Walmart doesn’t pay that well and isn’t regarded as a great tech place to work. It’s a good job, but someone who’s really serious about programming wouldn’t work there
Yes the same funds usually are the top ones. There’s one offs like people who made money in 2008 etc. but it’s the same people always beating the market. The industry is really small, I don’t need a false and misleading academic study
they provided study's and links, can you? Seems like you're the one just saying things.
Not only does it make sense from a mean scenario, but it makes sense from a human scenario too. When i see a company like Tesla skyrocket to 700, every day that it posts a 10% gain i think it's at the end of it's rally. Eventually, the firm gets way too hot and pressure to buy cools down. Market cap is just how much people are willing to pay for something * outstanding shares. If suddenly everyone thinks the rally has gone on too long, buying pressure ceeds and thus market cap/ stock price.
I’ve got better things to do, and it’s widely known that finance academia is worthless. The inner workings of the investing world is opaque. That’s why you see people posting logically sounding nonsense
I have a conspiracy theory that there are far more rich people than we are lead to believe, also that most of us are just working to prop them up and keep them rich.
I have a conspiracy theory that Forbes created the rich list
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
OP's conspiracy theory is absolutely true. There is a whole thread of academic research estimating the right tail of the wealth distribution (spoiler: the Fed household finances microdata is garbage).
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.
I guess it depends on where peoples wealth comes from. It’s probably far easier to estimate Zuckerberg and Bezos when you know it’s tied to a publicly traded company than if it’s all private. I have a good friend who is a billionaire that laughs at these lists knowing they know nothing about his money (not a public company), where it comes from, and where it lives.
The Forbes rich list has some criteria such as from their own revenue or share prices. Basically private market generated wealth. There are exceptions and the line gets blurred really quickly, but thats their stated goal.
Pretty simple with public companies. With private companies and current market it really does get messy. I'm thinking about Valve and how much higher it would be priced on public market compared to private... And that can't be only case. So the private market is quite dark place...
Yes, and most people aren't actually trying to be on the rich list. When I was in Monaco people were saying leave the bragging to the Americans. There is no transparency in the markets, thats also a distinctly American half-goal.
> there are far more rich people than we are lead to believe
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).
That contrast of value creation against theft is a false dichotomy. Reframing the latter as "value capture" or "wealth extraction" and treating it separately from value creation gives way to a far more robust analysis.
I agree terms like "value capture" or "wealth extraction" would probably be more descriptive. But note that I only mentioned "things like theft" in the gp, so I think we're really talking about the same sorts of activities.
Theft is only the most extreme and one sided example of what I mean by "capture" or "extraction." The best example (and most common) is salaried employment - many people produce far more value than they are able to capture in the form of a salary because they don't have enough leverage. Value is decoupled from currency even though we far too often use the latter to measure the former (IMO, I'm not an economist).
> 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.
>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).
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.
> The seller is richer by $X but you are richer by something worth $X, so it is really a wash.
It’s NOT a wash though - 2X is a bigger absolute number than the sum of the two pre-trade inputs. Or put another way, if I trade some of my giant stack of hotdogs for some of your giant stack of hot dog buns, we are BOTH better off and value has increased.
No, it is a wash, and so is your scenario. It is not a 2X gain. They both had an X and swapped it with each other.
In you scenario, I am poorer of hotdog buns and you are poorer of hotdogs, but I am richer of hotdogs and you are richer of hotdog buns.
You insinuate, but don't state, that maybe the completed hotdogs are worth more than either of the parts individually (ie. if I had one bun and one dog they would be worth less (together but separated) than if I put the dog into the bun), and maybe that could be true, but it isn't necessary.
> maybe the completed hotdogs are worth more than either of the parts individually
Yes, this was obviously the entire point. You can assume that this is true in any case where people voluntarily agree to trade anything: For each party to the trade, what they receive is worth more to them than what they gave in exchange. If it were merely a wash no one would bother trading. Either party could be wrong about the expected gain in any particular instance—economic calculation is not an exact science—but on the whole across many trades each individual can reasonably expect a net positive value from the trade; i.e. market exchange is not zero-sum. And since both parties benefit, there is a net economic benefit from the trade as a whole.
The point of economics and trade is to create value by allocating goods to their most-valued use. The goods themselves remain the same but the value increases with each trade. It is not correct to look at an exchange of good A for good B and conclude that goods A and B must be of exactly equal value from all perspectives, and that therefore no value has been created in the process. Good-A-with-new-owner has more economic value than Good-A-with-previous-owner, and the same is true for good B.
Going back to the original example, if I'm selling hot dogs for cash then what I want is cash (or something else I can buy with it). I have no use for hot dogs, as such. If for whatever reason I were unable to sell them they would just go to waste. By selling a hot dog I gain some cash and lose one hot dog, which (unsold) is worth much less than the asking price. I might even have to pay to dispose of any extras when they expire. The buyer likewise valued the hot dog more than the cash at the time of purchase or they wouldn't have made the trade. After all, one can't eat money.
>Yes, this was obviously the entire point. You can assume that this is true in any case where people voluntarily agree to trade anything: For each party to the trade, what they receive is worth more to them than what they gave in exchange.
I do not necessarily agree with your comment, but it is irrelevant to my main point.
