discussion how much money you think someone should posess before it become indecent

[lewdcorner1]

I have a degree, but could never get past interviews as I go into complete panic in them. You are completely out of touch with reality with how things are for the average person. I never made more than about $10/hour and now get about $1000/month Social Security. Trade schools are only good for those good with their hands. You are also talking about jobs that most people would never be capable of getting. Since the 1980s things have been getting worse in the US for everyone not rich, and now the US is 100% a Fascist country. I wish I could move to another developed country with sane politics.
And I said I don't even KNOW anyone who makes more than 50K a year - I don't move in those circles.

Social anxiety is a real thing and it must have been very difficult for you. I am sorry to hear it. I have actually worked with people who have struggled with it. The good news is that, at least in the cases I have encountered, it can be overcome. I don't know how old you were when you realized you had it but it is possible, with the right coaching, you could have had a different life. I'm very sorry things turned out the way they did for you.

I'm not saying life is easy. I lost my mom when I was in grade school. I lost my dad not long after that. I have had to take time off work to care for sick relatives. We all have our cross to bear. There are hundreds of biographies of people who had to overcome all kinds of adversity and still achieved greatness. I am reading one right now about the great Stan Musial. No one is promised an easy road in life.

You should never settle for $10 per hour. I think school bus drivers start at $22 per hour. You could sort mail at the local post office and make more than that. Many public school teachers make close to $100,000 these days. Pretty good for a so-called fascist country.

The reason our country works and many others don't is because we reward people who risk it all and our lives are better as a result. Look around your home and you will see items that someone invented and manufactured to make your life better.

Take paper towels as an example. Chances are, if you are like most people, you used a paper towel today. The reason you have paper towels is because someone decided: "Hey, I can get rich manufacturing paper towels." They didn't do it because they were bored or had nothing better to do.

You live in a country that rewards people who invent things like paper towels. They get filthy rich and, in the process, your life and my life become better.

You are looking at wealth like it is a pie, something that can just be divided up. Everyone gets a piece of pie. But where does the pie come from? Who created the pie? Why are some countries unable to create pies for their people and ours can?

 

[MattShizzle]

In civilized countries there isn't such wealth inequality. The best countries have the least, the worst have the most. I don't consider the US a civilized country as there isn't national health care and is the 2nd amendment. Lots of people risk it all and lose everything. Public school teachers make nowhere close to that around here. I also have physical things, like not being able to be on my feet more than about 5 minutes and very terrible coordination, along with tremors - and in recent years anemia and heart failure. Success is mostly a combination of luck and ruthless exploitation of the working class. Capitalism is an inherently unfair system. Should have been scrapped long ago.

 

[Harry180]

For me, personally, it's when I stop over-thinking about spending any

 

[BerryJ]

Post #65: "Economic inequality is a very bad thing"

You missed this part of MattShizzle's post, which I understand as it was the first sentence and you certainly seem to gloss over anything that doesn't match your worldview.

No, I want to make it nobody can get too rich and nobody can get too poor.

That basically says the same thing as me pointing out how high our Gini Coefficient is. Neither say that we should all have identical incomes. For example, I have no idea what you do, but I'm of the strong belief that all teachers should be paid at least double what you are making.

No one said all jobs should pay the same. What is being argued is that all incomes are the same. That is what it means to get rid of economic inequality. In other words, if you make $100,000 and I make zero, we should both get $50,000. It's an absurd proposal but I can understand why it might sound attractive to the person making zero.

Again, you have yet to show anyone in this thread saying that.

There are other people who are arguing that government should redistribute SOME of the money. So, if you make $100,000 and I make zero, maybe you get to keep $75,000 and I get $25,000. You might see a difference but I don't. It just depends on what degree of tyranny you want to impose on people.

I'm one of those people. You just described our current system of taxes. Are we a socialist country? As for degree of tyranny, they're taxes. It's legal for them to be imposed. Since you called them tyranny, I'm leaning towards SovCit, Objectivism, or at a minimum out there Libertarian. Which one of those best describes you?

I'm not saying life is easy.

You keep telling us to just work hard and all will be well. The hardest working mother fuckers in your country are these people. They work far harder than I ever have and it's not particularly close. They do this because they had the bad luck of being born on a different plot of land than I was. They're not billionaires. Hell, you don't even want them to have the basics of human survival.

