside can claim he's just cleaning up corruption or something like that (see: China's Xi Jinping)
I take your point, but it's been the same upper class culture, and basically the exact same families, since the Robber Barons. They seem to have worked it out. And since they're in charge, it's very hard to see what power any one of them would use to overthrow all the others. Certainly not the power of the US government, thoroughly owned as they are by that group as a whole. What's a guy with 5 Senators going to do against a group with 90?
Oh ho! Not 1st but 5th! Glorious! But we're talking about processionals working for big tech companies, it's the low-six-figure tax rate that matters.
I've lived in 3 stares now with no income tax. All had better roads. All had better street lighting. All had more reliable power. All managed not to run out of water. 2 of the 3 managed not to catch fire and burn half the state. California: top 10% in taxes, bottom 10 in infrastructure.
I've never met a student who was able to save half his pay while making minimum wage or even median wage at that.
Hint: I'm a professor.
You have students that make median wage? That's an odd sort of class. It's rare that a student is actually working full time - and since you're a professor, I'm sure you can read the post you responded too. Wait, I'm not sure of that at all.
How do you suggest a person with a family do this? What about someone paying off college debt? What about someone making minimum wage living paycheck to paycheck.
That's the problem with you all or nothings, you never consider other people, you think eberyone is like you. Hint, we are all different and life all hands us different starting points. We don't get to choose.
All or nothing? All I'm claiming is that most people can save a significant portion of their income, if that's their top priority. Not everyone, as I said: if you're only working part time, you're not going to manage much.
If you have a family, financial responsibility is only more important. Paying off debt is a great way (often the best way) to increase your net worth. Reaching a net worth of 0 can be a triumphant moment for many people (I know it was for me). Living paycheck to paycheck is a consequence of not saving. That's what the term means.
If you're working full time, and make it a priority, you can save, or at least most people can.
Why do some people treat the idea that you can save as some sort of personal attack? I think it's not me they're mad at, but their own history of choices leaving them where they are today.
You do get that the 0.01% are the ones that benefit from globalism, right? The more workers, the less they get paid. All that "race to the bottom" happening in other countries only helps the 0.01% here to the extent they can ship the work there. For maximum profit, we need the race to the bottom happening here.
The science for the on-planet stuff is in no way worth the price. That's OK though. You clearly don't understand the percentage of people who went into STEM fields because of inspiration from space programs. We've been lacking that for some time now. I've already seen people saying that the Falcon Heavy launch a year ago inspired them. And manned programs simply connect better, humans watching humans.
It's looking like boots on the Martian regolith in a decade or so. Musk and Bezos both seem willing to get there by burning $100 bills as fuel if needed. New Glenn and Starship both seem likely to reduce launch costs to the point where it's a change in kind. Building a rotating habitat (it has to be large) for the journey there and back is the big missing piece at this point, with nothing yet in development (and no other way known to avoid the ill effects of long-term 0g).
There's no point in sending warm wet bodies to Mars: robots prove time and time again that they do a much better job than human beings could ever hope to do.
Space exploration: science is secondary. Inspiration is primary. Robots may do the science fine, but they just don't inspire humans the way humans going out there do.
If the advances SpaceX and Blue Origin have planned for the next few years go as planned (or somewhere close), sending a crowd to people to Mars will cost a lot less than the next Avatar movie, and be far more valuable in inspiring a new generation of engineers.
There's a classic example in economics: two gas stations across the street from each other. Adjusting your prices based on the publicly displayed price you see across the street is simply not collusion. Every gas station in town raising their prices immediately when the price of oil goes up (even though their costs won't be affected for weeks) is also not collusion. Each seller still has made no promises not to undercut the other guy, they're just using the same data to reach the same conclusions.
If you're worried about money leaving the US, I think you'll find the total money sent back to family by recent immigrants dwarfs total CEO pay (most of which isn't salary to begin with).
Total federal tax revenue is $3.3 T/year. The combined comp of the CEOs of the fortune 500 is, what, a couple billion/year? Just a distraction. They should pay, like everyone else, but they're not important in the scheme of things.
The biggest flaw in this system is that it would put the richest people in the lowest tax bracket - the only tax bracket, but still the lowest. With a tax system like that, what rich guy needs loopholes?
You think the very rich pay income tax today? The top tax brackets have only ever affected those who recently spiked to high income (which is most of the literal 1% - most people only stay there for a year or two). The more you make, the more flexibility you have in when, where, and how you get paid. Any complexity in the tax code can only help you. And if you're multi-generational wealthy, income is secondary and minimized, as you certainly don't work, and already have most everything you need (but that crowd has always been more affected by property tax than income tax).