Even if it were always 100% true that both parties somehow gained value (that could be equated to money), if the differences between those two gained amounts unequal, then the agent-model works just the same ... at some point one (or a few) agents will still end up with all the money!
> …both parties somehow gained value (that could be equated to money)…
Value cannot be equated to money. This is the point you keep missing. Money is a specific good while value is subjective and variable. While you can say that at any given point in time a certain "agent" valued one good more or less than another, based on observed behavior, it makes no sense to try to compare the magnitude of the values placed on a good by two different "agents". Moreover the same agent can value a good more than its price (in money) at one time, and yet value the same amount of money more than an equivalent good at another time; the fact that someone is willing to pay $5 for one hot dog does not imply that they would be willing to pay $10 for two. In general, barring the limited cases where items are more useful as a set than they are individually, the more one has of something (even money) the less one is willing to give to obtain more of the same.
If there were an "agent" that always valued money over every other good, never needed to buy anything to sustain itself, and had an unlimited supply of goods to sell (such as labor over an unlimited time period), perhaps they could end up with all the money. That's a totally unrealistic scenario, of course, but there is a bigger problem: If the total supply of money is held by a single entity then it is no longer a customary means of indirect exchange, and thus no longer money. People would settle on some other means of exchange and the (former) money would become worthless as currency.
I wildly disagree with nearly everything you have written here.
Some notes:
>Value cannot be equated to money. This is the point you keep missing.
Out of curiosity, how do you think trade of any sort works in a capitalist society? In almost any case you can imagine there has been some conversion of money for a trade to be able to take place.
> That's a totally unrealistic scenario, of course, but there is a bigger problem: If the total supply of money is held by a single entity then it is no longer a customary means of indirect exchange, and thus no longer money. People would settle on some other means of exchange and the (former) money would become worthless as currency.
Would the new means of exchange be the "money" then?
On computer simulations, yes, one person ends up with all the money. And of course in the real world that is not the case. It ends up an oligarchy ... up until the "poors" revolt! You will notice that this has happened many, many times throughout history.
That's factually incorrect. It's easy to make a list of rich people specifically saying tax the rich more.
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.
I think we're missing the forest for the trees by focusing on exactly what the tax rates are and how much is "fair".
Money at the top levels is not at all like money for the rest of us. For a middle class citizen, money is about consumption and freedom to do what you want (with enough of it).
At the top end of the distribution, money is no longer about consumption or freedom (since you can never realistically consume as much as they have, and you don't have to work after you've saved like $10M). Money at that level is a proxy for power - a group of oligarchs can basically have the power of a shadow government, but unelected. And the real question to ask is "how much power/leverage do we want an individual (or a group of rich oligarchs) to have in a democracy."
So taxing the rich is not even about spreading the wealth, necessarily - if you redistributed it directly you might get inflation by redirecting investment money into consumption. It's more about limiting the amount of power that a person can accumulate over others.
> It's more about limiting the amount of power that a person can accumulate over others.
Does this not beg the question why not just limit power itself rather than limiting wealth with the target side effect that the wealthy will not easily purchase power as a result?
Why is almost the entire species seemingly addicted to the idea that the power itself is not the problem? You can erect regulations on the corrosive influence of money in politics until the cows come home but as long as the ROI on lobbying is positive, it's a given that's going to be the result.
On the other hand when there's no power to buy nobody buys it by definition. Adjust above extreme observation appropriately in order to justify the minimal possible tolerable conglomeration of power availability in any given system to find whatever tolerable level the reader ends up comfortable with. Or viewed uncharitably, arrive at the conclusion that's exactly what's already happened and the human affliction of slavish devotion to power is near universal and continuously growing and there's no way to escape it short of completely opting out of modern global civilization given the observed distribution of the population constantly seeking to increase it.
One rationale for limited government is that there is a direct, positive correlation between the power ceded to government and the incentive to control/steer that power. By limiting the power of government you reduce the incentive to usurp or corrupt that power.
An extreme example of this would be a dictatorial regime where control of the government becomes a life-or-death concern for warring groups.
I agree, that's what I'm getting at. But instead contrast that idea with the more broadly accepted one that it's wealth that's the problem not power even though the former seems like a much more accurate description than the latter.
Maybe it's just a bug in humanity; control the world with this one weird trick.
I think actually this a valid concern. A billion dollars is a ridiculous level of wealth that no person should need.
But if you implement higher taxes at the to end, past what point do those people just leave, or leave on paper. There is an inflection point where the tax would actually do more harm than good. And nobody knows where it is. I'd like to see us get closer to it though, there is room to raise taxes on the very wealthy.
A bigger problem at that level is loopholes and compliance though.
The tax code is lopsided in favor of the rich, it's not about paying a fair share, it's about the burden of the taxes. The burden of taxes on the non-rich is significantly greater than it is on the rich.
If I make $400K and I only need $75K to live, the burden of my taxes is negligible.
If however I make $80K and I need $75K to live, taxes are an unimaginable burden.
We fix the problem by evening out the burden, forget about loopholes, eliminate all but 2 deductions, dependents and primary residence, that's it.
Because the deductions have been eliminated lower the tax rate for each bracket to the effective tax paid for each bracket, the IRS has this data.
Then end capital gains tax, all income is taxed as earned income.
These changes will give 99+% of the population a tax break, and it will simplify taxes drastically for everyone.
