Yes, it's rent seeking. It's getting paid for doing no work, merely owning something. This is not productive behavior.
So NO, you don't know what a loan is. Work is not the only form of value you can provide. A loan is capital provided at risk to the lender. You can also provide knowledge or connections. These aren't "labor" either, but can be quite valuable.
Do you know that people can today be part of business and make or lose money with it by loaning money to business (those are called bonds) and that's where the money comes out of to pay the employees?
If the money to pay employees isn't coming from customers, your business isn't profitable and the employees don't deserve to be paid. Bonds are only a tool that are used to smooth out the peaks and valleys in income and they can be replaced by other mechanisms that don't create the idle rich. e.g. labor owned cooperatives that allocate resources to where it best benefits labor. As a bonus, these would be democratic and not totalitarian institutions.
Bonds do a lot more than income smoothing (which incidentally is something that they're not good at, you'd use lines of credit, insurance, or derivative hedges for short and long term cash flow control). They are used to fund capital purchases. It allows you to improve or grow the company without having to wait for enough income to accumulate to fund the purchases.
Do you know that if the management stops doing their work properly
Management is a valuable service, and they deserve to be paid well. My beef is with investing.
I see here that you care about the future. That's what investment is all about. Sacrifices today for a better future tomorrow. You can disagree about the priorities or the time frame, but ultimately investment is about making a better future, something you seem to want.
You think the profits are evil I bet
Not at all. Profiting from your own labor is a great thing. Profiting from someone elses labor (capitalism) is evil.
Nonsense. My labor is far more valuable exactly because someone else can profit from it. I profit from someone else profiting from my labor, That makes it good in my view and it should in your view as well.
A lot of tax audits and resignations. 100,000 people is not that many to be honest though it might help curb this sort of crime in the long run.
One thing I find strange however is the near complete absence of US names from this list. The highest profile person they have is the ex-wife (Denise Rich) of Marc Rich, a billionaire living in Europe, who had committed tax fraud and illegal trade with Iran in the late 70s and 80s. Maybe US citizens don't use the British Virgin Islands very much.
Show me how you pin all that on the FDA, and not the ridiculous marketing costs that pharma seems to think tie into their "R&D" budgets.
So the drug industry markets drugs that don't even make it to the market? Note the discussion of failure rates:
But as Bernard Munos of the InnoThink Center for Research In Biomedical Innovation has noted, just adjusting that estimate for current failure rates results in an estimate of $4 billion in research dollars spent for every drug that is approved. But Munos showed me another figure, where he divided each drug companyâ(TM)s R&D budget by the average number of drugs approved. This was far more dramatic.
Wanting to make this even more rigorous, Forbes (that would be Scott DeCarlo and me) took Munosâ(TM) count of drug approvals for the major pharmas and combined it with their research and development spending as reported in annual earnings filings going back fifteen years, pulled from a Thomson Reuters database using FactSet. We adjusted all the figures for inflation. Using both drug approvals and research budgets since 1997 keeps the estimates being skewed by short-term periods when R&D budgets or drug approvals changed dramatically.
The range of money spent is stunning. AstraZeneca has spent $12 billion in research money for every new drug approved, as much as the top-selling medicine ever generated in annual sales; Amgen spent just $3.7 billion. At $12 billion per drug, inventing medicines is a pretty unsustainable business. At $3.7 billion, you might just be able to make money (a new medicine can probably keep generating revenue for ten years; invent one a year at that rate and youâ(TM)ll do well).
"Which is more likely: that 150 million Americans are lazy or that 400 Americans are greedy?"
That is an idiotic question. What is more likely is that there are in excess (well in excess, I might add) of 150 million financially ignorant people in the US. That's why they don't have wealth.
And being "greedy" doesn't magically make you as rich as one of the top 400 people by wealth. Else we'd all be doing it.
Or, they could be compassionate people with some empathy and see that it's a good thing to do, and want a rising tide to raise all boats.
Well that's what we have now. Is it working?
From reading the comments to this article, I get the impression that this is the society we want, but we're getting bent out of shape because some people got out of paying some taxes. So now some of us blame the failings of this society and how it is run on those few defectors. It's a two minute hate on rich people.
Do the companies they own and profit from, and the employees engaged in work for those companies, drive more, fly more, require more police and fire protection, phone lines, clean water, solid waste disposal, waste water disposal?
Not really. They pay a lot of money and they just don't get that much in return. That was the original poster's point. Basic services are a monopolized protection racket.
