Elizabeth Warren wealth tax

[2018OFPP1?2]

True, why would I want to be ethical when I can just outsource my work to child labor camps. Capitalism is great when I can reap all of the advantages and can exploit the less fortunate because I have the means and pockets to do so.

It is such a shame that businesses need to pay to make sure they operate in accordance with laws and regulations almost as if we were worried about human rights violations, see: anywhere you can people to look the other way.

I've already bashed the taxes = stealing money bullshit in earlier posts and the other thread about socialism. If you care I can repost, or you could read through them, quote me, and debate.

I countered your (Warren's) argument and you didn't refute any of my points, so why would I bother to debate you. You seem more interested in spewing rhetoric and making illogical correlations (Capitalist = Immoral, re: child labor. Shesh) anyway, so knock yourself out.

As a parting point to ponder, let's apply your 'logic' to school grades. In a given school, the same resources are equally available to every student. Why are there A students, and F students? Should we take two grade points from the A students, and give them to the F students so that everyone is a C student? How will this benefit society in the long run?

Good luck finding or making your socialist Utopia.

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[watisthis]

I countered your (Warren's) argument and you didn't refute any of my points, so why would I bother to debate you. You seem more interested in spewing rhetoric and making illogical correlations (Capitalist = Immoral, re: child labor. Shesh) anyway, so knock yourself out.

As a parting point to ponder, let's apply your 'logic' to school grades. In a given school, the same resources are equally available to every student. Why are there A students, and F students? Should we take two grade points from the A students, and give them to the F students so that everyone is a C student? How will this benefit society in the long run?

Good luck finding or making your socialist Utopia.

You presented laws and regulations that exist due to unethical practices, how is that a counter-argument? Why not quote what I said rather than Warren. I have posted plenty none of which you have countered or even debated.

Capitalism drives competition for profit to such an extent that ethical behavior is basically antithetical to it. Any firm that can skirt ethics and/or the law to increase their profit will be rewarded for doing so, and conversely, more ethical competitors are punished. This is a law of the market. Ethical behavior, therefore, has to be imposed politically, and the more the market is allowed to drive society the less ethical it will be.

However, Government intervention is essential and inseparable of capitalism because it keeps the free market free. Unethical behaviors and externalities must be prevented through regulation and enforcement. In theory that’s fine. In practice, private interests exercise immense power over the politicians and the regulators. Capitalist competition drives firms to seek out opportunities for corruption. In most cases, this corruption consists of perfectly legal and routine practices of campaign finance, revolving doors between private and public employment, etc. Even when the regulation process works with maximum possible integrity, wealthy private interests heavily influence how the “ethical” is framed in the first place, putting the interests of shareholders first before workers and the environment. So yes, we need regulation and enforcement, but this is directly undermined by the freedom of the market. Re: your previous post.


Socialist utopia, what are you talking about? Not only is this not socialist, but it's also not even close. It's a fix for a capitalist system because let's remember what socialism is all about...eliminating surplus-value going to the capitalists (owner of the company). This simply doesn't do that, it gives workers a voice in the company, sure, but it doesn't give workers any kind of tangible ownership of the company. The workers in this situation are still producing more value than they are getting paid. (this is the central point in Marx's criticism of capitalism.)

Edit: Responding to your logic in another post

 

[2018OFPP1?2]

What are you talking about? Vehicle registrations are due to unethical behavior? Didn't bother to read anything after that.

You are obviously close minded and fanatical in your beliefs and opinions. Any discussion to the contrary would be futile. Good luck comrade.

 

[watisthis]

As a parting point to ponder, let's apply your 'logic' to school grades. In a given school, the same resources are equally available to every student. Why are there A students, and F students? Should we take two grade points from the A students, and give them to the F students so that everyone is a C student? How will this benefit society in the long run?

In a kind of roundabout way it applies, but it's not a 1:1 correlation: Kids who fall behind go to smaller classes or get special accommodations to help them learn more effectively, kids who don't need to work to get an A and get bored go to more advanced classes that challenge them more (at least in an ideal world version of the school system; there are certainly kids on both extremes who get lost in the shuffle). As for the benefit to society... more educated people means more of a chance of solving really big pressing problems.