The final step is to add 2 new brackets,
>$5M with a tax of 45%
>$10M with a tax of 69%
The rich won't need to be making decision about if and when to eat, but the burden of taxes will get leveled out.
We'll also have enough money to pay for Universal Healthcare, and probably college tuition for everyone.
Go lookup the charts for income inequality for the U.S. When the GOP tax cuts from Reagan's first term took effect the income inequality gap started in earnest.
> Then end capital gains tax, all income is taxed as earned income.
Wealthy people can keep their money growing inside a corporation essentially forever. It never becomes “income”; instead they just borrow against the assets at exceedingly low rates of interest as well as classifying personal consumption items (like a private jet) as a corporate expense.
It’s possible to keep doing this until death, or even longer.
A surprising number of things wrong with the world today started in the Reagan/Thatcher/etc era.
I agree with the general sentiment of your post (though I disagree that capital and labour should be taxed the same way). I'll also add the following: implement an LVT. It is the most economically “efficient” tax there is, and morally perfect at the same time. Then with the money you collect through LVT you can lower income tax.
You do realize that the percentage of all taxes paid by the top 1% has only increased, not decreased over time?
If you include transfer like EITC, the US tax code is highly progressive and the tax burden on low income earners has only gotten less (e.g. Trump’s doubling of the standard deduction).
I would argue your plan to “fix” the tax code is already flawed if the basis of your changes is wrong.
we should look at the big picture not just the percentages that those people are taxed at the end. Because in many cases the leading question is: How come they earn so much more than every one else? Is it through sheer talent and grit or is there something else going on? Inheritance, structures that benefit those with capital over those who labor, connections with the right people etc. etc. And after analyzing all that coming back to the question whether someone should earn 10.000 as much as another person who works the same hours? Should someone earn billions in a year and then use it for moon shots like going to mars? Is that what the society needs or can afford right now? Maybe. But for as long as there are people who work 40 hours a week and cannot afford a healthy life (e.g. having no trouble coming up with emergency money, dont have to commute 2h just to get to their minimum wage job etc.), there certainly is a structural problem going on. This structural problem can only be solved if - and that's the most important point - wealth is shared more equally. Meaning taxation (and all the structures that lead to income) has to take more from those who earn more and give to those who cannot give more. Well, that's if we want to live in a social society, if not forget what I said.
I think any wealth (not income!) over something like 1M should be confiscated. :) There's no reason to have that much money and there's no way you personally have generated that wealth, most likely you just invested money early enough in something sucessful to extort money from it. This may sound provocating but it's actually quite a sound model, but which would also mean reconstructing what we mean by the economy... No capitalistic ownership (eg investment is at most a loan, you don't get propriety shares in exchange), no for-profit renting, ...
And obviously funnelling all that money and economic capital to some central state isn't gonna go well so levels below and above the state need to be reinforced.
This is a terrible idea put forward by people with no grasp of either economics or history.
First off you can't buy a home in some parts with that kind of money. But that aside, you'd stifle most incentive to innovate, provide jobs, and live in your country. Anyone who thought they might pass your 1M limit will just leave to a country that doesn't do that. No offense, but I've never been interested in living in the US and you'd have to pay me quite a lot to accept a green card. I certainly wouldn't take it if offered freely, because it comes with a major tax liability. There are nicer places in the world by a variety of metrics.
So if you chase away everyone with wealth you'll be left paying 100% of the taxes instead of 60% and with no jobs to pay them with. Good luck with that!
Look to Soviet Russia, Cuba, Venezuela for examples of how that plays out.
> This is a terrible idea put forward by people with no grasp of either economics or history.
Thanks for the compliment. I guess you must know better than Picketty (he doesn't exactly say what i said, but does promote very aggressive taxation of capital, which is the same goal more gently said). Go study for yourselve before insulting right and left. I know i did, i'm reading monthly issues of "le monde diplomatique".
> First off you can't buy a home in some parts with that kind of money.
Perhaps instead of 1M$ you'd prefer if i say "the equivalent of 100K ton of wheat at retail price"? Obviously i'm talking from the perspective of my local living standard which is west-european 500M people city.
> No offense, but I've never been interested in living in the US
None taken, me neither.
> So if you chase away everyone with wealth you'll be left paying 100% of the taxes instead of 60% and with no jobs to pay them with. Good luck with that!
Ok so that's the only argument of your comment. It has been debunked time and time again that for individuals, fleeing a country because of taxes is minimal. Corporations do that. And it can be fought by taxing international transactions (which every sane economy but the EU does anyway). Yes, in the end, it becomes a frontal fight between the financial and industrial establishment and your local economy, which obviously will need some negotiation because they can hurt you, but let it be clear that without them, it would work quite well (and in reverse, in my economy, it would be quite hard to practically be capitalistic). I don't even want to eradicate capitalism, i'd just want to not mainly depend on it for living and tip the balance to a much more reasonable state.
> Look to Soviet Russia, Cuba, Venezuela for examples of how that plays out.
You realize that my arguments were communist-ish? You're not gonna scare me off pointing at these countries! Obviously things went bad because the liberals virtually control the world, so these countries had to fight for everything, which breaks at some point. And obviously i'm not defending dictatorship (and please note i'm not using this strawman of the numereous capitalistic dictatorship against you).