What is worth rich peoples' money is the minting of favorable law, regulation, and selective contracts which creates all sort of profitable rent seeking opportunities. But I think you probably wouldn't want rich peoples' tax money paying for that.
its just that there is a massive culture of willful ignorance gaining popularity in the US over the last couple of decades.
And how is that any different than any other time in human history? The fundamental dynamic of ignorance is our very limited ability to understand reality and death.
Please stop being an idiot. You do realize that when it costs billions of dollars just to bring new drugs to market, that will delay new medical technologies? From that link:
During the Super Bowl, a representative of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly posted the on the company's corporate blog that the average cost of bringing a new drug to market is $1.3 billion, [...] This is, of course, ludicrous.
The average drug developed by a major pharmaceutical company costs at least $4 billion, and it can be as much as $11 billion.
Go ahead, tell me how that helps us all be healthier. My view on this is that every bad health consequence that happens to us will eventually be preventable. But the profound ignorance of creating huge economic obstructions to medical innovation will delay that day for a long time to come. We are not saving lives.
The reasonable default position, at least theoretically, prevents the deaths of your family members.
Why in the world do you think that is "reasonable"? Nothing prevents evil or incompetence. The best we can do is to provide large negative consequences for evil and incompetence. That's adequately covered by lawsuits.
There are plenty of different taxation systems, and what people consider as fair varies.
Bingo. Fairness is subjective. Someone's always going to lose and think it's unfair. Their opinion counts as much as your does. Hence, why fairness is unfair.
The basic definition of fairness is something done equality and without bias.
So fairness is impossible as well. The rich will never be without their devices for avoiding taxes.
The reality of the situation now is that some people on the top are paying less than those below them, which is unfair.
We'll see if they still are after all the tax audits and court cases settle out. The crack dealer usually ends up paying less taxes than honest work. But that only lasts till they get caught.
How's your sympathy for entrapment victims? That's probably enough power to shape tax laws, creating the very market when the blackmailer is exploiting. While I too don't feel any sympathy for rich people evading the law, blackmail on this scale would be powerful enough to screw you over in a variety of ways, such as enabling manipulation of law, consolidating wealth in the hands of a ruthless few, etc.
Someone collected this information and it's worth asking who? and why?
Fairness is inherently unfair. You argument that because the US is screwing over one demographic, it should screw over all demographics just as much. How about not screwing over that dual-income family instead?
Libertarianism cuts both ways --- if you don't want to pay for the FDA, fine, but don't complain when your family members die from tainted medicine.
I can still sue the manufacturer. Second, Libertarianism cuts both ways. Without the FDA, there would be a more medical treatments available to save lives. The FDA vastly increases the costs of researching new medical treatments and that kills more people than tainted drugs do.
I take it you'll be the first to work for the ten cents per hour the companies will be willing to pay you if minimum wage is revoked, and you'll keep your complaints to your fucking self about it.
I will no doubt be earning a bit less. But I'm willing to sacrifice for the future of my society. Are you?
US (and other developed, educated, industrialized countries) workers should not have to accept a drastic reduction of standard of living and safety of the workplace so that the owners of companies can make more money.
That's ok. Your acceptance isn't required.
Like public education?
The US spends more per student adjusted for standard of living (PPP) than all but a handful of countries and it gets a relatively weak educational outcome for that money spent.
And what's the point of all your other nonsense, if the US doesn't have an economy to support all the stuff you want? My approach keeps and strengthens that economy. Your approach loses that economy and turns the US into another Ottoman empire, no called something like the "sick man of the west" that everyone would be waiting on to croak.
I for one am for protecting the standard of living that our recent forefathers fought for.
Then implement my suggestions. That what will work.
It's worth keeping in mind that the original holders of the information might have collected it for nefarious purposes. Being able to blackmail a significant fraction of the world's corrupt business people and politicians is quite a bit of power.
I stand corrected on the number of companies. Apparently, the British Virgin Islands are a major creator for such companies and they've created over a million such companies since the 80s. So 100,000 companies is a bigger share of the entire market over its entire history than I expected.
This story indicates that the companies in question seem to cluster on the British Virgin Islands.
The data seen by the Guardian shows that their secret companies are based mainly in the British Virgin Islands.
But this might be a quirk of how the data was released (apparently, news organizations have access to the data from their country, meaning that the British Virgin Islands may be the preferred destination for UK money).