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You are looking at wealth like it is a pie, something that can just be divided up. Everyone gets a piece of pie. But where does the pie come from? Who created the pie? Why are some countries unable to create pies for their people and ours can?

Stupid analogy, but sure. I own a big ass piece of that pie. Warren Buffett owns a far far larger piece than I do. Both Warren and I think that everyone should have a piece of pie of some size at a bare minimum. Both of us are perfectly willing to have the government take more of our pie than they current do to get there.

You live in a country that rewards people who invent things like paper towels. They get filthy rich and, in the process, your life and my life become better.

Before they (E. Irvin Scott and his brother) get filthy rich, they borrow $65,000 from their father-in-law (you keep picking really shitty examples) to create a company. A company that exploits our vast forests.

The reason our country works and many others don't is because we reward people who risk it all and our lives are better as a result. Look around your home and you will see items that someone invented and manufactured to make your life better.

The reason our country works is because we are a vast, stupidly resource rich country (this is the primary reason), protected by oceans on the east and west, all of which we stole from the original inhabitants. Once we took it and moved what remained of the original inhabitants out of the way, we found out that we had moved them to areas that had natural resources, so we moved them again. We did this in spite of treaties, promises which we made to reduce uprisings by people who we trampled all over. Then we found that that move also was to a resource rich area (more oil!), so we fucked them off out of there as well.


So, SovCit or Objectivist?

 

[HTYYHRK]

The problem with putting a cap on income is that people won't stop earning more than the income cap, they'll spend more on avoiding taxes and then if that fails they'll just earn it somewhere else. So whether or not it's a moral good, which I don't agree with either, as a practical matter it's just a good way to get your top tax payers to leave and pay taxes elsewhere.

 

[User_198630]

it's never enough

 

[MattShizzle]

The problem with putting a cap on income is that people won't stop earning more than the income cap, they'll spend more on avoiding taxes and then if that fails they'll just earn it somewhere else. So whether or not it's a moral good, which I don't agree with either, as a practical matter it's just a good way to get your top tax payers to leave and pay taxes elsewhere.

Make a maximum amount they can take with and any money made in the country is taxed double the rate of what it would otherwise be if they do so.

 

[BerryJ]

So whether or not it's a moral good, which I don't agree with either, as a practical matter it's just a good way to get your top tax payers to leave and pay taxes elsewhere.

Then they get to pay taxes to both the US and their new local government (there are methods to avoid double paying) and the penalties are pretty severe for not paying. So no, this just isn't a thing that happens here. What is a thing is people trying to hide their money in foreign accounts. That's why we need more IRS agents to track this shit down and laws that punish the shit out of people who try to hide money. Unfortunately, we just laid off of a bunch of those agents. It couldn't be because billionaires are running the shop, could it?

They don't really want to leave as the resources that they are exploiting are right here.

 

[HTYYHRK]

Make a maximum amount they can take with and any money made in the country is taxed double the rate of what it would otherwise be if they do so.

Whenever you tax someone, it increases the value of tax avoidance. Not only that, tax avoidance can have its own economy of scale, that is if you push them into an expensive tax avoidance scheme it may allow them to avoid even more tax because the scheme makes it cheaper per dollar once the initial cost is paid (for example creating a tax shelter company). But let's say you remove all itemized deductions and have a tax code that whack-a-moles all the schemes. At that point your richest people, including the people that aren't necessarily making more than the cap now but either might in the future or are concerned that you're going to expand the program once you've driven out everyone making more than the cap, are all going to flee to other countries. In the UK for instance, 16,500 millionaires left in 2024 because of among other tax changes a new very high inheritance tax (incidentally the same year China lost 7,500 millionaires, I wonder how a communist country has so many millionaires while a lot of the population lives in abject poverty ). You can look at Venezuela for a historical example. The US is a little different in that I believe it's the only country that taxes its citizens that live in other countries, but again the more you expensive you make being a citizen the more incentive there is to front the cost to change citizenship (and that's not considering rich people that are either dual citizens or are permanent residents).