Not necessarily harder to cheat, just different. You might see compensation shift to the form of perks or services
If you can imagine it, it was done 40 years ago. They do much more clever things now.
It might also push people from tax "avoidance" to more clear-cut evasion activity using foreign subsidiaries, which is more risky but would be much harder to catch if the government doesn't know anyone's income.
As above, old news. Money moving across borders is very heavily tracked (which is why Bitcoin grew so fast). Some CEOs get paid by foreign subsidiaries, in clever ways. But total income of all CEOs is a rounding error in the scheme of things - the goal should be to fund the government, not punish people you don't like.
Perhaps, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone controlling vast inherited wealth who would willingly part with any control over that wealth. Power is pretty addictive, and seldom relinquished.
Most US politicians - the Establishment - are owned thoroughly by the very rich, and would not act against their interests. Someone outside the Establishment who wanted to seize power would be going against both the will of the common man and the will of the wealthy and powerful. Not going to lose sleep over that possibility - he wouldn't live long enough to matter.
Just look at the numbers. Fixed amount - % of earnings = higher effective tax rate the more you make (and negative taxation if you make sufficiently little). It's the same amount as saying the flat rate only applies above a certain income, plus giving money to the poor, but it's much simpler.
Plus, there's no good reason for the government to know how much any citizen gets paid. A payroll tax takes care of taxing all income, without any individual paperwork at all - the average guy never interacts with tax collection. If you invest then you get the government's nose in your business, but you also have your bank or broker to do all the math for you (just like today), unless you own a business or commercial property directly.
Very simple, very hard to cheat, 0 exceptions for the rich to take advantage of (so it will never happen). You can even pretend it's UBI to keep the UBI fans happy (though the yearly fixed amount might not be so high).
Dude, modern median incomes are plenty to save on. Saving significantly when just at the poverty line is hard mode, but possible. Saving at median income is easy - just live like a student and you can save half your pay.
"Fair" is not the word you want. Any rules, no matter how arbitrary or evil, that apply equally to all people without bias are "fair". It's better to be just than to be fair. It's better to be righteous than to be just. Ancient wisdom.
And of course in the very post you responded to I explained how to make it progressive. But even if it weren't it would still be better than sales taxes.
Spending less than you make is only a viable method to getting rich if you already have a very generous income.
Proven false by a great many people, including myself when younger. Heck, a buddy of mine was a security guard making $6/hour and saving half his pay (he did work a lot of hours), who inspired me to do the same. It's just a matter of priorities and optimization, assuming you have a full-time job. Not much you can do beyond subsistence if you're stuck with part time work, but that's not most people.
Whether your religion is Rich Dad Poor Dad, or Mr Money Mustache, or one of the many other cults of savings, get the fervor and you can save. Plenty of proven recipes out there, but any way you do it is a matter of working to change your habits and finding pleasure in the abstract activity of saving (abstraction is very hard for some people, but again that's not most people).
Sales taxes are inherently regressive. An actual flat tax - all income, dividends, and gains taxed the same, no exceptions - would be not merely fair, but righteous (make it progressive by sending everyone a check every month). It will never happen, of course, as the richest would pay far more, and the politicians couldn't run every election on spending other people's money.
We already got Toyota and State Farm from the (nastiest) bay area. Both have relatively sane blue collar workers. Don't want a bunch of feely feels tech (wannabe) millionaires coming in here and making even more waves, driving up the cost of living and turning the state even more liberal. If ya wanna be a foam speckled progressive, at least try to stay in Austin.
Austin is the designated Californian Containment Zone in Texas. Please respect our boundaries.
Those companies employ a lot of people. How much tax does Cali, with the nations highest tax rate, collect on 100,000 people making over $100,000 a year?
Slashdot Mirror
$130k is rich when you're making $6/hour!
That's a big part of the various savings religions: focus on the cheap things that give you pleasure. The goal is financial independence and comfort, not impressing your neighbors.
I doubt that, seeing as inheriting wealth is not the same as inheriting values. The father could be the most noble person who built the business empire, but the son could be a deadbeat who ruins it.
You're thinking of the nouveau riche. No one in the American upper class has a living relative who has ever worked for a living - pretty much by definition. The upper class is the most rigidly conformist and tradition-bound group in America. Their whole social fabric is based on locking everyone into the same set of unchanging values. IMO evil values, but quite good at retaining wealth and power.
many 1%ers don't believe they have power, and/or don't believe their wealth translate to that much power. They think they're just "normal" people. Some might even think they are the oppressed ones
You are correct. And they are correct. They are not the ones in power here. Heck, most 1%ers have jobs!