But ultimately the big place this comparison falls apart is that your grade points don't translate directly to your ability to buy the necessities of life. If I get an F in school, I may have to go to another class where my educational needs are better suited, or I may have to change schools, but I don't die or even really physically suffer like I do if I'm making minimum wage part-time and need to support myself (or, as is the case so often, a wife and kids).

We like to pretend there's more of a correlation there than there is, but I know a class valedictorian who ended up addicted to heroin and then dead before the 10-year reunion, and I know D students who went to college and turned their life around and now make a good living. And I don't even have to rely on an anecdote to prove this: Penn Jillette has openly stated that he graduated high school "on a plea deal" and then went to clown college; Eminem flunked out of the 9th grade; Mark Wahlberg dropped out at 13 and was caught up in gangs and other crime... the list goes on.

There's also the point that the disparity here is so big that the scale is unfathomable until you do some work to put it into perspective:

Let's say that you won a million dollars in a lottery drawing. That's pretty big, right? Like if I asked you to visualize a million M&Ms you don't even see a million little candies, you probably see some fairly large container like a dump truck that is full of little candies. Similarly, a million dollars is hard to put into scale if you don't contextualize it: for most people this means having enough money to pay off all their debt (most households that are not millionaires have somewhere in the realm of $100k worth of various debts, from student loans to car notes to mortgages), to significantly upgrade your home (a really nice house in most places that are short of a mansion is around $500k), get a really nice car (not a supercar, but something like a BMW 7 series can be had for 1-200k) and have enough money to save up... but for a lot of people it's not instant retirement money either; like if you do the math, if you're 30 and you have a yearly budget of $40,000 then you're going to get 25 years out of it, meaning you're out of cash at 55 and with a quarter-century of no work experience.

Now let's say that you won 10 million dollars. That is 10 life-changing jackpots in one. This you can almost certainly retire with, but only if your spending doesn't get too crazy. This is about where a windfall becomes "life-changing"

Now, let's say you won 100 million dollars. That is 10 sets of the previous 10 life-changing jackpots, or hitting a million-dollar jackpot 100 times over. What can you do with that much money? It turns out quite a lot; for the first bit, if you put $20m in what amounts to a bunch of government bonds and take an annual salary out of the interest of those investments, at a fairly conservative rate of 3% you're getting about 600,000/year which puts you in the top 1% of income-earners immediately.

That still leaves you with 80 million to spend.

Now let's go to a billion dollars. You can set yourself and your 10 closest friends up to get $600k/yr for life, and still have 8 times the last jackpot leftover. You can probably fix some pretty big problems. You can buy an unfathomably large house, pretty much nothing is beyond your price range. Ditto with cars; the only place you might see problems is that your luxury yacht might be a bit too small.

Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates each have more than 100 times that last amount of money that lets them buy an unfathomably large house.

If we go grade point by grade point in this example: In most cases, an F is 60% or below, so let's equate the highest F with the poverty line, which realistically is like $20,000 which gives us about 333 dollars per grade point.

This would mean that Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates would have had to have gotten perfect scores on everything, AND done 299,999,999 (that is, almost three hundred million) times the total amount of work that you could possibly do in the class in extra credit to earn enough grade points to get to the neighborhood of their current net worth at that exchange rate.

 

[watisthis]

What are you talking about? Vehicle registrations are due to unethical behavior? Didn't bother to read anything after that.

You are obviously close minded and fanatical in your beliefs and opinions. Any discussion to the contrary would be futile. Good luck comrade.

"Permits to build factories, permits to run a business" Obviously, I was referring to those, let's use our brains here.

Of course, I would expect nothing less.

 

[watisthis]

Have you read anything I've said. Please, read over my entire body of posts here and then try to say this is about me wanting to amass money, or am out for everyone who is trying to become rich. I've already discussed inheritance and how that affects democracy, again read through my posts as you will observe I am more for the benefit of human values and decency than I am for Bezos to 'earn' another billion off the backs of the disenfranchised.