That's only what happens in the immediate aftermath. Going back to Venezuela, they started expropriating land and wealth in 1999, so anybody with means fled and no-one, domestic or foreign, was willing to invest in businesses that the government might arbitrarily seize. Between 2013 and 2023 its living standards fell 74%. And this is a state with huge oil resources, it should be the richest country in South America, but these sorts of wealth grab policies always lead to this kind of failure.

Then they get to pay taxes to both the US and their new local government (there are methods to avoid double paying) and the penalties are pretty severe for not paying. So no, this just isn't a thing that happens here. What is a thing is people trying to hide their money in foreign accounts. That's why we need more IRS agents to track this shit down and laws that punish the shit out of people who try to hide money. Unfortunately, we just laid off of a bunch of those agents. It couldn't be because billionaires are running the shop, could it?

They don't really want to leave as the resources that they are exploiting are right here.

The IRS makes more overall from auditing middle income earners than high, but sure, maybe this time all of those extra agents would have gone into auditing high earners. That said, I'm not necessarily arguing that there isn't some increased top marginal tax rate that would not be catastrophic, the question was about seizing all wealth over a certain amount (at least as a government policy, it could be interpreted as a moral question). As for resources, see my point about Venezuela. The US has valuable resources but it's not on magic dirt, it's a rich nation in part because it has a government that enforces property rights and at least avoids egregiously infringing on them (although eminent domain is misused more and more often). Also a lot of US value now is in intellectual property and tech, which has very little tie to physical location, it just cares about government jurisdiction.

 

[Republican Bear]

One can never have enough money as that's how Capitalism works folks.

The top 1% will keep squeezing more and get richer, while the other 99% will keep getting poorer.

It's a big club and you and me are not in it. It's a rigged system and you will never win.

 

[lewdcorner1]

In New York right now they are getting ready to elect a mayor who promises to make everything free. He filled a stadium of his followers and they all chanted:

"TAX THE RICH! TAX THE RICH!"

Meanwhile ... All the so-called "rich" are quietly packing their bags and getting the hell out. According to one poll, up to 25 percent of NYC residents are planning to leave.

My advice to anyone: If you live in a place where huge mobs of people are chanting that they want to harm you, get as far away from that place as you can. It always starts with the chants. It almost always progresses to physical violence and worse.

 

[MattShizzle]

Need to do it nationwide and make it illegal to take much out of the country then. Also make it illegal to do any business in the country for any company that moved out to avoid taxes. Tax rate adjusted for inflation to what it was under the last good Republican president. Dwight Eisenhower - top tax rate 90%. Business seemed to be doing fine in the 1950s...

 

[NovaJack]

Flat amount.
£1.7million for 1 person is enough for a comfortable life from beginning off adulthood to death without the need for compulsory work.

Before it becomes obscene ? 2 times that. Why? to account for the need/want to provide for kid(s).

Example scenario.
A man reaches the age off 18 and inherits £1.7million. That is enough to last him his entire lifetime living like your average middle class White collar worker. ~47 years of work averaging £36k a year, but without the need to actually work. Also having the flat amount available in one go means no mortgage or loans thus less monthly bills.

That young man starts a family. Now he is providing for another adult plus at least 1 child. Thats fine, its still enough, for his lifetime.
However, should he want to give his son/daughter as good a life as he has had he will need another £1.7million for them.

Therefore my answer is somewhere in the region of £3.4 million.


Yearly income amount.
£100,000
That works out over a lifetime as more than the flat amount ..what gives ? Well the difference is your still working thus a lot less free time. However at 100k a year a person could easily still retire early (age 55) whilst aiming for the 1.7million mark to give to their child, or within 22 years (age 40) if they are willing to live a more blue collar lifestyle.

A person earning more than £100k a year, frivolously spending most of it each year to maintain a wasteful/glutinous lifestyle with little to no savings..thats obscene.


Capitalism is the only form of society that has a proven track record off working, unlike others. However unrestricted it results in the issues we have today. Limits must be put in place else massive imbalances will forever exist causing more and more problems.

 

[BerryJ]

In New York right now they are getting ready to elect a mayor who promises to make everything free.