I wonder who collected these records in the first place? Either it's all from the same business or someone collected it across many such businesses. In that latter case, it could be a government spy agency with resources or a particularly powerful and well organized blackmailer.
100,000 shell companies over thirty years is significant but not, I think, a large share of the overall market. I gather that these sorts of businesses process millions of new shell companies a year.
It'll be interesting to see who gets caught as a result.
The problem pointed out by the grandparent is that the middle class is getting gutted. Your solution to that is to decrease minimum wage, remove worker protections and so on. That doesn't even compute. Your solution is to make the problem the grandparent complained about worse.
The problem here is your perception. No matter what we do, US labor is going to face some degree of gutting. That's because when you add several billion people to the global labor force, labor becomes less valuable and capital more valuable. That's the fundamental dynamic.
It'll probably take at least 50 years to start getting better just because there's still Africa to go to for cheap labor after the current group of countries's labor costs go up.
Things like the so-called "safety net" are making this problem worse by driving employers away or encouraging them to hire less people. And that in turn will result in less tax revenue for the "safety net".
My approach is simply to cut these costs now rather than later when we're in more dire straits. Consider what's happening in Europe right now. A number of countries are failing and going through a painful adjustment at a really bad time to be doing it. The reason "austerity" hurts so much here is because they did nothing until they got into a situation where they left themselves no other choice.
I believe we'd see immediate benefits in economic growth and more productive work for everyone (there's a considerable portion of the US that isn't working right now, but could be. They're in prisons, schools, on disability, early retirement, etc). In the long run, I think it would slow the decline of the US economy relative to the rest of the world and give us a stronger economic foundation so that we can return to the current standard of living faster than if we continue to struggle in the spider web.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you understand what a loan is?
Yes, it's rent seeking. It's getting paid for doing no work, merely owning something. This is not productive behavior.
So NO, you don't know what a loan is. Work is not the only form of value you can provide. A loan is capital provided at risk to the lender. You can also provide knowledge or connections. These aren't "labor" either, but can be quite valuable.
Do you know that people can today be part of business and make or lose money with it by loaning money to business (those are called bonds) and that's where the money comes out of to pay the employees?
If the money to pay employees isn't coming from customers, your business isn't profitable and the employees don't deserve to be paid. Bonds are only a tool that are used to smooth out the peaks and valleys in income and they can be replaced by other mechanisms that don't create the idle rich. e.g. labor owned cooperatives that allocate resources to where it best benefits labor. As a bonus, these would be democratic and not totalitarian institutions.
Bonds do a lot more than income smoothing (which incidentally is something that they're not good at, you'd use lines of credit, insurance, or derivative hedges for short and long term cash flow control). They are used to fund capital purchases. It allows you to improve or grow the company without having to wait for enough income to accumulate to fund the purchases.
Do you know that if the management stops doing their work properly
Management is a valuable service, and they deserve to be paid well. My beef is with investing.
I see here that you care about the future. That's what investment is all about. Sacrifices today for a better future tomorrow. You can disagree about the priorities or the time frame, but ultimately investment is about making a better future, something you seem to want.
You think the profits are evil I bet
Not at all. Profiting from your own labor is a great thing. Profiting from someone elses labor (capitalism) is evil.
Nonsense. My labor is far more valuable exactly because someone else can profit from it. I profit from someone else profiting from my labor, That makes it good in my view and it should in your view as well.
what is going to happen with this information?
A lot of tax audits and resignations. 100,000 people is not that many to be honest though it might help curb this sort of crime in the long run.
One thing I find strange however is the near complete absence of US names from this list. The highest profile person they have is the ex-wife (Denise Rich) of Marc Rich, a billionaire living in Europe, who had committed tax fraud and illegal trade with Iran in the late 70s and 80s. Maybe US citizens don't use the British Virgin Islands very much.
Show me how you pin all that on the FDA, and not the ridiculous marketing costs that pharma seems to think tie into their "R&D" budgets.
So the drug industry markets drugs that don't even make it to the market? Note the discussion of failure rates:
But as Bernard Munos of the InnoThink Center for Research In Biomedical Innovation has noted, just adjusting that estimate for current failure rates results in an estimate of $4 billion in research dollars spent for every drug that is approved. But Munos showed me another figure, where he divided each drug companyâ(TM)s R&D budget by the average number of drugs approved. This was far more dramatic.