>(he doesn't exactly say what i said, but does promote very aggressive taxation of capital, which is the same goal more gently said).
Well true, he doesn't say exactly what you said, because he doesn't anything like what you're saying. Taxing wealth above the relatively low ceiling of 1M USD at 100% would be ridiculous. He is, though, in favour of a progressive tax system that, crucially, reduces inequality below “tolerable” levels, where an “intolerable level” is a level which results in imbalances of power which undermine or destroy democratic rule and oppress those without wealth.
So his practicable suggestion is a global coordinated effort to tax wealth and reduce inequality, which his utopian suggestion is a trans-national socialist economy with true democratic control over the economy.
How would you reduce wealth inequality without directly or indirectly limiting the maximum amount of wealth? I believe the citation of Picketty is appropriate given that. I believe that the main solution is indeed limiting indirectly, but that there should additionally be a hard cap on the wealth an individual is able to control. 1M, 100M, i could've said any number, it's not the point (i said 1M because that's probably a level above which your lifestyle doesn't meaningfully improve, you're just having more luxuous luxury). One deep problem with current capitalism imho is the implicit goal of unending growth. Putting a hard cap would break that down. It's the same thing for corporation: they always want/need to get larger. It's not useful for anybody but the owners and actually it creates wrong incentives: optimizing for relative efficiency (result/resources) with no regard for constants instead of minimizing absolute resources for a given fixed production goal.
Also i'm not really sure what's so "ridiculous" about it. I'm not saying the next president of random country should do that. But after sufficient transitioning, in a state of the economy where we have "tolerable" inquality, we should lock it with a hard cap.
To make it even clearer, i believe most "things" should have a cap on how much you're able to posess (perhaps with exceptional derogations, or additional taxation): the number of houses, cars, land, gas, plane travels, eletronics, clothes. For most people it wouldn't be a constraint as the cap would be on the level at which you can realisticaly use it personally, but i think achieving that would prove a deep shift in mentality.
> Thanks for the compliment. I guess you must know better than Picketty (he doesn't exactly say what i said
Yes, he didn't say anything remotely like you said. It's disingenuous to cite Picketty as if he would support your position.
> has been debunked time and time again that for individuals, fleeing a country because of taxes is minimal.
Because the difference in taxation is minimal. I used to live in Panama, I've personally meet people who fled tax rates in their home country. The low taxes was also my favorite thing about living in Panama. Personal anecdotes aside, what you're proposing is drastic enough that the emigration won't be minimal, it will be a mass exodus of the wealthy - you know the people paying for 40% of the services you benefit from.
> You realize that my arguments were communist-ish? You're not gonna scare me off pointing at these countries! Obviously things went bad because the liberals virtually control the world, so these countries had to fight for everything, which breaks at some point.
I don't know where to start with that without violating site guidelines and being uncivil to your intellect. Actually are you trolling me? I have trouble believing you could be serious right now.
There's a lot of bigger reasons communism failed. Your proposal would fail for much the same reasons. This comment of yours is so ignorant of history it is mind boggling.
You are quick to insult people's intellect while spouting western propaganda.
People love to trot out the USSR as a failure, ignoring that a major part of that failure was due to Perestroika and Gorbachev.
As for Cuba, the US has waged terrorist campaign against them for 70ish years. Venezuela has had to deal with US interference and attempted coups as well.
You can't talk about communist/socialist societies and completely ignore the external forces acting against them.
If you believe communism works, how is that not an indictment of your intellect after a century of examples to the contrary - and not just a few, there had been a 100% failure rate. The only communist counties they did well essentially embraced capitalism. Either you are totally ignorant of history and arguing out of your depth or you are probably not that bright.
You didn't even address what I said, and instead resorted back to black and white thinking. All while telling me I am the stupid one. Okay.
P.S. Cuba and Vietnam are still around and still socialist.
Edit: Actually, looking at all your arguments here, you just scream about how socialism doesn't work and if you disagree then you're dumb. Get better, please.
I visited Cuba recently. It's improving now that they're embracing capitalism, partially.
But I still saw people plowing fields with oxen. I've seen very poor people in developing countries, but I haven't seen that first hand. The level of poverty in Cuba is pretty bad still.
You are so educated, surely you can provide a short summary explaining your views.
>But I still saw people plowing fields with oxen. I've seen very poor people in developing countries, but I haven't seen that first hand. The level of poverty in Cuba is pretty bad still.
Do you think that has anything to do with the US embargo on Cuba? (Y'know, one of those external forces I was talking about originally).
Things went bad in Soviet Russia because liberals virtually control the world? Baloney. Liberals controlling the non-communist world didn't make Soviet central planning less able than capitalism to deliver goods. It didn't make Soviet workers less motivated than capitalist workers.
Jobs don't need to be "created". Either there's stuff to do for people to live correctly or there isn't. If there is, try to find people who'd like to do it. If nobody wants, either people don't really need it, or it's a chore and organize it fairly and locally (division of labour makes no sense for non-qualified chores, it's just a byproduct of inquality: i'm not taking out my neighboors trash, what we could do tho is mutualize our chores). Then distribute the result of this work fairly. Everything else than life-support can be done without too much constraints, but i strongly believe that even that won't "naturally" be too much capitalistic.
