Democrat Nomination for President

[RSL]

Actually, the Senate did its job perfectly and upheld its oath to protect the Constitution. The House screwed up from square one and debased the Constitution. I have a feeling Nancy’s going to pay a high price for that.

[kers]

First, taking someone else's money to give to someone else is stealing.  Sure, since government does it, we can make believe it's righteous, but it isn;t.  The entire Soviet Union was based on this and look what they had for 70 years.  Gulags to enforce it and a lot worse.  That's what it leads too.  Oh, did I mention Venezuela, Cuba, etc.?

I completely disagree (& i thought you were against hyperboles?- please don't start about gulags !)

My take is that billonaires have too much money, ergo too much undemocratic controlled power in one hand.
Also when the election system is partly based on the amount of money a candidate can bring they directly can influence the democratic part of the political system.

In todays economic system it is easy for them to get even richer without taking great risk while pretending to be philantropists. (for instance  Bill Gates)
Some of them acknowledge this situation and ask for a tax system in which they pay more.

...There is a reason Europe and the rest of the world do not have Apples, Googles, Microsofts, Teslas, etc. of the world. Those inventions require enormous amounts of money to take off. If you limit how much money one can make, you limit how much money would be in the ecosystem as well.
...

The amount of money to take off is not dependent on the Billionaires...
It is for this the stock exchange was developed.

[JoeKitchen]

My take is that billonaires have too much money, ergo too much undemocratic controlled power in one hand.
Also when the election system is partly based on the amount of money a candidate can bring they directly can influence the democratic part of the political system.

In todays economic system it is easy for them to get even richer without taking great risk while pretending to be philantropists. (for instance  Bill Gates)
Some of them acknowledge this situation and ask for a tax system in which they pay more.

The amount of money to take off is not dependent on the Billionaires...
It is for this the stock exchange was developed.

Wow, I never truly realized how evil Obama was then.  He outspent McCain 3 to 1 and Romney 2 to 1. 

I guess what you are saying is that the people's choice those years should not have been Obama. 

But anyway, getting back to billionares having too much power, how about Tom Steyer and Bloomberg?  If they win, will you still endorse them, or go third party?  How about Elon Musk?  How does he effect politics?  How about Warren Buffet? 

[Craig Lamson]

You do beautiful work Craig.

Thanks.  So you were the hit from New Jersey

(I really need to update that Web Site...)

[faberryman]

Of course the main problem is how do you pay taxes on wealth that's tied up in the property?  Let's use your real estate exdample.  So you own a hotel or a golf course that's worth $10 million.  Leave aside how that's determined right now.   But it's not in cash.  So you have to pay a wealth tax of let's say 2% a year. That's $200,000.  Where do you get it from.  It's not under your pillow.  It's tied up in the property.  So now you actually have to sell off part of it to raise the cash for taxes.  So you have a fire sale and the value of the property is lost.  Same if you own a farm.  Everything is tied up in the land, and tractors, and barns, and milking machines.  So you have to sell your farm to get cash to pay the taxes?  That's nuts.  That's why the tax law is currently written, for good reason, to pay taxes when the property is sold.  That's the only real time cash is available to pay the taxes.  It's also the time that the capital is no longer needed as an investment.  It's also the time that the owner get the real wealth in a form he can spend it on himself and use it personally.

You would pay taxes on the hotel with income from room fees, and on the golf course with income from greens fees and cart rentals. You would pay taxes on the dairy farm with income from the sale of milk. They are an expense you budget for.
Like most people I pay annual property taxes to my local government without having to sell my house. I'm guessing you do too. Would you prefer to eliminate property taxes and replace them with income taxes?

[Craig Lamson]

You pay taxes on the golf course with income from greens fees and cart rentals. You pay taxes on the farm with income from the sale of milk.
I pay annual property taxes to my local government without having to sell my house.

So much for the raises for the greenskeeper and the farm hand...

[kers]

Wow, I never truly realized how evil Obama was then.  He outspent McCain 3 to 1 and Romney 2 to 1. 