I was joking, I too use investment vehicles to increase my wealth, however, I pay my fucking taxes on my capital gains under law. If they require me to pay more I will pay me because I'm not a pos looking to make a quick buck through loopholes, offshore LLCs, and any other unethical practice to sidestep my civic duties. I trade forex because not only do I love game theory, but I also don't want to work for someone else relying on their kindness to keep me around when eventually they can get someone else younger for far less, or hell replace a human entirely. Which in cybersecurity may be sooner rather than later.

Edit: Sorry if I come off as an asshole, it's just annoying to have to repeat myself with different verbiage again and again.

 

[2018OFPP1?2]

"Permits to build factories, permits to run a business" Obviously, I was referring to those, let's use our brains here.

Of course, I would expect nothing less.

Plenty of unethical businesses have obtained permits, and continue to operate with those permits. Saying that a permit is a check on unethical business practices is either ignorant, self serving, or just regurgitated rhetoric. Permits are nothing more than another scheme for governments to collect revenue. They do not, and never have, guaranteed an ethical business, or a pleasant consumer experience. The fact that you think it's possible to regulate ethics demonstrates your naivety and reinforces for me, my decision to not read the bulk of your writing.

You should try thinking things through logically instead of just accepting someone's rhetoric as the gospel.

You are entitled to what you earn in life. Nothing more. Stop blaming society for your failures, get off your ass, and get your own. Once you have it, see how you feel about giving it away.

 

[watisthis]

I'm not sure what you mean by the two-way street when it comes to the context of wealth tax and entitlement, please elaborate.

Thanks, I do so as I enjoy my job and my co-workers, while also out of necessity to be able to afford a decent lifestyle in near DC due to inflated costs. Also, it gives me the chance to help others by writing policies that will, hopefully, affect us positively for decades to come.

 

[watisthis]

Plenty of unethical businesses have obtained permits, and continue to operate with those permits. Saying that a permit is a check on unethical business practices is either ignorant, self serving, or just regurgitated rhetoric. Permits are nothing more than another scheme for governments to collect revenue. They do not, and never have, guaranteed an ethical business, or a pleasant consumer experience. The fact that you think it's possible to regulate ethics demonstrates your naivety and reinforces for me, my decision to not read the bulk of your writing.

You should try thinking things through logically instead of just accepting someone's rhetoric as the gospel.

You are entitled to what you earn in life. Nothing more. Stop blaming society for your failures, get off your ass, and get your own. Once you have it, see how you feel about giving it away.

The Great Depression. Black Tuesday. The Mortgage Crisis. This is what happens when you let corporations dictate how things should go. Enron, WorldCom, etc. are all examples of what companies are willing to do to turn a profit - and that's their main goal. The Government's job, technically speaking, is to create order, follow/make laws, and other things to keep people safe and secure. Their job is to make their Country's people functional and can make the Country a good/better place (in theory, of course). Sometimes that doesn't happen as I will explain.

The EPA (a Nixon creation) is a great example, and also happens to be the target of a lot of complaints. To illustrate the issue with a real-world problem: back in the early 1980s, upstate New York was having its beautiful forests decimated by acid rain. The cause of that acid rain was, largely, factories in Ohio and Michigan. So: what could New York State do about that? Nothing. And there are dozens of other examples, both for environmental regs and everything down to the length of a semi-truck trailer (yes, there's a Supreme Court decision on that). And what it all comes down to is: we've tried local regulation, and it doesn't work, so now we're going to try national regulation. And while the national regs don't always work perfectly (depending on your POV), they DO work better than an inconsistent patchwork of state regs.

You literally fail to see the other side of any argument and continue to woefully misrepresent or entirely skip over what I am saying, you are the definition of narrow-minded. I've laid out time and time again how that isn't the case, yet you excuse yourself from even acknowledging it because you obviously have no other argument than 'but I dun worked hard for dis here 5 billion yall are so lazy work hard like I did and everyone one will be me too'

Edit: Your woeful ignorance of the past is incredible. Please, supply me any factual argument supported by said facts like I have done a few posts above and we can stop the back and forth arguments and actually debate what does and doesn't work. Because I know there isn't a one size fits all and I know no candidate elected is going to be 100% for everyone. Hell, I not 100% for any, but we've gotta have someone might as well try to figure out who that is through discourse rather than their dog and pony show media presentations.