Rich != Wealthy. "Rich" tends to refer to people who are generating lots of cash, oftentimes through labor (like doctors or lawyers or athletes). "Wealthy" tends to refer to people who own lots of assets and generate cash through asset appreciation/sales and real property.
Wealthy people will push for income taxes while trying to eliminate capital gains and inheritance taxes.
This conversation came up years ago when Bill Gates Sr tried to push for income taxes in Washington state and critics pointed out that it would not affect wealthy people.
yes, this is why people calling states with no income tax as a "regressive" tax structure seems like a psyop.
Income tax taxes people who work for a living. Property + capital gains tax both tax assets appreciation and rent seekers (unless the investment is a high risk venture into a startup or something ambitious).
States without income taxes usually rely on sales or excise taxes. In a “high tax” state like New York, poor people don’t pay income tax nor sales tax on food or clothing. (A significant expense) Usually high tax pressure is from property tax.
In a state like South Carolina, you have income tax, but property taxes are very low. They make up for that by taxing food, which results in higher taxation for poor and elderly people.
I didn't downvote, but the comment did confuse me as it's an oddly specific complaint.
If indeed there are lots of very wealthy people who are calling for higher income taxes on high earners (and I personally didn't think that was something so common as to be a stereotype) then that's hardly the worst thing they're doing.
It comes across as someone who really doesn't like taxes, probably because they've listened to too much propaganda generated by very wealthy people who have a vested interest in taxes being seen as a universally bad thing.
Bill is calling for higher capital gains and inheritance taxes, so not income taxes anyway.
The ‘Millionaires for Humanity’ don’t specify what taxes they’d like to see raised, but they emphasize they want it on themselves.
And from the third article:
> Several members, including Molly Munger, the daughter of Charlie Munger, the longtime vice-chairman of Warren Buffett’s firm, Berkshire Hathaway, have spoken in favor of a wealth tax.
At least two of the articles specifically mention increasing non-income taxes to tax wealth specifically. It seems likely the third one does too, since it's specifically about inherited wealth, but I didn't see a specific reference either way at a glance.
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...
I'll copy my answer from above since I think it's an important point and relates to your question:
"Money at the top levels is not at all like money for the rest of us. For a middle class citizen, money is about consumption and freedom to do what you want (with enough of it).
At the top end of the distribution, money is no longer about consumption or freedom (since you can never realistically consume as much as they have, and you don't have to work after you've saved like $10M). Money at that level is a proxy for power - a group of oligarchs can basically have the power of a shadow government, but unelected. And the real question to ask is "how much power/leverage do we want an individual (or a group of rich oligarchs) to have in a democracy."
So taxing the rich is not even about spreading the wealth, necessarily - if you redistributed it directly you might get inflation by redirecting investment money into consumption. It's more about limiting the amount of power that a person can accumulate over others."
If you take away rich people's money, other kinds of "insiders" will still pull the levers to enrich themselves and benefit their cronies at the expense of the public well-being.
The regulatory state, even if democratic, is fundamentally self-disregulating (as opposed to self-regulating).
Anecdotal... my peers (upper middle-class in the US) generally realize the taxes they pay fund all the stuff we rely upon to stay upper middle-class. Good public schools, roads, etc. We just want the rich to pay their fair share too.
Or, if you're a jaded cynic, the rich are mostly just greedy sociopaths. They want to minimize their own tax burden and give zero fucks about the betterment of society. They got theirs, screw everybody else.
When I lived in the US, the vast majority of my taxes went to the federal government and didn't come back in local benefits like schools and roads.
(Sure, federal money comes back to universities in the form of research grants which pay for foreign PhD students to work in bullshit paper mills. I've seen that firsthand. The wastage of federal money is near 100%.)
Separately, I've known lots of rich people. Of course, they are just like other people. They are not all greedy sociopaths. Grow up.
~$60 billion/year of federal funds goes to transportation.
~$1,000 billion/year goes to health care.
~100 billion/year goes to education.
The money we pay in federal taxes (whether it be income or other taxes) doesn't just vanish into the ether, it comes back via various government programs.
Yet our transportation infrastructure is decaying; our healthcare is among the worst in the world--the governments pays AND we pay out of pocket AND it still sucks; and our education sucks.
~$60 billion/year of federal funds goes to transportation.
~$1,000 billion/year goes to health care.
~100 billion/year goes to education.
Regardless of any specific programs I did or didn't list above, the money we pay in federal taxes doesn't just vanish into the ether, it comes back via various government programs.
True, it is does not vanish. However, the stewardship is out of the hands of the labor that begot it. There’s a reason We have the military industrial complex, cushy public-sector union jobs, and DC/East Virginia as one of the wealthiest regions of the country. It isn’t because these people are sweating blood and tears trying to find good opportunities where they can carefully deploy the taxes taken out of the tip jar.
> Roads and schools is always a cop out because that’s typically funded through property taxes
A significant share of road and school funding comes from the federal government, which doesn’t levy property taxes. Another significant chunk usually comes from the State, which in many states does not rely on property taxes.
100% true. bill hwang is a recent example he was on paper >$20 billion. though levered to the gills and it blew up. But there are a lot more examples that aren't big headlines.
I've lived in Fort Lauderdale which is sometimes called the world's yachting capitol. After seeing my first boat show I was actually kind of shocked by the number of people in the "own a large yacht" wealth bracket.