I guess what you are saying is that the people's choice those years should not have been Obama. 

But anyway, getting back to billionares having too much power, how about Tom Steyer and Bloomberg?  If they win, will you still endorse them, or go third party?  How about Elon Musk?  How does he effect politics?  How about Warren Buffet?

This is apart from any candidate- it has to do with the way the electionsystem is based at the moment in the US.
It means that without enough money you don't have a chance...
It also means that influence in the political system can be bought.

[JoeKitchen]

This is apart from any candidate- it has to do with the way the electionsystem is based at the moment in the US.
It means that without enough money you don't have a chance...

This has always been the case, with the possible exception of George Washington. 

Today though, modern technology has made it possible for the average person to donate, directly, without difficulty.  I would argue that the victory of Trump, who was out spent in the primary and general, and Bernie in the lead without any major donators, disproves your premise. 

[kers]

This has always been the case, with the possible exception of George Washington. 

Today though, modern technology has made it possible for the average person to donate, directly, without difficulty.  I would argue that the victory of Trump, who was out spent in the primary and general, and Bernie in the lead without any major donators, disproves your premise.

I did not say money rules all... fortunately not.
I do not have enough knowledge of the funding of those two you mentioned. You may be right. I suppose it is possible for every person to see how they are funded?
Then please show me some link...

[JoeKitchen]

You pay taxes on the golf course with income from greens fees and cart rentals. You pay taxes on the dairy farm with income from the sale of milk.
Like most people I pay annual property taxes to my local government without having to sell my house. I'm guessing you do too.

LOL.  What is your property tax rate?  Mine is about a percent on an amount that is about 60% of current market value. 

But anyway, to see how bad this idea is, just look towards France.  They implemented this over 10 years in the early 2000s.  First, the amount that they spent in auditing wealthy people to determine how to tax them in just one of the those years was more then they collected from the tax over the entire period.  This is the main reason they got rid of the tax. 

But second, it decimated a lot of asset rich but cash poor businesses, such as wineries.  Wineries in France are so old and have been passed down through generations, that the land is owned outright; there are no mortgages.  This makes many who own wineries asset rich.  However, the amount of profit they make off of these farms is still not that much.  With the exception of a few, wine only sells for so much.  So, when they were hit with this tax, they were forced to sell off parts of their winery to pay the tax.  It did not end well for the small family winery. 

If a Wealth Tax is Such a Good Idea, Why Did Europe Kill Theirs?

"... it was expensive to administer, it was hard on people with lots of assets but little cash, it distorted saving and investment decisions, it pushed the rich and their money out of the taxing countries—and, perhaps worst of all, it didn't raise much revenue."

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

I did not say money rules all... fortunately not.
I do not have enough knowledge of the funding of those two you mentioned. You may be right. I suppose it is possible for every person to see how they are funded?
Then please show me some link...

One such link:

https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/contributors?id=N00000528

[Craig Lamson]

This is apart from any candidate- it has to do with the way the electionsystem is based at the moment in the US.
It means that without enough money you don't have a chance...

How then would you expect candidates to get their words out to the people without money? 

[JoeKitchen]

I did not say money rules all... fortunately not.
I do not have enough knowledge of the funding of those two you mentioned. You may be right. I suppose it is possible for every person to see how they are funded?
Then please show me some link...

Trump spent about half of what Clinton did on his way to the presidency

Says Donald Trump "spent the least amount of money of any of the competitive primary contenders that he beat so badly."  Rated as mostly true. 


Bernie’s new approach to raising cash: ‘Grassroots fundraisers’  Of course, with the plans Bernie is putting forth, it would be damn near impossible to find any wealthy person who would part with his money to support Bernie. 

Like I said before, money has always been a part of politics, especially the presidential election, with the exception of Washington (the only unanimously electorally elected President). 

