I would love to embrace libertarianism (is that a word?) but people are humanity’s worst enemy because evolution gave us what we needed to survive but didn’t teach us how to live. So maybe what you describe is close.
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Of course, you have! He wouldn’t buy it otherwise.
The only way you sell something without creating value for the customer is by forcing him to make the purchase, or by fraudulent means.
Man A doesn’t want health insurance, so you threaten him with penalties if he doesn’t purchase it. He purchases health insurance. You have not created value for that man; you have robbed him.
Man A wants a power rack. You agree to sell him one. You receive his money, and you send him a stack of kiddie porn.
I never thought you would. And I’m not disparaging how or why you are earning your money. I have nothing against being wealthy or wanting to be wealthy.
It means that if we say that if people, or some/enough people, put value into something and therefore it whatever it is has some validity to exist then feelings matter. Subjectivity matters. I don’t have an issue with that as humans have emotions and we should accept that. But, if we apply that reasoning to taxes, for example, then what is fair or what is right is at the mercy of those same feelings. This means that if billionaires have to pay more than their “fair” share it’s not actually unfair if enough people decide that it is fair.
Which brings me back to the point of perceived value and actual cost. We can make economic decisions based on feelings, one way or the other, but there is an actual cost good or bad, that has to be paid at some point.
This is why those military bases won’t close. It wouldn’t be fair to all of the people whose livelihoods depend upon them. Whether or not it’s right to close some is irrelevant.
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But at what cost? You have the customer’s perceived value that has to be weighed against the cost (some immeasurable, like the damage to the child’s emotional and metal state) to actually give the “product” a “real” value.
That has nothing to with a customer deriving value from his purchase.
The difference is that individuals are determining the value of x and then using their own resources to obtain that value. Whereas taxation is the collective deciding what value centralized government should provide to individuals and then forcibly removing resources from a specific portion of society to provide it.
These are two very different things. One transaction is mutually beneficial and agreed upon free of coercion. The other is obviously not mutually agreed upon and, ignoring the social contract (which I happen to believe in) is an example of coercion. Further, the people whose resources are taken more so than others have very little say into how/what those resources are used for, which imo is also an ethics issue.
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Read Nudge by Thaler… just don’t quite take it as gospel without reading Khaneman and Tversky first?
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The only real problem I have with this is that ethics is also quite subjective as well.
How we measure value needs to have ethical inputs. Perceived value does not equal value. Not that perceived value is unimportant or irrelevant. Just that it can’t be the only measure for everything. I think, since this thread is about taxes, that we need to think ethically but not when it comes to deciding what’s fair but what’s right.
No, it doesn’t mean that. Taxes are not fair. Full stop. You can argue that they’re necessary. You can argue that there’s no better alternative. Taxes are not fair. They are not a voluntary transaction. They do not necessarily create value for their payers.
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But the collective is made up of individuals who arrive at their judgments the same way as when making one on one transactions. It sounds like I’m criticizing the wealthy but I’m criticizing the middle and working classes. How they determine value and ultimately spend their limited resources is part of the reason why they complain so much.
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Incorrect. People, the majority or the minority if it has the power, decide what is fair. Fair is a human idea. Walk through bear country alone; if you were to ask the bear that is about to eat you if he thinks it’s unfair it would be just as silly as the bear asking you if it’s fair that you have a gun and are about to shoot him.
A significant portion of the collective arrives at “I need________” or “I want _____” knowing full well they aren’t the ones that will pay for it.
In a voluntary one-to-one or one-to-many transaction where each party has to provide the others with some form of value or compensation, the value judgment is individual.
In other words, the majority of the collective use force to coerce a portion of the same collective into paying for what the majority judges to be necessary, which is not often the case.
We talk about this at work quite a bit. What people will pay for with their company AMEX is often out of touch with what an individual would do if it was their own money. It’s a similar concept.
I didn’t think you were criticizing anyone. I just disagree with the assertions you’ve made.
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It seems the only thing you believe should be considered is the ability of one to take from another. Nice.
Edit: You did, however, do a good job of pointing out how silly it is to discuss fairness and taxation. We agree.
I’ll see if I can find a way to sleep at night.
In any event, yeah, it is massaging, because the GP is being paid for providing investment management services, and service providers treat such income (I get paid for service I provide) as wages and salaries. It really isn’t a return on capital, but they treat it as such in order to benefit from the lower rate. Classic loophole.
Oh goodie, bumper sticker talk in lieu of the merits. My point was originally that Trump wasn’t following through on a campaign promise, but on the merits, the loophole doesn’t need to exist - manage investments, fine, no problem, but treat it like income that others providing the service of management receive.
Non-sequitur. You made the point that naturally with a tax cut the benefits accrue to those who pay in a larger percentage of income, on which there is no disagreement. But other choices that aren’t strictly rate reductions are what I’m referring to, and the fact that the tax code isn’t uniform is both self-evident and irrelevant. It being not uniform, what’s at issue are the new choices and who they are designed to reward.
The moderator then asked those in attendance whether they were planning to increase their business investment if the tax bill became law. The CEOs in attendance did not seem to be on the same wavelength as Cohn.
While there was a smattering of raised hands in the auditorium, it was clearly not as many as Cohn would have liked.
“Why aren’t the other hands up?” Cohn asked before moving on to another question.
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This is unequivocally wrong.
They receive capital gains from the investments, the same gains LPs get, from the same investments. These gains are typically LTCGs. This is irrefutable fact.
The character of that income is based on the circumstances of the transactions. Because they also receive higher rates of dividends, interest, OI, royalties portfolio and non-portfolio expenses as well. None of their character is changed either. Irrefutable fact as well.
The issue is, again: the increase in allocation of these gains (sans additional capital contribution) is de facto salary. That is why we should NOW change the character. This has significant issues, because it turns ALL of there gains and losses into ordinary, and without the 2% floor on portfolio expenses, you might end up with net less income tax than just leaving the character as is.
You understand the situation enough to push a talking point, not to actually represent it fairly.
TAx law should not dictate corporate policy to the point where you raise your hand to a question without a final bill in front of you.
Yeah, they’re fair. Humans receive public services, and its absolutely fair they pay for them, and taxation is a perfectly fair way to do it. Doesn’t mean all taxes are fair as structured, but the notion of taxation as unfair conceptually is nonsense.
No one buys this threadbare anarchism poppycock that pops up on every thread policy thread.
Yes, when they put them in places that aren’t all that windy…
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Which requires one to massage the character of the income. (Or alternatively get rid of rate and treatment differences between portfolio and non, long and short.)
The massaging isn’t happening now, it happens with the “fix”.