Edit 2: What would you do to stimulate the economy while providing equality to the disenfranchised? Farmers, miners, people who are told to shut up and learn to code, lmao.

 

[2018OFPP1?2]

You just keep giving me reasons to be disinterested in what you have to say.

Enron happened in spite of the fact that it was a publicly audited company, audited by one of the formerly big five accounting firms (now big four), with oversight (allegedly) by the Securities Exchange Commission. Two government mandated gates in place to protect stockholders from fraud and prevent what happened from happening. Lot of good that did. So what was the solution? More government regulation that cost businesses more money (created a whole new accounting cottage industry) that will ultimately fail to prevent the same thing from happening again. Just wait.

 

[watisthis]

You just keep giving me reasons to be disinterested in what you have to say.

Enron happened in spite of the fact that it was a publicly audited company, audited by one of the formerly big five accounting firms (now big four), with oversight (allegedly) by the Securities Exchange Commission. Two government mandated gates in place to protect stockholders from fraud and prevent what happened from happening. Lot of good that did. So what was the solution? More government regulation that cost businesses more money (created a whole new accounting cottage industry) that will ultimately fail to prevent the same thing from happening again. Just wait.

Under pressure from shareholders, Enron executives began to rely on unethical accounting practices, including a technique called mark-to-market accounting. Mark-to-market accounting allowed the company to write unrealized future gains from some trading contracts into current income statements, thus giving the illusion of higher current profits. Furthermore, the troubled operations of the company were transferred to so-called SPEs, which are essentially limited partnerships created with outside parties. Although many companies distributed assets to SPEs, Enron abused the practice by using SPEs as dump sites for its troubled assets. Transferring those assets to SPEs meant that they were kept off Enron’s books, making its losses look less severe than they really were. Ironically, some of those SPEs were run by Fastow himself. Throughout these years, Arthur Andersen served not only as Enron’s auditor but also as a consultant for the company.

The severity of the situation began to become apparent in mid-2001 as a number of analysts began to dig into the details of Enron’s publicly released financial statements. An internal investigation was initiated following a memorandum from a company vice president, and soon the SEC was investigating the transactions between Enron and Fastow’s SPEs.

The scandal resulted in a wave of new regulations and legislation designed to increase the accuracy of financial reporting for publicly traded companies. The most important of those measures, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, imposed harsh penalties for destroying, altering, or fabricating financial records. The act also prohibited auditing firms from doing any concurrent consulting business for the same clients.

Lmao, you have the most boomer arguments ever.

 

[watisthis]

Just for example, deregulation, including the repeal of Glass-Steagall, was among the root causes of the Great Recession that struck in 2008. Lets forget that millions lost their homes, and millions more lost their jobs, in that calamitous economic downturn. I'm not for socialism, or Democrats, or Republicans because it doesn't seem to matter. Not a single US President over the past half century has taken any significant step to address America’s growing inequality in wealth and income. Barack Obama was by far the best of them, but he also: named as his top economic advisers many of the same people whose policies in the 90s brought down the economy in the 2000s; prevented the prosecution of the bankers who caused the crash; and failed to question the prevailing bipartisan love affair with Corporate America.

 

[69mach1-395]

I think income tax should be abolished and replaced with a sales tax. Sales tax is a fair and ethical tax. Plus the IRS could go away. People and companies who spend a lot will pay a lot of taxes. I like that system.

I agree with this idea. The more you buy, the more you pay. If you can afford to live high on the hog, you should pay more. If you can't, you don't.
Plus, no more tax forms ;)

 

[Hack]

Just for example, deregulation, including the repeal of Glass-Steagall, was among the root causes of the Great Recession that struck in 2008. Lets forget that millions lost their homes, and millions more lost their jobs, in that calamitous economic downturn. I'm not for socialism, or Democrats, or Republicans because it doesn't seem to matter. Not a single US President over the past half century has taken any significant step to address America’s growing inequality in wealth and income. Barack Obama was by far the best of them, but he also: named as his top economic advisers many of the same people whose policies in the 90s brought down the economy in the 2000s; prevented the prosecution of the bankers who caused the crash; and failed to question the prevailing bipartisan love affair with Corporate America.