[Rob C]

Thats the problem for businesess like ours, they have very little real value.  Unless you have some business real estate, they true value of oyur business is YOU.  When you retire, you can sell equipment and that has some value.  You can try to sell a client list but thats not worth much because the clients are really buying YOU.  Not much is left to add a real value to the business.

There is nothing wrong with being a lone wolf, and I actually prefer it to all the other forms my lifetime career has taken.  You just need to understand going that there is really nothing of real value in your business other than yourself.  I'm rather enjoying my end of career trajectory.  I work with my wife, we are making good bank and we work maybe 100 days a year.  We have pretty much zero overhead and our billing rate has never been higher.  I can't put  a dollar value on that   I don't think Bernie could either   I'm having a ball. Working on my toy car, in the process of getting my part 107 remote pilot cert and playing with drones.  Oh yea, shooting for some select clients. too.

Life is good.

On the money: retire, and all you can sell are some tripods and old cameras. As I know and always knew. It was the ride of a lifetime, and that was the buzz. It got me to places I could never have afforded to visit at a standard that makes me blush sometimes. I was not really money-driven because if I had been, there were several other doors open to me. I ignored 'em.

Rob

[Rob C]

Rob, this statement shows a complete lack of understanding about wealth and business! 

The fact is that although Bezos is very wealthy, he has very little cash on hand and does not receive a salary, aka earnings, any where near the amount that he is worth.  I would be very surprise if he even had a $1M in the bank.  Nearly all of his wealth is tied up within Amazon, not in cash, but in the business itself.

The only way that he could retrieve that wealth would be to sell part of the business, or his stock. 

And this is the problem with Sander's tax proposal.  He wants to tax people based on wealth, not salary.  If Bezos is taxed 6% (Sander's top tier) on his total wealth today, that would be a tax bill of almost $8B.  In order to pay that, he would need to sell $8B worth of stock, but in doing so, this would crash the price of Amazon stock. 

This, combined with all of the other stocks suddenly being flooded on the market from other wealthy people selling to make the tax bill, would crash the stock market.

Then, we start getting into trying to figure out how much to tax people who's wealth is not tied up in public companies that dont have a stock price.  How do even determine the value of a private company?  (I dont know my company's value.  I know how much I made this year, and the past, but value is more then just that.  To put an exact dollar figure on it would be impossible.)  Sure, public is easy, you multiply the stock price by the total shares, but what about private where neither of those things exist? 

Bernie's whole plan is doomed to failure due to him not understanding the scale to which this would effect the economy and the sheer complexity of trying to figure out how wealthy a wealthy person actually is. 

Insofar as you saying people do what they do, how well is that working out for Venezuela?  I know a couple of photographers who left because the economic system did not let them do what they do.  How about Cuba?  I seem to remember all those people who do what they do leaving and building up Miami, Dominican Republic, etc. while Cuba fell into the abyss.

How arrogant of you, and how reflexively driven. Read my post properly: folks like Bezos are doing exactly what I suggested: reinvesting. Is your foot painful?

And exactly right: selling off his stock breaks my suggested way forward, and so he'd be inclined to keep it going. That said, he could still get himself that fifty million in cash (and be within my limit) any time he wanted to as long as he didn't do it in a way to panic the market.

If you use an accountant to do your books every year (I did, right from the first year) he will give you a value for your little business each time, not just tell you how much tax you have to pay or how much you have lost, or otherwise advise you on the benefit of doing something else.

People from Cuba and Venezuela have nothing to do with it; they either flee countries ruled by despots or political gangsters. You should not try to confuse the plight of these people with a fair tax regime in developed countries. Taxing the crazy rich is not gangsterism; handing contracts out as kickbacks and for kickbacks is. You see the difference?

Rob

[LesPalenik]

The amount of money to take off is not dependent on the Billionaires...
It is for this the stock exchange was developed.

All large technology companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc) started with seed money from family members, angel investors and venture capitalists. Only after they became very large (and many collapsed before they could become that large), they went public and got listed on the stock exchange.

