Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
Well, in part because property taxes are traditional, hard to dodge, and spending tends to be associated with stuff around the house.
That being said, wealth taxes tend to have the higher tax drag then a dividend or capital gains tax. That is, if you are looking at investing money for the long haul, like building a factory or something, a wealth tax is the best way to do it. It really discourages long term investing.
Borrowing money does not avoid the tax - it delays the tax.
Or, to put it another way, taxes are triggered by a taxable event - such as selling the stock. Borrowing the money just shifts this discussion to a buy now, pay latter. Z probably wants to delay the sale of stock because 1. He thinks FB stock will go up in value faster than the interest rate on the loan (see compounded interest, and leverage) and 2. He wants to keep voting control of the company so he is willing to take the risk. i.e., if FB goes to zero he still has to pay back the loan.
By the way, a wealth tax has the opposite affect of a sales tax. Sales taxes are meant to discourage consumer purchases and encourage investment. Wealth taxes discourages investing in long term capital goods.
Pricing bonds, especially subprime bonds, it a bit of an art. The market is huge, but the chance that the exact bond you hold is rare
Let us say you hold a 9 year IBM bond. The 5 year bond and 10 year IBM bond traded, but not yours. What’s the price? You would base it on “observable, Level 2” inputs – basically taking apart the value of the bonds and putting it back together.
For subprime bonds, it may be nothing like you bond has traded for months. They are customized things, or “unobservable, level 3” inputs. These are subjective. One could enter “high” values and claim to be an optimist. Or, one could ask your boss if they wanted high or low number and then manipulate the system to deliver the desired number. There is subjective delusional and then there is lying to deceive.
“Hacking” is not about illegal access to the system. It’s knowing what manual numbers to enter to manipulate the system to generate the desired results without tripping any compliance alarms.
In theory contingent fees solve this problem. A poor defendant can sell a portion of their suit to a rich investor for a upfront payment. Today that is normally the lawyer handling the case. So being poor is not the major issue.
What is the major issue is when the plaintiff doesn’t have the money. One can be poor, hire a good lawyer, but you can’t squeeze Bernie Madoff for money he does not have. (I am working off the assumption that he is telling the truth when he says he spent it all)
A test case of the New Deal was if the Federal Government could regulate a wheat field that was grown on private land whose purpose was to feed the people who owned the land – and thus would never be sold or transferred across state lines..
The Supreme Court said yes.
I can understand and approve that common carriers have to be open for all (see parent’s comment). The wheat case just strains my poor brain.
You are so very wrong. Try reading “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery” by Fogel.
Slavery apologist tried making the same type of argument - that their slaves received better care (food, clothing, care in old age, etc.) then their northern “wage salve” counterparts – which might be true.
However, the wage slave could vote with their feet – they were not required to work. The wage slave could hope for a better life for their children by investing in their future – something slaves were prevented from doing.
To cost to freedom for true plantation slavery was horrendous as accounted in economic terms – to say nothing of moral ones.
Companies that want to buy other companies want to be public. Public companies can either offer cash or publicly traded stock. Publicly traded stock is better than private stock. The investors of the bought out company can either stay with the new merged company or sell their stock (cut and run).
Companies that want to be bought don’t want to be public.
First, they lose some control of the selling process. They have to sell to the highest (generally cash) bidder. Insiders generally have a harder time cutting special deals in regards to the minority shareholders.
Second, public companies have to disclose a lot more information, some of it audited. Negotiations can be similar to poker. Why show more cards then you have to? Just ask the Winklevoss twins.
"The principal purposes of our initial public offering are to create a public market for our Class A common stock and thereby enable future access to the public equity markets by us and our employees, obtain additional capital, and facilitate an orderly distribution of shares for the selling stockholders"
Assuming Facebook does not need the money to expand, the money raised will go to 1.cCash to Facebook for a rainy day, future acquisitions, etc. and 2. The current owners (cash out).
I am assuming that Facebook is going public not because it wants to, but because it has to. Once a company has more than 25 owners / partners it gets tricky. Owners are leaving and want to cash out, new employees want to buy in and have an actually ownership stake in what they are doing, etc.
I am going to assume this is going to be very much like the Google IPO. They had more than 250 owners so they had to do most of the paperwork / accounting that goes with a public company. They had a lot of people who wanted to cash out. Etc.
Meanwhile, DC continues to show there is no move too desperate that they won't risk alienating their fans in the quest for the dollar.
