The Giving Pledge

Can we talk about the giving pledge?

Apropos of nothing, I just want to state how profoundly unimpressed I am with the giving pledge. It just seems so cynical to me. Take Bill Gates, for example. How much money is in his bank account? How long has it sat there while thousands (millions? billions? Definitely more than thousands.) of people around the world continue to die in abject poverty from entirely preventable causes? And I'm supposed to be impressed by the magnanimity of his largesse, that he's going to will half of it away once he's no longer around to enjoy it? Fuck that, you've got a hundred billion right now that you don't need, get to it.

Semi-related, I never want to hear Melinda Gates's name again. The only thing of note that she has done in her life is marry Bill. I don't know Warren Buffet's wife's name.

Mods, please merge with the class warfare thread.

I'll guess Elizabeth or Susan.

I said apropos of nothing, but upon further reflection, that's not entirely true. This is in part a response to Bill Gates's reaction/opposition to Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax.

You've already pledged to give it away, Bill. Consider the wealth tax an advance on your pledge. Unless the pledge was just a PR move, and you never had any intention of following through during your lifetime. And also, you don't get plaudits for paying your taxes, but you can stroke your own ego as much as you want for "philanthropy."

But maybe I'm just cynical.

Just me, I guess.

Cameron I think people struggle to understand just how much money a billion dollars is. Like, it’s all very theoretical and they don’t get it just how much it really is. Let alone 100 billion dollars. That’s fucking insane. I have no sympathy for these people and no matter how much you tax them they’ll still be able to buy and sell all of us at their own will.

One way I like to get people to wrap their heads around it- if you had a million dollars and you spent $1/second, or $86,400 per day, you’d be out of money in 11.5 days. Makes sense. If you had a billion dollars and did the same, it would take 31.7 years to run out of money, and that’s not even including the interest the money is earning in the meantime. So really it would run out way slower than that.

Anyway, it’s an obscene amount of money and no one should have control of that much wealth and it’s a symptom of a broken system and if someone tells me they want to tax people like that at 90% then I’m good with it.

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:Cameron I think people struggle to understand just how much money a billion dollars is. Like, it’s all very theoretical and they don’t get it just how much it really is. Let alone 100 billion dollars. That’s fucking insane. I have no sympathy for these people and no matter how much you tax them they’ll still be able to buy and sell all of us at their own will.

One way I like to get people to wrap their heads around it- if you had a million dollars and you spent $1/second, or $86,400 per day, you’d be out of money in 11.5 days. Makes sense. If you had a billion dollars and did the same, it would take 31.7 years to run out of money, and that’s not even including the interest the money is earning in the meantime. So really it would run out way slower than that.

Anyway, it’s an obscene amount of money and no one should have control of that much wealth and it’s a symptom of a broken system and if someone tells me they want to tax people like that at 90% then I’m good with it.

I saw a meme recently, and I had to double check the math myself, because it's along those same lines.

Meme said something like: if you started working at the birth of Christ, and earned $2000/hour, saved it all, and never paid any taxes, today you'd have around $8.4 billion. You'd be only about the 30th richest American.

Yeah that’s about right. It’s just absurd.

Also I think people hear about wealth taxes and such and it scares them because they think that they will somehow be effected one day (another random “I saw” but awhile back I saw a poll about people’s views on the standing of their own wealth and something like 25% thought they were either in, or one day would be in, the top 1%.)

It needs to be drilled into people’s heads that things like wealth taxes aren’t even close to impacting 99.999% of people and that they have no hope of ever being impacted by it. Oh and if they somehow were, they’d still not even notice an effect on their life because of the tax due to how absurdly wealthy they’d have to be.

I have recently started watching the Because Science youtube channel, and one of the videos I watched recently touched on how much money Bezos has. I'll try to find the video, but I believe it concluded that if you converted all of Bezos's wealth to one dollar bills, they could circle the circumference of the sun 3 times.

Found the video. It's 4 times, not 3.

That sounds interesting, going to give that’s watch.

Oh one other thing- republicans have ensured that we are hopelessly fucked for quite some time. Every once in awhile I heard rumblings about this but it’s never really talked about. For every proposal to tax the rich, we need another proposal on how exactly we will collect beyond asking nicely.

Here’s a podcast with Chris Hayes of msnbc fame that digs into how, even if we enacted laws to tax these people, we have no enforcement mechanism anymore since the IRS has been gutted over the course of decades. At present the IRS does more audits of poor people than they do of rich simply because it’s easier and they don’t have the staff to do the more complicated in depth ones. It’s a really nice oligarchy we’ve formed while most of the country gets worked up about if “their” tax dollars go to something that makes them upset.

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/msnbc/why-is-this-happening/e/58730094

That's a great point. I'm often quite suspect of the motives of anyone who talks about reforming the tax code, but reform is absolutely needed. Gotta close those loopholes.

I'm also given to understand that funding the IRS is one of the most efficient, if rather unpopular, uses of taxpayer money. I forget the number or where I heard it, but I believe each dollar spent funding the IRS brings back more than a dollar in tax revenue.

Cameron wrote:That's a great point. I'm often quite suspect of the motives of anyone who talks about reforming the tax code, but reform is absolutely needed. Gotta close those loopholes.

I'm also given to understand that funding the IRS is one of the most efficient, if rather unpopular, uses of taxpayer money. I forget the number or where I heard it, but I believe each dollar spent funding the IRS brings back more than a dollar in tax revenue.

I thought it was closer to 4:1 that it brings back. Then again, I probably saw it on Reddit over a year ago.

InTenSity wrote:

Cameron wrote:That's a great point. I'm often quite suspect of the motives of anyone who talks about reforming the tax code, but reform is absolutely needed. Gotta close those loopholes.

I'm also given to understand that funding the IRS is one of the most efficient, if rather unpopular, uses of taxpayer money. I forget the number or where I heard it, but I believe each dollar spent funding the IRS brings back more than a dollar in tax revenue.

I thought it was closer to 4:1 that it brings back. Then again, I probably saw it on Reddit over a year ago.

Right you are, at least according to this article.

Yeah, we can say “give us 2% of your wealth” but if the answer is literally just “lol no. make me” and we don’t have a way to enforce it.... well, then sure we got the law passed but it doesn’t make a difference.