When your house doubles in value you can borrow against it. The risk is still all yours but you can do things with that money to make more money, theoretically. There is actually a company doing exactly what you are talking about. I saw an add for it but don’t remember the name. They basically buy equity in your house over time. It’s a fascinating idea, but also seems like the last thing we need are more complex financial instruments for our homes.
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I’m all in favor of a progressive wealth tax, we desperately need it, but I can’t imagine it being a good idea to try to make one specific to money earned during a single event. If the government didn’t want private businesses try to solve the problems caused by the pandemic, they should have done it themselves. They didn’t, and the private sector only will if they believe they can make money. That’s kinda the fundamental principle of a market economy: we pay money for things we want/care about, and try to avoid spending money o things we don’t (yes, I know all the reasons it so often doesn’t work that way in practice). Still, take away the money now, and next crisis, no one will bother trying to meet demand. Moral hazard works in both directions.
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If you tell a company it will make a little less money, then they will never have an incentive to make money again!
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Yes, but I’m aware of reverse mortgages and such, though typically there’s a significant risk as the home owner is essentially putting their house up as collateral. Runs the risk of causing homelessness in the elderly.
I’m not seeing how this isn’t a win/win?
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Yes. I just wanted to point out that she is not on the receiving end of the wealth transfer, so she needn’t feel bad about profiting from other people’s misfortune. It was not my intention to question @VeronicaConnor’s choice about where she buys her stuff, but I see how I could have expressed that more clearly.
Yep. Remember when the whole economy crashed every time we raised the minimum wage? And all those times the entire economy started doing backflips and puked in all our mouths when the EPA mandated emissions regulations?
And that time the economy collapsed when we decided to make exotic lending products like credit default swaps and collaterallized debt obligations illegal?
Yeah some scary times. I guess the economy can’t work if we ever make corporations and rich people pay some money after they’ve externalized all their losses and privatized all their profits.
/s
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I’m sorry, but Gildebrand? Are you inferring that Kirsten lives in a gilded cage? I highly doubt that she is “covered thinly with gold leaf or gold paint”. That’s someone else’s bag… and brand.
In the real world, those 467 billionaires would only need to kick in a million bucks or so each (chump change) to make the act go away. Their wealth has been successfully rigging the system so far.
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Your first statement is an irrelevance. Stock values rise and fall under different dynamics than illiquid real estate.
Your second one ignores how unusual and dramatic Tesla’s value has changed. This is not a normal progression of a well managed stable company, but a dramatic and extreme increase over a short time. That tells me stock manipulation. Pure and simple.
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It smacks of artificial manipulation. The gains are far too dramatic, especially in this investing climate to look natural or the product of a well managed company. Even hype doesn’t create that kind of gains. Tesla is a company with well known labor and sales issues. It is not going to have IPO level stock rises under a normal market conditions.
When a stock or any kind of investment rises so sharply, there are strings being pulled and likely fraud. We see this all the time and always after the fact.
As a business owner, I can tell you that you’re looking at this wrong: The issue is that a lot of things in business you have to take a financial risk by paying to make changes. If you fail you lose that money, if you succeed you gain money - every decision in business is basically making a bet. And like any bet, you want to know your odds and the potential payout when you make it.
This is why, it becomes an issue if the government suddenly starts doing retroactive penalties against your bet in the form of tax increases - suddenly my risk/reward calculations are off, since the payout has suddenly significantly dropped, but without any correlating drop in risk (such as if they gave an extra tax break to companies that tried to deal with the pandemic but failed).
Really, the true issue here is that it’s a tax being levied after the fact - I see nothing wrong with a tax this high (or, frankly, even higher - the top tax bracket should probably be 90%+), but going around months after the fact and penalizing people for doing business isn’t a good idea. They shouldn’t be tying a tax to this year’s pandemic profits, but instead making a law that will tax them next year, and/or creating one that does this for future pandemics or other national emergencies.
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I requested a correction to Senator Gillibrand’s name.
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You run a business, you owe a deal to the infrastructure that made it happen and keeps it in one piece.
When you are profiting without paying for the maintenance and upkeep of that infrastructure, you not only undermine that infrastructure but yourself as well. Having to pay more out of pocket to make up the difference. Taxes are the price of doing business. Maintenance of the system from which you profit from.
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That’s called just living in a capitalist shithole.
The rules change for regular human private citizens all the time. There is NO moral reason ehy big powerful corporations with billions of dollars should be treated so much better than Joe Schmoe on the street.
In fact corporations, if anything, should have much less of a right to stability than normal human people.
I’m sick to death of hearing how my own health and auto insurance has to change its terms without my consent, but corporations have to be bottle fed or else all the bad things will happen.
Let the Billionaires salve their own little booboos. They certainly have no shortage of money and resources to do so.
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Who said anything about not paying taxes? If you re-read my post, I’m pretty clear that not only am I fine with taxes, but that they should be topping out a lot higher than they are. My only issue is with the government making major retroactive tax burdens. This can cause major issues with risk/reward calculations, and can even cause an otherwise liquid company to suddenly be in financial trouble if you spend the profits on an expansion and then suddenly find out the government has decided they’re doubling your tax burden for the previous year.
I’ve got enough cash set aside to (hopefully) pay my taxes. But a lot of my extra money goes into improving my store, making repairs, expanding my offerings, etc. If the government did this to me - suddenly told me my taxes for this year were going to double - I’d have nowhere near enough money saved up to pay this off. That new shelving I bought because I thought I had some extra money? Well, now I’m going to have to cut employee hours, work 80 hour weeks for the rest of the year, and forget about taking a vacation anywhere in order to have afforded those.
Nope, not talking about a reverse mortgage. These are companies buying equity shares in your home. If it loses money, they lose money. If it gains money, they gain money. haus.com is one example.
Who ever said they should be treated better? I’m just saying retroactive changes to tax burdens is unfair and can cause major problems. Yes, in this case it’s being done to billionaires who can handle it, but it sets a precedent that major retroactive tax increases are OK, and next time it might not be limited to the ultra-rich.
And yeah, insurance price increases suck, but frankly insurance as a whole is a goddamn nightmare in this country, so it’s not exactly fair to use that as your baseline.
Plus, to boil this down to its simplest: Just because one thing is unfair does not justify something else being unfair. That leads to circular reasoning where everything unfair is justified because something else unfair exists. Everything that is unfair should be dealt with, and none of it should be ignored just because you think the recipient this particular time for some reason deserves it.
Sadly we didn’t make some of those financial instruments illegal enough. And they’ve brought some back since then. Wells Fargo is probably in a worse position than last time, but these are mostly commercial mortgage backed, so it’s going to be even worse. Well Fargo needs to get broken up into tiny pieces forever.
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Nah. I’m unreceptive to anyone who wants to talk about what’s fair or not to corporations.
I don’t care about what’s fair to corporations at all. I care about what’s fair to real human beings. You know, people. Corporations can suck wet farts out of my butt. The entire purpose of a corporation is to shield the ownership from legal liability while doing absolutely everything in its power to make as much value increase for the shareholders as possible.
Honestly they’re immoral in my opinion.
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