Actually, DC & Moore’s original plan was to write a prequel – so it’s not like it a total violation of Moore’s idea. (That being said, what’s the chance that the writer will be able to match Moore’s original script?)
Charity is Charity – If you earn money and give it away you are not taxed on the money given.
Tax Shelters are used to delay or avoid taxes. If somebody had a large bonus this year (ordinary income) one would try to build a tax shelter to convert it to long term capital gains. i.e., don’t pay the tax this year, pay the lower capital gains tax after a couple of years.
Alpaca farms are a great example. It’s a part time gig, and all of a sudden your large SUV and barn (for your riding horses) converts to a work truck and farm.
It’s not about the consumers, it’s about the employees. Companies want to keep their payroll down so they conspire not to hire the other’s employees. Dampens completion and thus pay.
On the flip side, I have seen a rival company hire away whole teams. All of a sudden a company had a great line of business and the next day it’s across the street. Sometimes it has been a key operations department (i.e. the department that keeps the companies’ door open, not one that makes any profit.) It can be quite stressful for a company.
In my line of business, if somebody wants to poach another person’s team (Such as all of the brokers in a office or a analyst team) the only answer is more money. On the other side, if one want’s to poach a operations team, you got to leave enough people so the company can run. Not quite fair that the 2 types of people are treated different - it's jus the way the cookie crumbles.
Actually, most of the value production is done outside of China. China basically does assembly. For an IPad that works out to about $10 of labor. So the wages in China could double and we would still not see much change in the price / profit of a IPad.
Selling liquor retail requires a liquor license, so the city/county only issues the license to themselves. It’s common in the small town / rural Midwest. Can’t say for anyplace else.
In my hometown, anybody can sell beer and other low point drinks, but only the city can sell the hard stuff. Partly it’s a money maker for the city. Partly it is a holdover from the temperance era. City employees are less like to sell the hard stuff to minors no matter what the profit margins are. I have seen some small towns where the only place to buy liquor (On or Off sale) is the City Bar.
Because this class of rights is a blank check. It is very different to say that you can do something verse you must be provided with something.
In order to freedom of speech, religion, or to bear arms all I needs is a few federal judges and a few zealots (ACLU, Christian Right, NRA, etc.).
In order to provide medical care, education, or broadband access I have to start writing out big checks. Do I have to run fiber out the middle of nowhere for 1 guy? Is a 99% solution acceptable? A 80% solution?
I grew up in a town with a municipal liquor, phone and cable company (3 separate companies.) The last 2 being “natural monopolies” (less so today, but).
The phone company was well managed, the cable company less so. Both were for profit companies and paid corporate income tax, but kicked any dividends over the city. The phone company did a good job of reinvesting in equipment, the cable company did not. The cable company kind of imploded one day (a little mismangment, a little fraud) and was sold off to a large corporation.
The real question is how cities handle quasi natural monopolies. When there is limited completion the monopoly (or, in most cases, the duopoly) can squeeze hard. And since broadband is a critical component of most business infrastructure, cities want to make sure they lots of cheap broadband. (i.e. the economic profits should flow to the business owners, not the rent seeking broadband providers.).
I am generally a free market kind of person and I think the private market should provide these kind of services. However, this is a bazooka for municipalities. If they can’t get reasonable providers in (which can be the case where I grew up – low population density, very much a natural monopoly) then I think they should be able to play this card.
4 said warrantless tracking via GPS was illegal. period.
9 said warrantless tracking via a attached GPS was tresspass, and thus illegal.
5 out of the 9 did not say if you could warrantless track via GPS WITHOUT tresspas. i.e. via a person's cell phone or GM's On-Star. It may well still be perfectly legal - or not. (I hope not, but....)
I think you go too far when you go into China territory.
I think it would be more fair to compare it to the Gilded Age of Robber Barons. Insiders who tilted the rules of the market in their own favor. Jay Gould and Daniel Drew would be good examples. These people gained control of corporations and tilted it towards their own gain vs. the shareholders. Took control of banks and choked off competition. Etc.
Follow the logic I own company X (shareholder) I hire a agent in a posistion of trust (a C.E.O., for example) The manager takes / gives away valuable property (i.e. insider information) At a disadvantage (i.e. lacking insider information) I trade at a disadvantage. (I sell stock too low, I fail to invest, etc.) Wealth is transferred from me to the insider.