The main reason as I understand it is the government passed a law that forced banks to give home loans to people that didn't really qualify for a home loan. Yes there were additional problems and some of those were caused directly by the banks, but those loans should have never been granted.

 

[watisthis]

The main reason as I understand it is the government passed a law that forced banks to give home loans to people that didn't really qualify for a home loan. Yes there were additional problems and some of those were caused directly by the banks, but those loans should have never been granted.

Ok, this is a big one and not an easy one to place blame on just one entity. Yes, there are multiple factors, such as, Congress and President Clinton basically forced lending institutions to issue subprime home loans to people whom were obviously unable to pay the loans back. These loans were "insured" by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The entire collapse began with the bankruptcy of Fannie & Freddie, which started a waterfall effect of lenders and banks going tits up.

However, nobody was innocent in this. People took on loans they should never have taken, and some even took out multiple loans for multiple properties. Banks took that government mandate as carte blanche to make as much money as they can despite knowing what would happen. The Ratings Agencies all but sold their ratings which violates the entire point of their existence. And yes the Government instituted bad policy which allowed this all to happen and encouraged the behavior.

If anything I'd argue that the Banks and the Ratings Agencies are the most culpable. I don't expect Congress or your average Citizen to understand complex financial instruments and their implications but I DO expect our financial experts to use that knowledge for good. But again, that doesn't change what the average person did or what role the government played.


Now more into the repeal of Glass-Steagall, deregulation, and this is a LONG one, I'll try to break it up so that it will be easier to read.

The glass-steagall legislation which was enacted to avoid another Great Depression. Basically it separated investment and commercial banks. So the bank that you have checking account with can't be involved in the business of the bank that handles your stock portfolio etc. This being repealed meant that a lot of banks which would not have been able to invest in securities and such, suddenly could.

Government bonds are considered very stable investments. unfortunately the interest rates had been repeatedly cut so they were no longer appealing to the new investors (banks). At this point companies began bundling mortgages together and selling them to investors. The investor would pay to own the mortgages and the monthly payments made by the homeowners would go to the investor.

Because banks wouldn't, at this time, approve a mortgage loan without proper research to make sure that the recipient of the loan can afford to pay it back. So these mortgage backed securities were doing quite well. But at some point many of the people who could afford to get a mortgage and wanted to already had a mortgage. So banks became ever more lenient with checking on the ability to pay back the loan.

Here I will interject that a lot of banks would give large bonuses to employees based on the amount of a mortgage that they processed. This led to some employees of banks being dishonest and falsifying paperwork so they could get an approval for a larger loan. This meant that poor people were now on the hook for very large mortgage payments.

Eventually banks got to a point that somewhere issuing what was called a "NINA loan." Which is a no income verification and no asset verification. A person with simply walk into a bank, Tell them what job they had and how much money they made and how much they had in their bank account. The bank within check with a financial expert to see if hypothetically someone in that job would be able to have the money they claimed to. this gave a huge opportunity for dishonesty and some people took advantage of that opportunity.

While these mortgages were becoming less valuable because they we're not getting paid back, banks continued to buy up these mortgage backed securities. and selling them to other companies which would then sell them to another company and so on. The reason Banks were still buying these was they were still given a very high rating. There were a lot of tricks that were used to accomplish this.

Eventually companies had purchased mortgage back securities that they couldn't sell and they weren't getting any return on their investment. Because the artificial demand created by these bad mortgages was so high house prices continually rose.

As companies and banks began going out of business and people begin losing their homes the problem quickly became apparent.

What you ended up having was a lot of companies who had invested in something that would do nothing but lose them money. And you had people who had lost their houses after receiving what's called balloon payments for their mortgages. Essentially balloon payments mean that your monthly payment skyrockets. People no longer knew who actually had their mortgage anymore because they had been bought and sold so many times.

Now we had houses that were priced too high that not enough people wanted to buy. And a large amount of the money that had been invested in these home mortgages was lost.

This is glossing over a lot of other shitty financial practices (worldwide) that were going on at the time.

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