First, there are 1%ers in the Establishment too, so it doesn't have to be "someone outside" that try to seize power. The guy from the inside can claim he's just cleaning up corruption or something like that (see: China's Xi Jinping)
I take your point, but it's been the same upper class culture, and basically the exact same families, since the Robber Barons. They seem to have worked it out. And since they're in charge, it's very hard to see what power any one of them would use to overthrow all the others. Certainly not the power of the US government, thoroughly owned as they are by that group as a whole. What's a guy with 5 Senators going to do against a group with 90?
Oh ho! Not 1st but 5th! Glorious! But we're talking about processionals working for big tech companies, it's the low-six-figure tax rate that matters.
I've lived in 3 stares now with no income tax. All had better roads. All had better street lighting. All had more reliable power. All managed not to run out of water. 2 of the 3 managed not to catch fire and burn half the state. California: top 10% in taxes, bottom 10 in infrastructure.
Ah, you're thinking of putting the wall on the Canadian side to keep the US out. Fair enough.
I've never met a student who was able to save half his pay while making minimum wage or even median wage at that.
Hint:
I'm a professor.
You have students that make median wage? That's an odd sort of class. It's rare that a student is actually working full time - and since you're a professor, I'm sure you can read the post you responded too. Wait, I'm not sure of that at all.
How do you suggest a person with a family do this? What about someone paying off college debt? What about someone making minimum wage living paycheck to paycheck.
That's the problem with you all or nothings, you never consider other people, you think eberyone is like you. Hint, we are all different and life all hands us different starting points. We don't get to choose.
All or nothing? All I'm claiming is that most people can save a significant portion of their income, if that's their top priority. Not everyone, as I said: if you're only working part time, you're not going to manage much.
If you have a family, financial responsibility is only more important. Paying off debt is a great way (often the best way) to increase your net worth. Reaching a net worth of 0 can be a triumphant moment for many people (I know it was for me). Living paycheck to paycheck is a consequence of not saving. That's what the term means.
If you're working full time, and make it a priority, you can save, or at least most people can.
Why do some people treat the idea that you can save as some sort of personal attack? I think it's not me they're mad at, but their own history of choices leaving them where they are today.
You do get that the 0.01% are the ones that benefit from globalism, right? The more workers, the less they get paid. All that "race to the bottom" happening in other countries only helps the 0.01% here to the extent they can ship the work there. For maximum profit, we need the race to the bottom happening here.
The science for the on-planet stuff is in no way worth the price. That's OK though. You clearly don't understand the percentage of people who went into STEM fields because of inspiration from space programs. We've been lacking that for some time now. I've already seen people saying that the Falcon Heavy launch a year ago inspired them. And manned programs simply connect better, humans watching humans.
We need a Canadian wall! Made of ice and 100 yards tall! It's the only way to keep the White Walkers out,
It's looking like boots on the Martian regolith in a decade or so. Musk and Bezos both seem willing to get there by burning $100 bills as fuel if needed. New Glenn and Starship both seem likely to reduce launch costs to the point where it's a change in kind. Building a rotating habitat (it has to be large) for the journey there and back is the big missing piece at this point, with nothing yet in development (and no other way known to avoid the ill effects of long-term 0g).
Uh-oh. What will Slashdot do now? Pai made a statement that the hive mind agrees with. The cognitive dissonance will be terrible.
There's no point in sending warm wet bodies to Mars: robots prove time and time again that they do a much better job than human beings could ever hope to do.
Space exploration: science is secondary. Inspiration is primary. Robots may do the science fine, but they just don't inspire humans the way humans going out there do.
If the advances SpaceX and Blue Origin have planned for the next few years go as planned (or somewhere close), sending a crowd to people to Mars will cost a lot less than the next Avatar movie, and be far more valuable in inspiring a new generation of engineers.
There's a classic example in economics: two gas stations across the street from each other. Adjusting your prices based on the publicly displayed price you see across the street is simply not collusion. Every gas station in town raising their prices immediately when the price of oil goes up (even though their costs won't be affected for weeks) is also not collusion. Each seller still has made no promises not to undercut the other guy, they're just using the same data to reach the same conclusions.
If you're worried about money leaving the US, I think you'll find the total money sent back to family by recent immigrants dwarfs total CEO pay (most of which isn't salary to begin with).
Total federal tax revenue is $3.3 T/year. The combined comp of the CEOs of the fortune 500 is, what, a couple billion/year? Just a distraction. They should pay, like everyone else, but they're not important in the scheme of things.
