i don't think the bill&melinda gates foundation is based on increasing bill gates' personal pleasure, with no morality involved.

did zuckerberg and buffet sign that pledge to donate smth like 99% of their wealth because they felt like it was the most fun thing to do with it?

I wasn't giving a "view".

You asked about quantifying income equality. I referred you to a well established and widely referenced way of doing just that.

Wtf? "Fun" is not the same as "pleasure." And the pledge, at least for Zuckerberg, is 50%, not 99%. All parties are doing it because it gives them the most pleasure, not the most "fun." Morality is certainly involved, but you said, specifically, that These parties somehow think it immoral to have $50B and I don't think that is even remotely true. Unnecessary, yes. Immoral? GTFO.

Oh cool, we're playing another round of "keep the lower classes angry at an even lower class to distract them from how much the plutocracy is stealing from everybody all over the globe". Thank you Mr. No-Way A Previously Banned Poster for your Stockholm Syndrome water carrying!

ok fair point, they're getting some kind of feeling of satisfaction as a result of doing what they feel is "right" to do, instead of spending the money on dan bilzarian style boat and cocaine parties. i guess this is a bit of chicken and egg argument for where their motivations are coming from. it just feels to me like saying bill gates is doing all these great things because it gives him pleasure makes him sound like a greek god that's choosing to bless us with his countenance from on high. when really he's just a man. a smart man who sees millions of people without even basic healthcare and one man with 50 billion dollars and he made the decision to redistribute that wealth. and he knows exactly how hard he worked for that 50 billion. he was there.

unfortunately, the current presidential candidates besides bernie sanders are all seeing this same situation and aren't coming to the same conclusion as bill & bernie. i think it's because they're morally lacking. someone else might say it's because they get pleasure in different ways.

I don think it's fair to compare any of them, even Trump, to Gates. While they are all likely very wealthy, they aren't Bill Gates or Warren Buffet. In fact, after Gates and Buffet give away all the money they intend to, they will likely STILL have more money than all of the presidential candidates. Combined.

In regards to motivations, all I can say is that I don't at all trust that Sanders' motivation for running for POTUS are in any way similar to Gates' motivation for giving his money away. Sanders, like every other person who has run for public office, is a narcissist and likely says the things he says to gain money, power and/ or notoriety. It just so happens, in this instance, that the things he says resonate with you. One wonders if that's by design...

american companies are great. you're right, they do all those things. but did the minds behind these businesses need the carrot of obscene wealth to drive them to create such fabulous companies? or was the scientific community building to the point of developing a google algorithm for many years already, and some bright engineers took it one step further? look, that's great that they did, and they should definitely be rewarded for it, but let's not go crazy and start giving individuals billions of dollars.

you don't need one guy at the top squeezing a million+ dollars a day out of a company to make a company successful. what if, for some reason, bill gates couldn't have personally made 50 billion off of microsoft? the company would have nearly 50 billion more dollars to invest in itself, its own employees, new ideas, etc. it'd be all the great things that corporations provide today, and more of it.

we don't NEED ultra rich people for society to exist and keep rolling. we allow it for some crazy reason, most likely because rich people can buy political power.

Explain how "human desire" prevents passing a law that raises taxes on the ultra wealthy? Perhaps you meant the absurd influence of money in politics?

Well, try that then, you have explained why "human desire" is morally incompatible with taxing the uber wealthy. I can want to be uber wealthy and taxing the uber wealthy will do nothing to prevent me from becoming uber wealthy.

i agree with all of this. but why do we need ultra rich people for the equation to still work? we can still have all of those things if the top businessmen aren't taking billions of dollars a year off the corporate table.

idk man i live in america. ikea? mercedes? i'm not comparing, america rocks. ford was a really successful company for over 100 years, it's survived through many different kinds of government taxes. in the 1950s and 60s income taxes were super high, but ford still made cool new cars and people bought them.

if ford motor company existed in an economic environment where 91% of household income over 400k$ was taxed... it would have been continued to be an extremely successful american company.



http://taxfoundation.org/article/us-...usted-brackets

exactly! they were able to still do that even though the top income tax rate at the time was relatively very high compared to today. so, exorbitant income tax rates clearly don't stop a business from thriving and creating economic opportunities for society at large.

Morality and fairness aren't why you should care. You should care because your output is necessary for perpetuation of the system, but your relative take has been steadily decreasing for decades. Not caring about that makes you a chump.

that's an especially heartless way of looking at the current state of the world.

here's why you should care there are uber-wealthy people: through some glitch in the system there's a small group of people able to extract obscene amounts of money from businesses that could otherwise provide economic opportunities to a greater amount of less fortunate people. and let's be honest, that small group doesn't represent the hardest working group of people in america, they're mostly hard working smart people who happened to get really lucky.

that money these few are taking off the table, aside from the investment capital their businesses would have available, could be used by the government to provide education, health care, and other social programs that many nations in europe have already implemented and we can see it makes their society safer, healthier, and happier than our country. unless you enjoy poverty and violence for some reason, which you might, because you're admittedly amoral.

I don't give a rats ass about sustainability or entitlement. I'm calling you a chump for handing over an ever increasing share of your labor without complaint. That makes you a beta sycophant buffoon.

Ford would be better without the taxes. It almost went bankrupt several times. Technically its downfall was Detroit's downfall. Many of the parts are made overseas.

We pay about $0.25 a kwh for electricity in Los Angeles, without unions and government help we would pay about $0.03 a kwh.

$400K in the 1940s was like $2 million today. Furthermore, the little guy paid a lot of taxes too. Someone making $32,000 paid 50%. Someone making $12,000 paid 30%. Some guy making $4000, would get a $400 standard eduction and pay $360 tax.

the website says it's adjusted to 2012 dollars, if you can believe that.

and i agree it would have done better without taxes. for a business, having more cash is the definition of doing better. but do individual people do that much more for society when there are no taxes on them? do we need the ultra rich more than we need public services?

How does a tax on the uber-wealthy affect your income?

I don't know about the last sentence, but everything before that is precisely correct.

I wonder when people are going to realize that taking money from smart, wealthy, productive people and giving it to poor, stupid, lazy people doesn't work.

Then it sounds to me like you should be agnostic and not have an opinion. But strangely, you do. And it's one that most directly benefits the plutocracy at the expense of yourself. Chump.

The Sanders proposals should be subjected to computer simulations under various reasonable assumptions to make sure there are not unintended consequences.

What about giving it to poor struggling smart ambitious people? (And if the people you are taking it from are really rich its no big deal if most of those who get it are in your category as long as some are in mine.)

What about the really rich giving struggling smart ambitious people jobs, rather then forcing people to give something for nothing.

Keep poor shaming ****wad.