It’s a breach of fiduciary reasonability. Liberations believe in playing hardball, but cheating is another thing.
The trick here is that a representative’s knowledge of pending legislation, regulatory actions, etc. (i.e. knowledge from his day job) is technically not insider information – which of course if big enough to drive a very large truck though.
So congressmen can still be charged with insider trading if they got their knowledge outside of their day job Congressmen have been prosecuted when outsiders have bribed them with inside information (less paper trail then giving them money) but it’s been rare.
Actually, most drones are flow by non-coms, because most drones (by numbers) are back-pack squad level drones. Basically, fancy model RC controlled planes allowing soldiers to see over the hill.
If you want to reduce gas consumption (reduce oil imports, reduce green house gasses, etc.,) levy a carbon tax, don't increase gas mileage. Do it directly – not indirectly.
Forcing me to pay extra to buy a fuel efficient car is going have little impact on the above issues – I don’t drive that many miles (yeah bike, mass transit).
When the first MPG requirements were put in place, a lot of people switched from big gas guzzling station wagons to big gas guzzling light trucks – the minivan.
Each year Americans drove more miles until gas hit $4.00 a gallon. Only at that point did they start switching their behavior. Smaller cars and shorter commutes.
I am all for open data, and I like what they do, but Ancestry.com should not be a 501(c)(3). It's for profit. It’s purpose is to make money.
If they were dealing strictly with public data then I would have no bones to pick if the U.S. government moved into their business and started to offer the information for free. (well, small bones. We are running a deficit, not sure this ranks on my top 10 list for this decade, but that’s a different debate).
What they do is combine multiple government databases together. That’s their value add, and I would not want the U.S. government to go there. Once again, I would love to see governments chose a standardized data structure so I can easily query birth records from many different countries over many different centuries – but until then –
o.k. – now that I have thought about it for 5 minutes – a non-profit that would publish and maintain the different data structures would be o.k. Then open sources software to mine the various government databases? Parts of Ancestry.com would be o.k. – but it would have to be public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in part because property taxes are traditional, hard to dodge, and spending tends to be associated with stuff around the house.
That being said, wealth taxes tend to have the higher tax drag then a dividend or capital gains tax. That is, if you are looking at investing money for the long haul, like building a factory or something, a wealth tax is the best way to do it. It really discourages long term investing.
Borrowing money does not avoid the tax - it delays the tax.
Or, to put it another way, taxes are triggered by a taxable event - such as selling the stock. Borrowing the money just shifts this discussion to a buy now, pay latter. Z probably wants to delay the sale of stock because 1. He thinks FB stock will go up in value faster than the interest rate on the loan (see compounded interest, and leverage) and 2. He wants to keep voting control of the company so he is willing to take the risk. i.e., if FB goes to zero he still has to pay back the loan.
By the way, a wealth tax has the opposite affect of a sales tax. Sales taxes are meant to discourage consumer purchases and encourage investment. Wealth taxes discourages investing in long term capital goods.
Pricing bonds, especially subprime bonds, it a bit of an art. The market is huge, but the chance that the exact bond you hold is rare
Let us say you hold a 9 year IBM bond. The 5 year bond and 10 year IBM bond traded, but not yours. What’s the price? You would base it on “observable, Level 2” inputs – basically taking apart the value of the bonds and putting it back together.
For subprime bonds, it may be nothing like you bond has traded for months. They are customized things, or “unobservable, level 3” inputs. These are subjective.
One could enter “high” values and claim to be an optimist. Or, one could ask your boss if they wanted high or low number and then manipulate the system to deliver the desired number. There is subjective delusional and then there is lying to deceive.
“Hacking” is not about illegal access to the system. It’s knowing what manual numbers to enter to manipulate the system to generate the desired results without tripping any compliance alarms.
In theory contingent fees solve this problem. A poor defendant can sell a portion of their suit to a rich investor for a upfront payment. Today that is normally the lawyer handling the case. So being poor is not the major issue.
What is the major issue is when the plaintiff doesn’t have the money. One can be poor, hire a good lawyer, but you can’t squeeze Bernie Madoff for money he does not have. (I am working off the assumption that he is telling the truth when he says he spent it all)
A test case of the New Deal was if the Federal Government could regulate a wheat field that was grown on private land whose purpose was to feed the people who owned the land – and thus would never be sold or transferred across state lines..
The Supreme Court said yes.
