Which intentionally does not have despots oligarchs or royals to skew the conversation to a business matter which can get lost in the left/right divide
Diff the Bloomberg and Forbes rich lists... they're not the same list. One oligarch on those lists had their estimated net worth double after the Appleby leaks turned up some trusts. I'm pretty sure Bloomberg just calls people up and asks them how much they have.
This is almost certainly true — apart from oligarchs, dictators, and crypto billionaires, it's broadly understood that "500 richest" lists also miss a fair number of anonymous Omaha residents, for example.
> most of us are just working to prop them up and keep them rich
I think this part is probably a mischaracterization (though I could also just be misinterpreting what it means). To take the limit case, consider a wealthy dictator who stole absolutely everything he owns, and who flees his ruined country. In this scenario, the aggrieved parties are the people he stole his wealth from, as opposed to, e.g., the waitress who ends up serving him drinks on a Caribbean island.
That means to the extent you believe the "prop them up" part of the theory, you must also believe that most wealth concentrations arise more from things like theft, and less from things like value creation. My experience has been that this seems untrue today and almost certainly becomes more untrue every year (but I do understand that reasonable observers may disagree).
> the aggrieved parties are the people he stole his wealth from, as opposed to, e.g., the waitress who ends up serving him drinks on a Caribbean island.
I understand your logic here, but I think in these scenarios we are all losing - if the dictator's money is the only game in town you have to play his game and by his rules.
When the efforts of the waitress, and all the other effort and resources directed to fulfilling the dictators whims, it creates a network of economic activities around a single person's will.
If that money was being spent by the population he stole it from, the choices of the spenders will be more diverse, reflecting the desires of a that whole population, this creates a more complex network of economic activity and it also means that people supplying that demand have greater choice in how they participate.
it reminds me of the ant article from the other day.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/05/ant-tape...
Maybe, maybe not. [1]
[1] https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/cybercrime-to-top-6-trillio...
As a side note I appreciate the urgency in the tone of the quoted here.
It is pretty well demonstrated and accepted that both IQ and talent (in anything, business, sports, art, whatever) have a Gaussian (normal) distribution, but wealth does not. It has a Pareto (power) distribution.
So there is something more than just offering value (ie. the results of talent or IQ or even work) that contributes to the accumulation of wealth.
Some of this has to do with the "Snowball Effect" where it is easier to make more money at a faster rate, the more money you have.
But even that doesn't really get to the heart of the issue.
There is another surprising effect at play!
In a non-sophisticated version (ie. the version everyone is taught in the beginning economics classes) of economics, there is an assumption that someone pays money that they believe is equal to value of some thing that they want. And if this is true, no wealth actually changes hands. You paid $X for something that is worth $X to you ... and maybe others and the person that sold it to you got $X of value which is what they thought it was worth selling it at. The seller is richer by $X but you are richer by something worth $X, so it is really a wash.
But we have to pretend in this case that both sides know the worth of the item in question. And this is almost never the case!
If we allow for whoever "misjudges" the value to be the "loser" and the other to be the "winner" in the exchange as measured by one or the other getting a little more value out of the deal than the other, then something magical happens.
If you play out this scenario (and you can model it yourself in your favorite software) with many "agents" doing these deals, and if you give every single transaction a completely blind and fair chance of 50/50 of being the winner and loser in the transaction, and you do this many, many times ... one agent will always end up with ALL the money in the end!
And this is without theft (as the gp comment insinuated) and is also without there necessarily being any "real value" created (as you suggested).
There is very interesting and recent research in this area[1].
BTW, I used to think more like you than the GP comment (and I still don't really agree with the GP comment) but if you take the time to look into the research and understand the math behind what is going on, it is a real eye-opener and a different perspective on why wealth inequality seems to show up in basically every type of economy and society given enough time.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
Leaving that aside, the 1% pay 38.5% of taxes, which seems quite fair as is. We already tax the rich quite heavily.
I'd rather the focus be on compliance. Close the loopholes and catch the tax evaders.
Wealth taxes, if you look at examples elsewhere both present and historically, are hard to do well. I worry the government is not sufficiently competent ( now or in the future) to implement it correctly and it does more harm than good. It's very easy to drive capital offshore and take the potential investment and job creation with it.