[Rob C]

And yet they come to the good, old, greedy US of A to help themselves. Elon Musk could have stayed in South Africa to pursue his inventions... how far would that get him? There is a reason Europe and the rest of the world do not have Apples, Googles, Microsofts, Teslas, etc. of the world. Those inventions require enormous amounts of money to take off. If you limit how much money one can make, you limit how much money would be in the ecosystem as well.

It is like mice determining just how much grass is enough for elephants.

Investment capital is available even to little ladies in Africa who want to start a seamstress business; charities ask you to help almost every day - benign investment and banking, they call it, and when the person you helped has got off the ground, you can either recoup your loan or reinvest it in similar, benign fashion where you really do help some soul eat more than locusts. Not all philanthropic action is self-centred egotripping and neither is it motivated by greed.

Neither of us knows how much money these people have in their personal accounts; I still believe they don't need more than fifty million. I am glad that they find investment backing in the States; that capital is always looking to make more, and it does it by being invested in ventures, by no means all of which turn out successfully. That is exactly a part of what I am advocating: reinvestment. Reread my original post and don't come to it blind or wearing the traditional reactive spectacles. Because I speak against too much money going to waste whilst others, mostly for no fault of their own, are starving does not make me a red; rather do I think it makes me someone who realises that greed is ultimately self-defeating and destructive.

[Alan Klein]

Thanks.  So you were the hit from New Jersey

(I really need to update that Web Site...)

I forgot about that.  I guess I'm still impressed.

[JoeKitchen]

How arrogant of you, and how reflexively driven. Read my post properly: folks like Bezos are doing exactly what I suggested: reinvesting. Is your foot painful?

And exactly right: selling off his stock breaks my suggested way forward, and so he'd be inclined to keep it going. That said, he could still get himself that fifty million in cash (and be within my limit) any time he wanted to as long as he didn't do it in a way to panic the market.

If you use an accountant to do your books every year (I did, right from the first year) he will give you a value for your little business each time, not just tell you how much tax you have to pay or how much you have lost, or otherwise advise you on the benefit of doing something else.

People from Cuba and Venezuela have nothing to do with it; they either flee countries ruled by despots or political gangsters. You should not try to confuse the plight of these people with a fair tax regime in developed countries. Taxing the crazy rich is not gangsterism; handing contracts out as kickbacks and for kickbacks is. You see the difference?

Rob

Well maybe I mis-read you, but you stated, "I would be inclined to set a flat, top limit of personal/family worth ..." 

When you write worth, do you mean total wealth, or amount earned through salary per year?  I define worth as the former, which if you set a limit on becomes a detriment to the economy.  Taxing only earnings, and not wealth, is not part of the Democrat platform right now, which I why I jumped right to wealth. 

Insofar as taxing the rich at higher and higher rates opens the door for more and more kickbacks.  You really think that making the tax system more complicated wont bring more cronyism and will make things fairer?  That's not how things work out. 

[Rob C]

In the case of real estate, someone is going to appraise it. and they are goingt o consider condition, upgrades and current market value of similar properties.  Thats the number.  Most banks are going to consider that number as a basis for what the value of a loan might be for that property.  It  matters not a whit if you have put in far more in renovations than the value of the property at the time its appraised.  If you want to sell it the true value is what someone is willing to pay at that instant. If the value it greater than the bank value ( if a loan is required) the purchaser could pony up more money.  The question is...would they?

I can imagine thats what would happen in a Bernie world.  Someone would appraise the business and decide what the tax would be.  Just like your home is appriaised for taxes. 

Trust me, if this were come to pass they would create a mechanism to value your wealth.  I cant image there will be a robust way to challenge the assessment

You are perfectly correct regarding house values. Any estate agent or property surveyor will give you their professional suggestion of a value. It's the reason why you are always advised to move to a better neighbourhood than to invest over the top in your current one: you are chucking your money away because it is never going to be recognized in a subsequent sale. You may get your pad moving more rapidly than another beside you, but only within the same money waveband. And as a complication - certainly in Britain - school catchment areas are worth more than solid gold plumbing.