Whether Elon's wealth stays the same as it is now, increases 100X, or all his assets are taken from him and he's wandering around homeless my life is not going to change in the least little bit. So why should I care about this?

Worth noting that the morons in question here were actually American farmers trying to pass their unsophisticated businesses down to their children instead of being forced into a sale upon death.

Cuepee can't be having people with working physical assets out there evading taxes. He wants to preserve that privilege for the likes of Musk and the hedge fund kids who can simply fill up trusts with untouchable digital assets and get "not income" loans against that in perpetuity.

- Dynastic wealth makes a mockery of America being a meritocracy or that people earn what they are worth in market
- Dynastic wealth creates a self perpetuating aristocracy counter to the ideals America claims to represent

Straw men much ?

Again , you say Elon musk fortune is illiquid .
All billionaires have no cash !
I told you they got massive collateral they can put in action and get billions .


Now you talk about full value , etc .
Whatever …..

The point is they aren’t as illiquid as you say they are .

Btw why you think everything goes crazy high in prices ?
Because of money printings , cash going down in value .
Banks would gladly accept a piece of a business as collateral instead of just paper money …
Banks love collateral, especially with the fed put …

Ps: and btw your 20% is ridiculous.
He surely would get much more .
Unless you believe the stock market crash of 80% is near ?

The value of Elon’s Tesla stock doesn’t impact whether I’m being paid what I am worth.

If Elon had a bunch of kids and grandkids and they run around like entitled, douchebag Dan Bilzerian wanna be’s that doesn’t impact me either.

WTF are you talking about.

Trumps National Policy Advisors was NOT referring specifically to farmers.

Where the **** did you get that from? Is that a Fox talking point you just googled?

Jesus Inso0, be less dumb.

He is absolutely talking about any of the rich people TODAY. He is saying if any of them end up paying a cent of Estate Tax they are morons as there are so many loop holes to avoid doing so. He is saying just hire a professional and get around them.

The point of those two bullets is that if you allow such dynastic wealth to be passed on and to avoid any taxes that help uplift everyone else you will only see the wealth gap increase even faster.

I am sure you understand the impact of Compound Interest and how if when you are 20 you put a little money away what it can be worth 50 years later.

Now imagine Elon and Bezos and others instead passing Trillions to those who pay no tax on it, also plow it in to the markets, never sell it and just borrow against it thus avoiding income and capital gains taxes, and then will it to their kids.

Can you see how the Uber rich (Top 10%) will go from owning 90% of all stocks to 95% to 99% as their money keeps compounding and buying more and more and how that raises prices so the rest just cannot get in nd participate? How then they seek to buy up housing inventory, drive up prices and make everyone renters and not owners?

Increasingly Joe 6 pack who is not political will simply be priced out of all markets by about 1% of the populace who will own 99% of all assets.

That is not hyperbole. IT is where things are headed if they dont' turn things back towards also building the Middle class.

When companies fails do governments intervene ?

See!

I posted the solution to this years ago right ITF so I don't know why we still have this problem. The solution is the principle that you can't control resources after you've died because there is no you. Let people give away whatever they want while they are alive. But, once you die, whatever you are holding goes to the state after, say some small amount like 100K.

Makes sense.

I first heard that solution advocated my Dad in the 1970's. (Don't know where he read or heard it from.)

You don't think power dynamics influence the going rate for labor ?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying that if Elon is too big to fail and the government will bail him out that's a problem? I agree with that. But I don't see where Elon is doing anything based on expecting a bailout. However I may have completely misunderstood you....

That's an interesting economics question. I don't think the wealth gap would affect labor rates. Either way my standard of living is probably in the top .1% of humans who have ever lived, and I don't think that changes based on Elon's net worth.

You got it .
But it’s not just about Elon musk .
The US have around 15% to 20% zombies companies.
And those companies are kept alive through debt being paid by the governments, meaning the people right ?
So when bad business and good ones are just getting bail out , how can’t you see it affect any regular joe at the end of the bottom line ?
It just enrich the owners of those companies at the expense of the workers, government and the economy in general .

Now when you speak about wealth gap not interfering in labor rates I don’t follow .
Wealth gap comes from where if not from higher tax cuts and fiscal advantages from governments, at the same time having a fed put that protect them from a market crash .
It creates government deficit , worst still it entice more private debts by leverage being protected by the fed put , diminishing gdp growth due to too much debt all being paid by who if not the middle class and lower ?

Fwiw , my understanding is as the wealth gap increases , velocity of money go down because less money is available to exchange hands in the real economy.
Less economic activities should equal weaker economic growth , hurting those that only have labour to earn money .

It is just mis allocation of capital not being used to increase economic activities but just to inflate stock and house prices owned by the top 10% .

Diminishing return laws is a real thing that exist in economics and it seem from the majority of data for many years that increase wealth for the top 10% do not increase gdp growth for the real economy .
On the contrary .
Just the tax cut from trump in 2018 clearly show that it add a small boost in gdp growth but got dismiss in a about 2 quarters .
All it did is added trillions on US debt while enriching those that do not needs more money .


It’s clear to me at least that when 1 factor of production is abused at the expense of another , the end result is subpar .
To me the wealth gap increase ( factor of capital ) is exceedingly abuse at the expense of the work force ( factor of labor ) , creating bad economics in the long run .
Bad economic should equal lower wages in the real economy right ?


I’m not sure if a lot here is familiar of GTO in poker but it’s the same concept for economics .

You can bluff a little to be a little more profitable but if you bluff too much ( abusing factor at the expense of another ( check for example ) , you create a strong imbalance that results as weaker strategy .

It’s already been proved mathematically a long time ago .