I guess if you keep tossing shit at the wall, eventually you might say something true. You haven't gotten there yet, but maybe one day. Mamdani is not promising to make everything free. He is promising fare-free buses, but not subways. Free child-care for certain ages, but not for all. A free starter basket for newborns. I think that's about it for free shit, but if buses, child-care, and a basket of diapers is "everything", then we could call your statement accurate. He's got some other policies as well. Hell, if you actually cared (you don't, since you just want to blather out incorrect talking points),

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.

He filled a stadium of his followers and they all chanted:

"TAX THE RICH! TAX THE RICH!"

Meanwhile ... All the so-called "rich" are quietly packing their bags and getting the hell out. According to one poll, up to 25 percent of NYC residents are planning to leave.

A shitty poll by a shitty pollster, Victory Insights. That's just not going to happen. If you really believe it, I've got some ideas to put your (and my) money at risk and help pay some LewdCorner bills. I'll happily put up $500. You up for it? Hell, I'll even give you percentage points as 25% is laughable.

My advice to anyone: If you live in a place where huge mobs of people are chanting that they want to harm you, get as far away from that place as you can. It always starts with the chants. It almost always progresses to physical violence and worse.

The proposal is a flat 2% tax on annual income (not wealth) over a million a year. On no, the poor guy making 7 figures will have to pay an extra $20K in taxes. How will he ever survive? It's a tax, not pitchforks nor tar and feathers. You really come across as one of those "

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" that I'm surrounded by.

Whine on you crazy diamond!

 

[lewdcorner1]

Warren Buffett owns a far far larger piece than I do. Both Warren and I think that everyone should have a piece of pie of some size at a bare minimum. Both of us are perfectly willing to have the government take more of our pie than they current do to get there.

There are about 600 billionaires in the U.S. As with any demographic group, there are political differences. You get any group of people, whether they are billionaires or working class, you will get big government liberals and free market capitalists.

Buffett favors more taxes. Carl Icahn moves his assets from New York to Florida to escape confiscatory tax policies. David Tepper did the same. Michael Dell says that entrepreneurs are better at handling money than government. Mark Zuckerberg believes the same.

There are problems that money cannot solve. There are problems that money actually makes worse.

I once lived in a 30-unit apartment building. About 100 people in all. I was the only person in that apartment who had a job.

I came home one day with a truck full of boxes that I intended to move to my apartment. I asked two young men if they would help me and offered to pay them for their time. They just looked at me like: "You .... want us to work?"

I made it my goal to help at least one person. I found a job for one young girl at a shop not far from her home. She showed up for the job three times and then stopped. I went to her home and talked to her and talked to her parents. I finally convinced her to go back to the job. She worked one more day and then quit again.

She was the first person in her family with a job. Her parents didn't work. None of her brothers and sisters worked. She did not have an example in her life of someone laying out their clothes the night before and setting an alarm and actually going to a job in the morning. Most of us have at least one parent who set this example for us. She couldn't handle it.

The people in my apartment aren't evil. They aren't bad people. I wouldn't even call them lazy. They simply have no work ethic. Their ability to work has been destroyed by years and years of government handouts.

Warren Buffett is the Oracle of Omaha. A very smart man. Trust his investment advice. Do not trust his advice on solving poverty.

I saw a film on YouTube that someone made driving in Philadelphia. Miles and miles of inner city blight. You think you are looking at some third world country. Or maybe some town in the Middle East that had just been ravaged by war.

Handing checks to able bodied people who did not earn that money makes their life worse.

 

[BerryJ]

I came home one day with a truck full of boxes that I intended to move to my apartment. I asked two young men if they would help me and offered to pay them for their time. They just looked at me like: "You .... want us to work?"

And then everybody clapped!

The people in my apartment aren't evil. They aren't bad people. I wouldn't even call them lazy. They simply have no work ethic. Their ability to work has been destroyed by years and years of government handouts.

And they're not real, either. For fucks sake, dude, make up better lies.

Here, I'll help you out:

I was standing in line at the grocery store and the lady in front of me was corralling her 12 children, while buying Cognac, veal tenderloin, live lobster, and Kolikof Albino Sturgeon Caviar. Then she whipped out her food stamps to pay for it all and had the bag-boy haul it all out to her welfare Cadillac, blaring rap music all the way out the parking lot.