Wanting to make this even more rigorous, Forbes (that would be Scott DeCarlo and me) took Munosâ(TM) count of drug approvals for the major pharmas and combined it with their research and development spending as reported in annual earnings filings going back fifteen years, pulled from a Thomson Reuters database using FactSet. We adjusted all the figures for inflation. Using both drug approvals and research budgets since 1997 keeps the estimates being skewed by short-term periods when R&D budgets or drug approvals changed dramatically.
The range of money spent is stunning. AstraZeneca has spent $12 billion in research money for every new drug approved, as much as the top-selling medicine ever generated in annual sales; Amgen spent just $3.7 billion. At $12 billion per drug, inventing medicines is a pretty unsustainable business. At $3.7 billion, you might just be able to make money (a new medicine can probably keep generating revenue for ten years; invent one a year at that rate and youâ(TM)ll do well).
"Which is more likely: that 150 million Americans are lazy or that 400 Americans are greedy?"
That is an idiotic question. What is more likely is that there are in excess (well in excess, I might add) of 150 million financially ignorant people in the US. That's why they don't have wealth.
And being "greedy" doesn't magically make you as rich as one of the top 400 people by wealth. Else we'd all be doing it.
Or, they could be compassionate people with some empathy and see that it's a good thing to do, and want a rising tide to raise all boats.
Well that's what we have now. Is it working?
From reading the comments to this article, I get the impression that this is the society we want, but we're getting bent out of shape because some people got out of paying some taxes. So now some of us blame the failings of this society and how it is run on those few defectors. It's a two minute hate on rich people.
Do the companies they own and profit from, and the employees engaged in work for those companies, drive more, fly more, require more police and fire protection, phone lines, clean water, solid waste disposal, waste water disposal?
Not really. They pay a lot of money and they just don't get that much in return. That was the original poster's point. Basic services are a monopolized protection racket.
What is worth rich peoples' money is the minting of favorable law, regulation, and selective contracts which creates all sort of profitable rent seeking opportunities. But I think you probably wouldn't want rich peoples' tax money paying for that.
its just that there is a massive culture of willful ignorance gaining popularity in the US over the last couple of decades.
And how is that any different than any other time in human history? The fundamental dynamic of ignorance is our very limited ability to understand reality and death.
During the Super Bowl, a representative of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly posted the on the company's corporate blog that the average cost of bringing a new drug to market is $1.3 billion, [...] This is, of course, ludicrous.
The average drug developed by a major pharmaceutical company costs at least $4 billion, and it can be as much as $11 billion.
Go ahead, tell me how that helps us all be healthier. My view on this is that every bad health consequence that happens to us will eventually be preventable. But the profound ignorance of creating huge economic obstructions to medical innovation will delay that day for a long time to come. We are not saving lives.
The reasonable default position, at least theoretically, prevents the deaths of your family members.
Why in the world do you think that is "reasonable"? Nothing prevents evil or incompetence. The best we can do is to provide large negative consequences for evil and incompetence. That's adequately covered by lawsuits.
I don't think it's all that subjective.
And I do. Hence, it is subjective by demonstration. If it weren't, then we would agree. Here's an example just from that short paragraph:
If we start with the idea that fairness is treating all things equally, then the simple equation in this case is everyone should pay the same rate.
Why is that more fair than everyone pays in what they get out?
Arguments that boil down to "NOBODY CAN SAY WHAT FAIRNESS IS" ignores popular opinion.
I disagree. Everyone can say what "fairness" is and they routinely do. They just don't agree with each other.
Do you think there are people out there who would advocate a few mega-wealthy people being able to evade taxes?
Absolutely, yes. Some of the mega-wealthy, for example, probably think it's unfair that they have to pay so much and get so little in return.
There are plenty of different taxation systems, and what people consider as fair varies.
Bingo. Fairness is subjective. Someone's always going to lose and think it's unfair. Their opinion counts as much as your does. Hence, why fairness is unfair.
The basic definition of fairness is something done equality and without bias.
So fairness is impossible as well. The rich will never be without their devices for avoiding taxes.
The reality of the situation now is that some people on the top are paying less than those below them, which is unfair.
We'll see if they still are after all the tax audits and court cases settle out. The crack dealer usually ends up paying less taxes than honest work. But that only lasts till they get caught.
That's not the point of suing or of the money. Nor incidentally, is bringing the dead back to life the point of the FDA.