Sorry campfire, to make a long story short , the top 1% vastly benefits government protection on multiple levels , I don’t see why they should not pay for it …..

Any regular person by Insurance for car, health care , houses ,put on stock markets , etc .
I don’t see why corporations and top 1% shouldn’t pay when they are always backed by government bailouts and other stuff .

Tax are at all time low since ww2 , should government debts only be shared by those who have no money ?

To me , being able to protect billions of wealth value should have a cost for its owner and not be assumed in totality by those who have not much wealth to begin with ….

You don't think poor people are exploited in areas where there is a large wealth gap ?

I know many, many white collar guys who come to America from their homes because they can make more money here. Those countries tend to have a much smaller middle class than the US. Even though ours in shrinking it's still larger than most.

The point here is that the US will eventually resemble these other countries if this trend continues unchecked.

No, the wealth of one man won't effect anyone else very much. He's just an example. One of the guys who will eventually collect all the marbles.

This is essentially an argument for keeping 'all' of the wealth out of the hands of a tiny few no? Life has gotten better for more and more people as we've clawed it away from the heavily concentrated points of power/wealth of the past.

Giving Elon's excess wealth to people who desperately need it would improve their lives immensely.

I know that YOU don't care about such a thing, as you're a reactionary psycho, but non-reactionary-psychos possess a personality trait called "empathy", which gives us real concern for the welfare of other people, particularly those that are struggling; and we feel happiness when their material conditions improve.

Conservative brains can't fathom liberal people having empathy for those they don't know, to the point where they think we are faking it and created the phrase "virtue signaling" to describe this phenomenon.

"My life is not going to change". LOL. This isn't about you, John Galt.

I think you are not considering a key aspect however.

As the top 1% and 10% respectively wealth soars exponentially they will keep buying up every asset class tying to protect their money and get a return. So that means they will go from 90% to 99% of the stock market. Buy up more and more homes and all the way down the line.

Just like with art, as they gobble up all the supply the price will increase for anyone else thus compounding the problem for those in the bottom percent trying to rise up. They will increasingly be shut out of asset classes. Currently we see that in the form of home ownership being dead for many, when just a few decades back that was not the case.

I just don't think people are thinking about what it means for Elon and Bezos to pass on a Trillion dollars tax free and that repeats a few generations. These families will be buying up majority control if the not the entirety of much of industry and regular citizens will have less and less ways to fight for anything, including a wage increase.

Fwiw Inso ….
Musk seem wanting to sell 10% of his stocks .
Let’s see how much it drop ….?

Since u claim he could not get more than 20% if he used them as collateral.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aut...ay-2021-11-07/

FWIW Musk was trapped between a coming rock and a hard place that was going to make it impossible not to pay significant Capital Gains taxes of ~$15B if he wanted to accept the massive new number of shares by purchasing his stock options.

I ran the quick numbers on this quasi arbitrage he is doing and it looks like this.

- If Musk follows thru he will be selling around 17MM shares at ~$1220/sh for Gross proceeds of about $20B. He has an option to execute 22.86 million stock options at $6.24 each, for Gross proceeds of $142MM, that expires next year. So he will more than replace the lost shares will banking a mass amount of cash. It will only take using the cash from 110,000 shares sold at $1220 to buy the entire 22MM new shares meaning he has 16.9MM shares as pure profit from this arbitrage like move to pay off the taxes. So his Net clear gain on this transaction is to increase his Tesla holdings by almost 22MM shares and his Net Wealth by $26B.

I bet this factored in significantly on his move from Cali to Texas as the timing could not be better for him to avoid State tax.

It's the biggest problem (possibly apart from climate change) because wealth inequality is poisening everything wihtin our democracies.

For example there are are two basic models for health care etc etc

1) we earn take home money and buy health care, etc etc
2) we contribute via taxs and nationalisation and the government rpovides universal health care etc etc

1) cannot work in a democracy with two much inequality* and 2) is currently we are tending to a 3rd where people want rich people to pay the government to pay for better universal health care etc etc. This is a nonsense model that can never be stable.

It's goign to get far worse if we do nothing. We tackle it or be damned.

* as people will vote increasingly for lunacy and extremism.

Despite the claims to the contrary, ‘share of wealth’ has held fairly constant over the years:



Latest from FRED has top 10% @ 70.0% and bottom 50% @ 2.3%.

the cycle is that people are increasingly staying home and not GAF allowing the lunatics and extremists who just want to burn the whole system to put in place destructive politicians.


The cycle is a 'NEW' 'HOPE' based candidate appears who actually does manage to stir up the fading belief that a Politician may actually fight for the ordinarily citizens and not just represent donor interests. That they may actually bring the 'CHANGE' they promise. They think 'Dare we risk being fooled again?' and they determine 'yes' and they show up in huge numbers (Obama and Biden) only to have it all dashed as the same old same old pattern of broken promises emerges no matter how much power they are given. They ALWAYS find a bogeyman to blame the inability to deliver on. Bad ole Republicans in Obama admin. Bad ole corporate Dems in Bidens Admin.

This inevitably leads to worse and worse Trumps emerging and a more difficult time of motivating voters to oppose him. They can see Trump is a wrecking ball in 2016 but he is also somewhat of an unknown and maybe the unknown swings his wrecking ball at the establishment and we get a back door win. Better that gamble they think then the known entity which is Hillary, the ultimate Corporate Democrat.

Trump ends up being horrendous. Everyone recognizes the error. Biden uses it to wave the biggest package of citizen initiatives in our lifetimes. CHANGE is coming.

He gets people to rise up and HOPE once again, only to now start to dash it. Same old, same old with likely the most intact part of BBB that will remain being the giant Tax Cuts for the rich.

:: enter even worse Trump in the future ::

Hmmm?.