Why does the middle class clamor to raise taxes on the rich, which won't appreciably benefit themselves, when they could instead push to lower taxes on themselves, which will benefit themselves?
Maybe different in Europe, but in the USA tax increases do not find their way back to benefits for the public.
I mean unless by "public" you mean the next country we want to "liberate" and bring "democracy" to...
There must be some old noble families with vaults of gold that are "off the books".
I think it's only exacerbated by government intervention (corruption) and regulatory capture.
I do agree that human nature tends to winners and losers, but right now the losers are being bashed over the head by a tool they think is helping them.
I live in a country with a thoroughly dysfunctional banking system which, by most accounts, fall right in the middle of the global income bracket.
Yet I know a ton of people in the upper-middle and lower-upper class and they all have the following characteristics of their wealth, which _do not_ appear in most wealth statistics:
* One or multiple bank accounts in offshore tax havens, with the US being the most important
* Multiple properties, whose real ownership is hidden by being assigned to family members, friends, and relatives
* A lot of overseas trips to buy things that are normally horribly expensive due to to import restrictions.
* A deep, thorough understanding not only of tax law, but also personal connections with people who work in tax agencies to understand when to avoid (legally), when to evade (knowing the tax agency won't pursue evasions under a certain currency amount) and when to get into convenient tax amnesty regimes.
Again, these aren't phenomenally rich people and they're easily hiding away 50-85% of their net wealth. By most metrics these people's income would, in theory, put them in median American lifestyle. Yet it's obvious that their standard of living _easily_ puts them in the top 2-5% of a developed country, with the addition that labor costs are so cheap that they can afford services even pretty wealthy people in other places cannot.
This is a classic in Latin America, and I have no reasons to believe it's any different elsewhere; the instruments are just different.
If you're providing labour then it's likely that you're providing a small percentage of the return that those providing capital receive as dividend.
Value of labor provider being transformed into profit for capital provider.
2. There exist tax preparation companies which profit enormously from doing the paperwork for you and they'd miss out on that profit if the government just billed you.
Which ones? I don't agree or disagree, but I think it's a good practice to call out politicians when we make claims they do something. That way it gives a more clear line of sight to your claim.
(I agree that #2 is a big problem, but I don't think it's actually the reason we file taxes.)
https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...
The IRS doesn't know how much tax you owe because Congress has created a massively complex system that includes using deductions to incentivize certain types of behavior, as well as using the tax system as a mechanism to deliver means-tested benefits.
This has been a major topic of discussion in tax circles for decades, the vast majority of Americans do not benefit from deductions and the federal government's direct knowledge of your income is essentially identical to your own (because of mandatory reporting from employers, banks & other financial service entities).
Specific deductions are written by and for high income individuals, and supported by lobbying from the tax industry which wouldn't exist without them, but they're not used by the vast majority of Americans, especially with raised SALT limits and doubled standard deduction.
The real question, in my mind, is that, knowing John Q. Taxpayer is burdened with understanding the tax code in it's entirety (in the spherical cow, in a vacuum sense), why in heaven's name are things written in such a manner whereby doing everything by the book is so hard?
From my experience, most people get the income part, those who have good portfolios get capital gains, but most people don't even know where to start looking if they aren't guided to it by an adversarial audit, which are guaranteed to be counterproductive in fostering the any degree of goodwill between taxpayer and tax service. Obviously, an accountant is capable of learning the corpus of material to be able to work with it, but given both the licensure requirement, and the fact most accounting questions I've heard resulted in a lot of open to interpretation answers, I'm not at all confident saying it is reasonable to expect the taxpayer to accurately report things, and furthermore, to expect some group of experts to handle it for everyone else, we've not done a good job at treating tax expertise as a public good in the accessibility department.
In short, at it's core an information propagation problem, suffering from perverse incentives present in private enterprise guarding and perpetuating information asymmetry to create opportunities for profit extraction at the expense of public process being rendered largely ineffectual.
Personally, I think the entire financial system is broken and should be squashed.
https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...