Not sure about the first sentence, but how is "most of us are just working to prop them up and keep them rich" a conspiracy theory? Isn't that the whole basis of capitalism? I am asking honestly. The social order being a mostly immutable pyramid has always been the natural model of how things work in my mind.
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 mean fundamentally, accumulating capital would be pretty pointless if not for legions of poor(er) people willing to do whatever the owner of the capital wants them to.
One of the standard anti-capitalist arguments for redistributing wealth is that the super-wealthy do not, in fact, use their wealth to have others at their beck and call to an extent even remotely proportional to how much better off they are. The usual framing is that less wealthy people spend far more of their money on goods and services, therefore we're better off if they have the money instead of the super-wealthy, but of course it's the same thing really.
At the same time, the natural flow of capital is upward. Without government intervention you end up back at feudalism as a very small percentage of the population controls effectively all of the wealth. The way to combat this is progressive taxation and government spending on social programs and infrastructure.
In Australia they appear to be voting in favour of continued bashing.
I think there's some kind of analogy to the Dunning-Kruger effect where people are deluded that they are in fact in the group of people that will be advantaged by lowering corporate tax rates, for example.
It's not really a conspiracy. You just need to know the right people intimately.
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.
I just don’t buy the wealth distribution that they are showing us. I don’t think the government even knows the true wealth distribution. I think it’s also partly political, they can’t go, “hey! Look how many people have 100 million!”
Sure. You know those police officers and courts of law and militaries you pay for? Those are the guys whose job it is to keep you from grabbing things from rich people.
US government trying to claw back the money they printed. It’s too late, everyone who was holding assets will lord over the day job having hardworking Americans that weren’t so lucky.
Java is miserable to write. You don’t realize this until you work with other languages. It was literally built with guardrails to keep enterprise coders from getting too creative
Yes lets rewrite everything Ruby on Rails and CoffeScript, it is just so much more productive and creative! At least this was the opinion on HN a few years ago. Now of course other tools and languages are fashionable. And nothing against Ruby or CoffeScript per se, but the demands of an enterprise where software lives for decades is just different than for a startup which rewrite the whole stack every six months.
Creativity and cleverness is a double-edged sword, which is exactly what Dijkstra is talking about.
Compare writing Java professionally with writing Kotlin professionally. It's like night and day. Same projects, same VM, all that's different is the language.
Distaste for Java isn't elitism or arrogance, it's just that the language is so damn painful to write.
If you start your career with Java (as I did), dipping your toe into another[0] language for the first time feels like Neo being ejected from the matrix and waking up to reality.
You realize your eyes are finally open, you're awake, and you can see that all that pain was just what Java saddles you with, and wasn't "the way programming is done (TM)".
[0] depends on which language, of course. Java to C# isn't a big jump.
I started working in C++, moved to Java, used several other languages commercially (Python, JS, PHP, Groovy, Kotlin), and about dozen other languages for personal projects including the hip ones like Clojure, Prolog, Ruby.
My first programming languages were C64 BASIC and Turbo Pascal. I've written some Ada and SML.
I have worked in Java shops my entire career (Travelocity, Orbitz, Expedia, Southwest, Bank of America) and have lots of pain points. In these cases Java is used to prop up a web server and typically with Spring.
Pain points:
* Stack traces seem to run to 500+ lines and nobody reads them.
* The processes, release management, and integration of code in a Java environment is glacial slow and obtuse featuring very low automation and many large teams of dev ops. The very idea continuous deployment is absent. Code releases occur at regular intervals quarterly or monthly if you are super fast and it feels like moving a continent. All of that slowness and super man power also applies to everything else not written in Java like riding on the back of a retardant elephant.
* Java applications running enterprise web servers are monolith beasts like the Great Wall of China wrapping the Pacific. Refactoring in those applications feels like inventing a new language while sinking in quicksand. Writing a JavaScript application in a massive MVC framework feels like that too but Java is orders of magnitude worse.
* What I really don’t understand is that Java is such a fast language but large enterprise web server applications written in Java always feel so slow in user experience in production. It just feels like something from the late 90s. That slow becomes the baseline experience to internal development by which all user experience ultimately suffers. There is no reason pages from these servers should take 5-20 seconds to fully load in the browser even though the page is a light smattering of static text with sprinkles of CSS and JS. I have an application in TypeScript that emulates the front half of an operating system and it fully loads in the browser in 0.3-0.8 seconds (averaging around 0.65 seconds).
> What I really don’t understand is that Java is such a fast language but large enterprise web server applications written in Java always feel so slow in user experience in production. It just feels like something from the late 90s.
My personal suspicion is that the programming style used in Java (OOP and patterns) together with the fact that everything is a reference, and everything is implemented in Java itself way down, kills the cache locality, which is the thing that makes modern computers fast.
Yes, you can write fast Java programs, if you keep abstractions to a minimum, use arrays rather than objects when allocating, and take advantage of the JIT compiler. But these are more lab conditions (which are great for benchmarks) rather than the real world conditions. I think finally having a proper record type in Java will help to fix this.
Shitty, poorly-run corporate behemoths (a) are shitty and poorly-run and (b) use Java, because it's an industry standard. You are making the error of thinking that the latter consequence causes the former.