I can understand and approve that common carriers have to be open for all (see parent’s comment). The wheat case just strains my poor brain.
You are so very wrong. Try reading “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery” by Fogel.
Slavery apologist tried making the same type of argument - that their slaves received better care (food, clothing, care in old age, etc.) then their northern “wage salve” counterparts – which might be true.
However, the wage slave could vote with their feet – they were not required to work. The wage slave could hope for a better life for their children by investing in their future – something slaves were prevented from doing.
To cost to freedom for true plantation slavery was horrendous as accounted in economic terms – to say nothing of moral ones.
Companies that want to buy other companies want to be public. Public companies can either offer cash or publicly traded stock. Publicly traded stock is better than private stock. The investors of the bought out company can either stay with the new merged company or sell their stock (cut and run).
Companies that want to be bought don’t want to be public.
First, they lose some control of the selling process. They have to sell to the highest (generally cash) bidder. Insiders generally have a harder time cutting special deals in regards to the minority shareholders.
Second, public companies have to disclose a lot more information, some of it audited. Negotiations can be similar to poker. Why show more cards then you have to? Just ask the Winklevoss twins.
From the prospectus, page 34
"The principal purposes of our initial public offering are to create a public market for our Class A common stock and thereby enable future access to the public equity markets by us and our employees, obtain additional capital, and facilitate an orderly distribution of shares for the selling stockholders"
Assuming Facebook does not need the money to expand, the money raised will go to 1.cCash to Facebook for a rainy day, future acquisitions, etc. and 2. The current owners (cash out).
I am assuming that Facebook is going public not because it wants to, but because it has to. Once a company has more than 25 owners / partners it gets tricky. Owners are leaving and want to cash out, new employees want to buy in and have an actually ownership stake in what they are doing, etc.
I am going to assume this is going to be very much like the Google IPO. They had more than 250 owners so they had to do most of the paperwork / accounting that goes with a public company. They had a lot of people who wanted to cash out. Etc.
Meanwhile, DC continues to show there is no move too desperate that they won't risk alienating their fans in the quest for the dollar.
Actually, DC & Moore’s original plan was to write a prequel – so it’s not like it a total violation of Moore’s idea. (That being said, what’s the chance that the writer will be able to match Moore’s original script?)
Yeah, it does matter. Since nobody else is buying Iranian oil, China is able to buy it at below market prices.
Charity is Charity – If you earn money and give it away you are not taxed on the money given.
Tax Shelters are used to delay or avoid taxes. If somebody had a large bonus this year (ordinary income) one would try to build a tax shelter to convert it to long term capital gains. i.e., don’t pay the tax this year, pay the lower capital gains tax after a couple of years.
Alpaca farms are a great example. It’s a part time gig, and all of a sudden your large SUV and barn (for your riding horses) converts to a work truck and farm.
It’s not about the consumers, it’s about the employees. Companies want to keep their payroll down so they conspire not to hire the other’s employees. Dampens completion and thus pay.
On the flip side, I have seen a rival company hire away whole teams. All of a sudden a company had a great line of business and the next day it’s across the street. Sometimes it has been a key operations department (i.e. the department that keeps the companies’ door open, not one that makes any profit.) It can be quite stressful for a company.
In my line of business, if somebody wants to poach another person’s team (Such as all of the brokers in a office or a analyst team) the only answer is more money. On the other side, if one want’s to poach a operations team, you got to leave enough people so the company can run. Not quite fair that the 2 types of people are treated different - it's jus the way the cookie crumbles.
Actually, most of the value production is done outside of China. China basically does assembly. For an IPad that works out to about $10 of labor. So the wages in China could double and we would still not see much change in the price / profit of a IPad.
pcic.merage.uci.edu/papers/2011/Value_iPad_iPhone.pdf
http://www.economist.com/node/21543174
Selling liquor retail requires a liquor license, so the city/county only issues the license to themselves. It’s common in the small town / rural Midwest. Can’t say for anyplace else.
In my hometown, anybody can sell beer and other low point drinks, but only the city can sell the hard stuff. Partly it’s a money maker for the city. Partly it is a holdover from the temperance era. City employees are less like to sell the hard stuff to minors no matter what the profit margins are. I have seen some small towns where the only place to buy liquor (On or Off sale) is the City Bar.
Because this class of rights is a blank check. It is very different to say that you can do something verse you must be provided with something.