> For now, the IRS says, while it agrees auditing more wealthy taxpayers would be a good idea, without adequate funding there’s nothing it can do. “Congress must fund and the IRS must hire and train appropriate numbers of [auditors] to have appropriately balanced coverage across all income levels,” the report said.
> Since 2011, Republicans in Congress have driven cuts to the IRS enforcement budget; it’s more than a quarter lower than its 2010 level, adjusting for inflation.
Besides, many of the best tax evasion strategies are legal -- you just need an army of lawyers and a large pile of cash to deploy them.
The more cynical individual voters are about the system, the easier it is for people with money and power to shift outcomes to the ones that benefit them. It's the political equivalent of a FUD strategy.
The IRS does a lot of stuff that can be easily handled by a computer--matching up data from various sources to make sure it agrees. Once it needs a human eyeball, though, they do very little.
It's just your Joe-Blue-Collar guy has most of his finances already reported to the IRS, anything wrong and the matching computer will catch it.
It’s a bit frightening that the IRS can deputize a corporation but I guess with crypto you live by the sword, die by the sword. Maybe the dystopia imagined by crypto enthusiasts is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get the government you prepare for?
The EITC is particularly complex (blame Congress) and therefore error/fraud-prone, but many aspects of typical errors/fraud can be mechanically detected (is this a qualifying child? is this qualifying child being claimed on another return? is there undocumented non-W2/1099 income being used to support this claim?).
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/tax/10/history-taxes.a...
Firstly, a lot of what is happening is legal or at least a grey-area. Secondly with the complexities of multi-juristiction money and 100s of layers of obscurity that a rich person can afford to put between them and their money (legally), would you bother spending 100s of 1000s of dollars looking into it after which you might not find anything that can be prosecuted?
It costs little to look at a much simpler Joe-Blue-Collar worker. Sad but true.
The only way I can imagine it being resolved is by requiring full traceability for all financial transactions so I can literally tell where all the money in an account originated from. Can't see that happening.
It's uglier than you can imagine.
For example take Paris Hilton. When she had her DUI a few years ago her 500k car got repo'd. Wah? She stopped making payments on it. Payments?! Because she probably had it going through some business expense structure and was probably literally writing off the interest and payments. More than likely the original money was borrowed against an existing capital asset. If the sale price of the car did not make up the difference they had to come up with whatever cash was left over. Like most repos. But in this case it was a fairly flashy car that held its value decently well. So they probably took a small loss. But there was never any real risk to owning it.
Think of getting a HELEOC but running everything through that type of borrowing structure. But since you 'know a guy' you get the super awesome low interest rates. Which are business expenses. That flashy show of hers was a way to write a bunch of stuff off. Everything is an expense and a way to write it off your taxes. In some cases it does not even affect your taxes if you bury it in another company that is doing something similar that you control 100% of and just happens to be in a lower tax bracket. But gave you a sweetheart deal of leasing a yacht for a small amount per year for being such a good customer!
Except if you don't actually relocate there, in which case it's fraud.
https://net.educause.edu/eligibility.htm
FWIW the Smithsonian also has a .edu address.
Brookings.edu was first registered 07-Sep-1996, so it would appear they are grandfathered in. Similar case for the S.F. museum, the exploratorium.edu https://domain.glass/Brookings.edu
As best I can tell, Brookings would not be eligible since the rule change in 2001 but was grandfathered in before this (domain goes back to 1996). It's not clear why they weren't purged with the other non-universities squatting on edu in 2003 - I'd guess Brookings's political connections, frankly.
Think about the alternate title for these benign actions:
Annual Report on Isle of Man financial sector
Hackers breach Cayman National Bank and Trust’s Isle of Man subsidiary, the second of major breaches for this institution
Post-Mortem, Cayman National Bank and Trust breach and client behavior
Aggregating Customer trends sourced from hacked bank, using pytorch
"man dies after impact with car"
is rightly reported as
"man booked for manslaughter after hit-and-run"
the technical details are perhaps not as important than the criminality that transpired
The internet is a mirror, it tells you what you want to see. You should be most skeptical when things match your worst nightmare.