How's your sympathy for entrapment victims? That's probably enough power to shape tax laws, creating the very market when the blackmailer is exploiting. While I too don't feel any sympathy for rich people evading the law, blackmail on this scale would be powerful enough to screw you over in a variety of ways, such as enabling manipulation of law, consolidating wealth in the hands of a ruthless few, etc.
Someone collected this information and it's worth asking who? and why?
Fairness is inherently unfair. You argument that because the US is screwing over one demographic, it should screw over all demographics just as much. How about not screwing over that dual-income family instead?
Libertarianism cuts both ways --- if you don't want to pay for the FDA, fine, but don't complain when your family members die from tainted medicine.
I can still sue the manufacturer. Second, Libertarianism cuts both ways. Without the FDA, there would be a more medical treatments available to save lives. The FDA vastly increases the costs of researching new medical treatments and that kills more people than tainted drugs do.
Why am I seeing visions
Brain damage due to ideological indoctrination. That time was then, this is now.
I take it you'll be the first to work for the ten cents per hour the companies will be willing to pay you if minimum wage is revoked, and you'll keep your complaints to your fucking self about it.
I will no doubt be earning a bit less. But I'm willing to sacrifice for the future of my society. Are you?
US (and other developed, educated, industrialized countries) workers should not have to accept a drastic reduction of standard of living and safety of the workplace so that the owners of companies can make more money.
That's ok. Your acceptance isn't required.
Like public education?
The US spends more per student adjusted for standard of living (PPP) than all but a handful of countries and it gets a relatively weak educational outcome for that money spent.
And what's the point of all your other nonsense, if the US doesn't have an economy to support all the stuff you want? My approach keeps and strengthens that economy. Your approach loses that economy and turns the US into another Ottoman empire, no called something like the "sick man of the west" that everyone would be waiting on to croak.
I for one am for protecting the standard of living that our recent forefathers fought for.
Then implement my suggestions. That what will work.
It's worth keeping in mind that the original holders of the information might have collected it for nefarious purposes. Being able to blackmail a significant fraction of the world's corrupt business people and politicians is quite a bit of power.
You have an odd definition of "ask". When are the rest of the population going to do their own bit of sacrifice?
I stand corrected on the number of companies. Apparently, the British Virgin Islands are a major creator for such companies and they've created over a million such companies since the 80s. So 100,000 companies is a bigger share of the entire market over its entire history than I expected.
The data seen by the Guardian shows that their secret companies are based mainly in the British Virgin Islands.
But this might be a quirk of how the data was released (apparently, news organizations have access to the data from their country, meaning that the British Virgin Islands may be the preferred destination for UK money).
I wonder who collected these records in the first place? Either it's all from the same business or someone collected it across many such businesses. In that latter case, it could be a government spy agency with resources or a particularly powerful and well organized blackmailer.
100,000 shell companies over thirty years is significant but not, I think, a large share of the overall market. I gather that these sorts of businesses process millions of new shell companies a year.
It'll be interesting to see who gets caught as a result.
ut would Europe, Africa,China, or Japan succeed. They need you/us more then they need themselfs
Absurd. Trade make some things better, but there's just not that level of "need" out there.
The problem pointed out by the grandparent is that the middle class is getting gutted. Your solution to that is to decrease minimum wage, remove worker protections and so on. That doesn't even compute. Your solution is to make the problem the grandparent complained about worse.
The problem here is your perception. No matter what we do, US labor is going to face some degree of gutting. That's because when you add several billion people to the global labor force, labor becomes less valuable and capital more valuable. That's the fundamental dynamic.
It'll probably take at least 50 years to start getting better just because there's still Africa to go to for cheap labor after the current group of countries's labor costs go up.
Things like the so-called "safety net" are making this problem worse by driving employers away or encouraging them to hire less people. And that in turn will result in less tax revenue for the "safety net".
My approach is simply to cut these costs now rather than later when we're in more dire straits. Consider what's happening in Europe right now. A number of countries are failing and going through a painful adjustment at a really bad time to be doing it. The reason "austerity" hurts so much here is because they did nothing until they got into a situation where they left themselves no other choice.
I believe we'd see immediate benefits in economic growth and more productive work for everyone (there's a considerable portion of the US that isn't working right now, but could be. They're in prisons, schools, on disability, early retirement, etc). In the long run, I think it would slow the decline of the US economy relative to the rest of the world and give us a stronger economic foundation so that we can return to the current standard of living faster than if we continue to struggle in the spider web.