I loaded up the G-Wagon with fried chicken, watermelon, collards, and grape soda and proceeded to drive into the middle of the hood, Barry Manilow blasting out of my Burmester sound system. When I opened up the back and started passing out food, the locals all got down on bended knee and proclaimed me their savior. This all came to an abrupt halt when I asked a couple of the locals to help me unfold a table to put the food on. When they balked at doing even a smidge of manual labor, I bent them over my knee and gave them a much needed spanking, at which point they said "thank you sir, may I have another?" and a passing Sprinter Van full of white people all clapped!.

Those would be more believable than the rhymes you're spittin'.

 

[MattShizzle]

Entreprenuers only help themselves. They get richer while everyone else gets poorer. They are a blight on society.

 

[lewdcorner1]

Need to do it nationwide and make it illegal to take much out of the country then. Also make it illegal to do any business in the country for any company that moved out to avoid taxes. Tax rate adjusted for inflation to what it was under the last good Republican president. Dwight Eisenhower - top tax rate 90%. Business seemed to be doing fine in the 1950s...

Why stop there? Why stop at confiscating assets and property?

In North Korea, if you try to leave the country, they shoot you. The leader there feeds his enemies to pigs.

Why go half tyrant when you can go full tyrant?

 

[lewdcorner1]

Entrepreneurs only help themselves. They get richer while everyone else gets poorer. They are a blight on society.

Bill Gates spent the last quarter century building AI which will revolutionize science, healthcare, and manufacturing . He has developed the next generation of nuclear reactors which will deliver clean energy to heat our homes. He has developed new ways to get water to the poorest parts of Africa. What have you done to benefit humanity?

Only entrepreneurs are able to produce self driving cars and send rocket ships to Mars. If you work in the private sector, chances are that a entrepreneur provided that job. Poor people can't do these things.

Take some time and talk to an entrepreneur. Go interview someone who put their own money on the line and bought a hardware store or a restaurant. Ask them if they agree with your characterization. One shop owner I know complains that he has to pay his employees and they all demand health care so he has to take care of them before he pays himself. Some months, when his business doesn't do as well, he doesn't get paid at all. I know a guy who owns a liquor store and, when one of his employees does something stupid like selling to a minor, his ass gets dragged before the city council and he gets chewed out. It's not the the glamorous life you think it is. Most entrepreneurs take enormous risks, they don't take a lot of vacation, and they work really really long hours.

By the way, we're not getting poorer. Compare your life today to someone 100 years ago and it's probably better in every way. Most people have a car, a TV, a computer, a cell phone with internet. You can get anywhere in the country in a couple hours.

You have access to better medicine. My mother died of cancer. I'm told that cancer treatments have progressed so much since then that the type of cancer she had is probably treatable today.

Our standard of living over time is going up, not down.

 

[lewdcorner1]

I loaded up the G-Wagon with fried chicken, watermelon, collards, and grape soda and proceeded to drive into the middle of the hood, Barry Manilow blasting out of my Burmester sound system. When I opened up the back and started passing out food, the locals all got down on bended knee and proclaimed me their savior. This all came to an abrupt halt when I asked a couple of the locals to help me unfold a table to put the food on. When they balked at doing even a smidge of manual labor, I bent them over my knee and gave them a much needed spanking, at which point they said "thank you sir, may I have another?" and a passing Sprinter Van full of white people all clapped!.

You may be projecting. No one is bringing up race except you.

Race is not the issue. What is important is human nature. You aren't showing compassion. You are just handing out checks! Giving checks to able bodied adults destroys them from the inside. It destroys initiative. If you want to live in a free society, you have to allow people the freedom to succeed. A free society also implies that you have the freedom to fail.

If you want to be a successful, copy the behavior of other people who are successful. Stephen Covey wrote a bestseller that basically said the same thing. David Ramsey is another author that I can't recommend enough.

Back when you were in school, I'm sure you witnessed highly motivated people, people who studied hard, worked hard, participated in school government, performed in plays, played in orchestra, went out for sports, and postponed things like marriage and children. You also probably witnessed unmotivated losers who sat in the bedroom all day staring at their phones. Which people are destined to have a better path in life?