In order to freedom of speech, religion, or to bear arms all I needs is a few federal judges and a few zealots (ACLU, Christian Right, NRA, etc.).
In order to provide medical care, education, or broadband access I have to start writing out big checks. Do I have to run fiber out the middle of nowhere for 1 guy? Is a 99% solution acceptable? A 80% solution?
No, but you are kind of missing the point.
I grew up in a town with a municipal liquor, phone and cable company (3 separate companies.) The last 2 being “natural monopolies” (less so today, but).
The phone company was well managed, the cable company less so. Both were for profit companies and paid corporate income tax, but kicked any dividends over the city. The phone company did a good job of reinvesting in equipment, the cable company did not. The cable company kind of imploded one day (a little mismangment, a little fraud) and was sold off to a large corporation.
The real question is how cities handle quasi natural monopolies. When there is limited completion the monopoly (or, in most cases, the duopoly) can squeeze hard. And since broadband is a critical component of most business infrastructure, cities want to make sure they lots of cheap broadband. (i.e. the economic profits should flow to the business owners, not the rent seeking broadband providers.).
I am generally a free market kind of person and I think the private market should provide these kind of services. However, this is a bazooka for municipalities. If they can’t get reasonable providers in (which can be the case where I grew up – low population density, very much a natural monopoly) then I think they should be able to play this card.
4 said warrantless tracking via GPS was illegal. period.
9 said warrantless tracking via a attached GPS was tresspass, and thus illegal.
5 out of the 9 did not say if you could warrantless track via GPS WITHOUT tresspas. i.e. via a person's cell phone or GM's On-Star. It may well still be perfectly legal - or not. (I hope not, but....)
I think you go too far when you go into China territory.
I think it would be more fair to compare it to the Gilded Age of Robber Barons. Insiders who tilted the rules of the market in their own favor. Jay Gould and Daniel Drew would be good examples. These people gained control of corporations and tilted it towards their own gain vs. the shareholders. Took control of banks and choked off competition. Etc.
Follow the logic
I own company X (shareholder)
I hire a agent in a posistion of trust (a C.E.O., for example)
The manager takes / gives away valuable property (i.e. insider information)
At a disadvantage (i.e. lacking insider information) I trade at a disadvantage. (I sell stock too low, I fail to invest, etc.)
Wealth is transferred from me to the insider.
It’s a breach of fiduciary reasonability. Liberations believe in playing hardball, but cheating is another thing.
The short answer is no.
The trick here is that a representative’s knowledge of pending legislation, regulatory actions, etc. (i.e. knowledge from his day job) is technically not insider information – which of course if big enough to drive a very large truck though.
So congressmen can still be charged with insider trading if they got their knowledge outside of their day job Congressmen have been prosecuted when outsiders have bribed them with inside information (less paper trail then giving them money) but it’s been rare.
Actually, most drones are flow by non-coms, because most drones (by numbers) are back-pack squad level drones. Basically, fancy model RC controlled planes allowing soldiers to see over the hill.
If you want to reduce gas consumption (reduce oil imports, reduce green house gasses, etc.,) levy a carbon tax, don't increase gas mileage. Do it directly – not indirectly.
Forcing me to pay extra to buy a fuel efficient car is going have little impact on the above issues – I don’t drive that many miles (yeah bike, mass transit).
When the first MPG requirements were put in place, a lot of people switched from big gas guzzling station wagons to big gas guzzling light trucks – the minivan.
Each year Americans drove more miles until gas hit $4.00 a gallon. Only at that point did they start switching their behavior. Smaller cars and shorter commutes.
I am all for open data, and I like what they do, but Ancestry.com should not be a 501(c)(3). It's for profit. It’s purpose is to make money.
If they were dealing strictly with public data then I would have no bones to pick if the U.S. government moved into their business and started to offer the information for free. (well, small bones. We are running a deficit, not sure this ranks on my top 10 list for this decade, but that’s a different debate).
What they do is combine multiple government databases together. That’s their value add, and I would not want the U.S. government to go there. Once again, I would love to see governments chose a standardized data structure so I can easily query birth records from many different countries over many different centuries – but until then –
o.k. – now that I have thought about it for 5 minutes – a non-profit that would publish and maintain the different data structures would be o.k. Then open sources software to mine the various government databases? Parts of Ancestry.com would be o.k. – but it would have to be public domain.
and customers who ahve already bought in, a eco-system, outside developers that are already fluent, programs already designed for the system, etc.