> Shitty, poorly-run corporate behemoths (a) are shitty and poorly-run and (b) use Java, because it's an industry standard. You are making the error of thinking that the latter consequence causes the former.
Other programming languages make it "more inconvenient" to apply such managament/programming practices.
> Stack traces seem to run to 500+ lines and nobody reads them
ok, you have a point here :) when you have libraries for filtering stacktraces you know something is wrong
> the processes, release management, and integration of code in a Java environment is glacial slow and obtuse featuring very low automation and many large teams of dev ops. The very idea continuous deployment is absent
that is the exact opposite of my experience - maven infrastructure beats anything C++ or Python have, and in every Java project I worked on we had CI (mostly BitBucket+Jenkins but I've also seen Apache Continuum and Team City and we had CI even back in svn/cvs era).
> large enterprise web server applications written in Java always feel so slow in user experience in production
Also not my experience, I've worked on an intranet app for warehouses that used jboss 4, jbpm 3 and plsql at the backend and a very small custom c# client running on remote Windows CE terminals. We had transactional and persistent business processes drawn as graphs invoking PL/SQL on the server, it was pretty nice. And the full roundtrip between pressing a key on a remote terminal and rendering the received response was under 150 ms. That's for all the layers:
- c# client -> intranet -> SOAP on jboss -> EJB3 -> jbpm -> hibernate -> JDBC -> PL/SQL and back
And it was around 2008 - in the age of spinning disks :) Certainly it was good enough for us and actually faster than previous simple code that we were replacing (remotes telnetted to a C++ text-only server that connected to the same business logic in PL/SQL). ORM cache wins covered all the performance loses caused by additional abstraction layers.
We didn't use html/js/front-end templating engines tho, at the time most people used JSF or similar and it sucked. We had a custom XML protocol that was rendered by the C# client and it was very fast.
Of course it wasn't that demanding - under 500 users all on the same local network. But without any thought spent on optimization (other than enabling 2nd level cache in hibernate) it was a pretty good result.
> There is no reason pages from these servers should take 5-20 seconds to fully load in the browser even though the page is a light smattering of static text with sprinkles of CSS and JS.
well yeah, something's wrong. I bet on data layer or passing each request through 20 microservices on different continents (this is the most recent fashion in server-side programming and it sucks).
Haven't upgraded Java since version 9, so take this with a cube of salt (my suspicion is that many hardcore Java haters were created by Java 5, 6 etc).. but my general issue is the readability. The idioms used to perform 'standard' things are verbose. The worst for me is that it's impossible to catch exceptions in lambdas. The absence of named or optional parameters.
Mind you, I'm only saying that after having spent 2 years in Kotlin. The Stockholm syndrom is real: you don't realize how much better things can be from the inside. Programming has become enjoyable again, my work 'feels' cleaner, more readable. Null safety makes reasoning about code that much easier. I can switch to functional programming when it's convenient. I keep all the tooling from Java, including the amazing IntelliJ IDE.
At the end of the day, choices are a matter of arbitration. Do I want the speed of C, the ecosystem and resource pool of Java, the locality / mathematical guarantees of functional languages, and the IntelliJ IDE? Sure. But they don't exist in one language.
So when I'm programming embedded, it's C. When I'm creating a complex data treatment pipeline for machine learning, it's Scala. And when I'm making a CRUD application that will have to support a team of 15 developers hacking on it for a decade, I'll go with Kotlin.
>The worst for me is that it's impossible to catch exceptions in lambdas.
I don't take issue with your comment overall, but this is not true. You can catch exceptions within lambdas, and you can define functional interfaces that declare that they throw checked exceptions.
You're right. It's been a while and I forgot the exact issue. I looked it up on StackOverflow, to refresh my memory [1]. It is indeed possible to thow exceptions within a lambda.
My issue is that for something as everyday as "throwing exceptions", you have to define a separate interface, or catch it inside the lambda. The first option being the Evil Verbosity everyone is on about, the second essentially rendering the exception useless as an instrument.
Java, in my experience of having to puzzle out a couple of large codebases in my career (that is, not having been a serious developer) is what happens when a couple of idioms run amok.
Inversion of control, interfaces, and OO make wandering a codebase feel like being lost in a bureaucracy.
Then we het to the issue of projects being coupled to IDEs. "Oh, this is an Eclipse project." "Oh, this is IntelliJ".
All of that chrome and tailfin leads to projects that take longer to boot than the OS.
The disdain for Java may be less about the language per se than the attendant mindset.
Maven and gradle projects can depend on each other, are producing the same kind of artifacts and deploying them to the same repositories. And both can be used in any IDE you like.
And ant is prehistory.
In C++ they don't even have Maven equivalent (only thousands build systems but no universal way of naming/deploying/running projects or specifying dependencies).
In Python there's several maven-like systems that are incompatible and don't have the concept of universal project identifier or repositories.
In JS and Rust they basically copied the Maven system and changed it a little.
Clojure uses Maven wrappers with lispy syntax for pom files.
I struggle to find a language where this is solved better than in Java.
All the problems here are solved till Java 15 in every iteration. A lot of opinion in Java is based on comparing old versions of Java with latest version of other languages
Bear in mind that I've written almost no Java since 8, so this may well be out-of-date.