The biggest flaw in this system is that it would put the richest people in the lowest tax bracket - the only tax bracket, but still the lowest. With a tax system like that, what rich guy needs loopholes?
You think the very rich pay income tax today? The top tax brackets have only ever affected those who recently spiked to high income (which is most of the literal 1% - most people only stay there for a year or two). The more you make, the more flexibility you have in when, where, and how you get paid. Any complexity in the tax code can only help you. And if you're multi-generational wealthy, income is secondary and minimized, as you certainly don't work, and already have most everything you need (but that crowd has always been more affected by property tax than income tax).
Not necessarily harder to cheat, just different. You might see compensation shift to the form of perks or services
If you can imagine it, it was done 40 years ago. They do much more clever things now.
It might also push people from tax "avoidance" to more clear-cut evasion activity using foreign subsidiaries, which is more risky but would be much harder to catch if the government doesn't know anyone's income.
As above, old news. Money moving across borders is very heavily tracked (which is why Bitcoin grew so fast). Some CEOs get paid by foreign subsidiaries, in clever ways. But total income of all CEOs is a rounding error in the scheme of things - the goal should be to fund the government, not punish people you don't like.
Perhaps, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone controlling vast inherited wealth who would willingly part with any control over that wealth. Power is pretty addictive, and seldom relinquished.
Most US politicians - the Establishment - are owned thoroughly by the very rich, and would not act against their interests. Someone outside the Establishment who wanted to seize power would be going against both the will of the common man and the will of the wealthy and powerful. Not going to lose sleep over that possibility - he wouldn't live long enough to matter.
Just look at the numbers. Fixed amount - % of earnings = higher effective tax rate the more you make (and negative taxation if you make sufficiently little). It's the same amount as saying the flat rate only applies above a certain income, plus giving money to the poor, but it's much simpler.
Plus, there's no good reason for the government to know how much any citizen gets paid. A payroll tax takes care of taxing all income, without any individual paperwork at all - the average guy never interacts with tax collection. If you invest then you get the government's nose in your business, but you also have your bank or broker to do all the math for you (just like today), unless you own a business or commercial property directly.
Very simple, very hard to cheat, 0 exceptions for the rich to take advantage of (so it will never happen). You can even pretend it's UBI to keep the UBI fans happy (though the yearly fixed amount might not be so high).
Dude, modern median incomes are plenty to save on. Saving significantly when just at the poverty line is hard mode, but possible. Saving at median income is easy - just live like a student and you can save half your pay.
"Fair" is not the word you want. Any rules, no matter how arbitrary or evil, that apply equally to all people without bias are "fair". It's better to be just than to be fair. It's better to be righteous than to be just. Ancient wisdom.
And of course in the very post you responded to I explained how to make it progressive. But even if it weren't it would still be better than sales taxes.
Spending less than you make is only a viable method to getting rich if you already have a very generous income.
Proven false by a great many people, including myself when younger. Heck, a buddy of mine was a security guard making $6/hour and saving half his pay (he did work a lot of hours), who inspired me to do the same. It's just a matter of priorities and optimization, assuming you have a full-time job. Not much you can do beyond subsistence if you're stuck with part time work, but that's not most people.
Whether your religion is Rich Dad Poor Dad, or Mr Money Mustache, or one of the many other cults of savings, get the fervor and you can save. Plenty of proven recipes out there, but any way you do it is a matter of working to change your habits and finding pleasure in the abstract activity of saving (abstraction is very hard for some people, but again that's not most people).
Sales taxes are inherently regressive. An actual flat tax - all income, dividends, and gains taxed the same, no exceptions - would be not merely fair, but righteous (make it progressive by sending everyone a check every month). It will never happen, of course, as the richest would pay far more, and the politicians couldn't run every election on spending other people's money.
The rich spend far less than they make
One might just assume a causal connection there. You know, if one had any interest in becoming a despicable richer.
We already got Toyota and State Farm from the (nastiest) bay area. Both have relatively sane blue collar workers. Don't want a bunch of feely feels tech (wannabe) millionaires coming in here and making even more waves, driving up the cost of living and turning the state even more liberal. If ya wanna be a foam speckled progressive, at least try to stay in Austin.
Austin is the designated Californian Containment Zone in Texas. Please respect our boundaries.
Parasites doing parasitism on more parasites.
Came here to say this. No sympathy. Let the left eat itself.
Those companies employ a lot of people. How much tax does Cali, with the nations highest tax rate, collect on 100,000 people making over $100,000 a year?