With that in mind, though, the biggest gripe I have, by far, is its needless verbosity. It always feels like I need a huge amount of boilerplate and repeated keystrokes to get things done. My fingers literally get more sore writing Java than anything other language.
Lack of extension methods is probably my next complaint, because you end up fumbling about writing a lot of code to address what should be
Lack of null-safety would be the next one, too. I'd say around 90% of my runtime errors are due to improper null handling, so this would cut down a huge source of errors.
On par would be painful deployment (and to a degree, package management). For some reason Java always felt like it needed an industrial-size team to get anything actually up and running, and needed more hardware than any other language. That might not be fair, but I think it's definitely fair to say that deployment is not Java's strong point.
> With that in mind, though, the biggest gripe I have, by far, is its needless verbosity. It always feels like I need a huge amount of boilerplate and repeated keystrokes to get things done.
This is my biggest complaint about OOP development in general and languages like Java and C# that are heavily invested in OOP paradigms are miserable for me as a result.
It doesn't, in fact; but configuring a Java application to run well with minimal resources is a problem that isn't a programming problem, it requires a separate skillset. So you end up with build specialists, and deployment specialists, which in turn results in long deployment timetables.
I can’t speak to the actual act of Java development, but I can speak to Java applications from a sysadmin perspective (15 yr Sr. QA Engineer to a 3 yr Linux admin (don’t ask)) — I’ve got no real beef with Java from the development side, but maintaining some of those stacks in production is pure pain.
Huh? Java is probably the least demanding stack from the sysadmin side - no big chains of library dependencies, no docker, strong backwards compatibility that means you can fearlessly upgrade the language. All you have to do is keep an up-to-date JVM installed on your servers and deploy single-file fat JARs to them.
The keystore situation is indeed poor. For several years now, it has been possible to do more key management in-app, so you don't need to manage keystores (i have written programs which pull standard PEM-encoded keys from environment variables). But the practice of using a JKS keystore is so ingrained that it's very rare to make use of that.
No language is immune to slow or memory-hungry code. The JVM is probably the easiest runtime to monitor/instrument/profile (and it's not like having no runtime makes that any easier, quite the opposite), and has probably the most tuneable GC going.
I guess enabling your users to do that might be work for a sysadmin, but that's more a reflection of those users having higher expectations for Java than for other runtimes - providing your users with the same capability in other stacks is never easier than Java, and often significantly harder.
I know this is just flamebait, but I write a lot of Rust, Python, Java, C++, Ruby, Typescript, etc. Java is fantastic to write in. What guardrails are you talking about?
My guess? Lack of first class functions and macros. Maybe higher kinded types.
The first one is annoying, not really something a professional software developer would care about for more than 10 minutes while creating a new product.
Macros can be major footguns, they're something that can only be realistically used efficiently and safely in large code bases by actual senior engineers. So the jury's still out how much they really increase productivity for the averaged developer.
Higher kinded types seem great, but it seems that they're not easy to implement and they also slow compilation down a bunch (someone please correct me on this). These seems hard to bolt on to an existing language, so Java can't be faulted much.
Java itself may lack macros, but by the time you get in reflection and libraries with XML and compile-time magic to work around the lack of macros and the whole thing is a giant plate of spaghetti, maybe macros were no' so bad after all.
Those would've been my guesses too, but Java's had first class functions in the form of anonymous classes since 1.1, and as the other commenter mentioned reflection takes care of a lot of macro use cases.
Problem is not with programming languages. It is with lack of programming principles. For eg. Consistency, Readability, Maintainability. Software requirements keep changing with time & so if we do not do continuous refactoring, we see a decay. Also in enterprises team ownership keeps changing & we miss the accountability. This erodes software. People need to give a damn to maintain software.
That's like a mason or an engineer complaining that the bricks are too boring and predictable :)
There's a place for "artistic licence languages" like Ruby or Clojure and I like them for experimenting, but when you want to build a house you want the bricks to be boring.
I think those guardrails often help with the humility the article discusses - they reduce cognitive load, and let you focus on the problem at hand, at the expense of expressing total creativity. It's a tacit admission that we aren't all knowing, and often need help from our tools to save us from ourselves.
I find it's just the opposite - when working in a Java codebase you can't focus on the actual problem because you have to spend so much of your time reading past the needless verbosity - or, often, debugging the crazy reflection framework that your organization has introduced because that verbosity became intolerable.
I find that the language itself is quite good, simple to use and has some nice features and performance... but the issues you mention are also there, however they're part of the frameworks and individual codebases.
Did the Java community get over their love of code generation already? Last time I used it, I'd debug the crazy 1000's of computer generated lines that people changed here and there.
That's never been my experience in over 10 years of JVM work - people mainly use reflection or bytecode manipulation (aspectj) to do the kind of things you'd use code generation for. The only exception is thrift/protobuf and that's dumb serialization code that hopefully no-one's editing.
Oh, the last time I've made any extensive use of Java was more than 10 years ago. I've met an off the shelf code generation based platform on the meantime, but luckily it was deemed too expensive so I didn't need to even finish a technical evaluation (much less use the monstrosity).
Anyway, that is great news. That unexplainable love for code generation was one of the things holding the language back. It's always good to see things improve.
I made a post about this yesterday and got torn apart for it. It’s the hard working professional class that suffers from high taxes. The people who do everything right. The rich evade
