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Comment by scohesc | Hacker News Reader

Man, it's so frustrating seeing all these businesses shutting down (smaller ones are closing for good), meanwhile I'm sure Bezos and the Silicon crew are reporting record profits this year through food deliveries and amazon purchases.

I sometimes find it very _very_ hard to not see this all a transfer of wealth from the middle/lower classes to the upper classes - either calculated beforehand or just being taken advantage of now I don't think it matters.

We're jumping right into another Great Depression, although as a millennial, I would argue we should call it something more fitting and modern - maybe... "The Big Sad"?

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What else could you call it? You can't drop taxes on the wealthiest Americans who are seeing the lions share of wealth transferred to them and then have the government spend like a drunken sailor to try to keep the economy from tanking.

SOMEONE has to pay for those stimulus checks and it appears right now it's turning into a loan that our great grandchildren will bear the responsibility of so that Bezos and Co can see an extra 0 at the end of their net worth.

The government can just keep borrowing until the currency collapses, there is no need to actually pay the debt down.

The word “need” presupposes a particular outcome. You don’t “need” to breathe, unless you want to live. The universe doesn’t “need” to keep existing.

So in language, when we say we need something, it’s a need for a particular and often presumptive / implied outcome.

In this case the purpose of the government is to provide for the general welfare of its citizens. The value of the US dollar depends on the “full faith and credit” of the United States actually meaning something. Therefore the government does need to show a willingness and ability to pay its debts.

The perceived future rate of inflation is a major variable in determining the interest rate that the US has to pay on its debt.

Also, the US government needs to control the level of inflation in order to have a functioning economy.

Given the widely accepted theory that printing arbitrarily large sums of money over time drives inflation, there are competing forces that act in the short and long term that would dictate the right amount of money to print now, or into the future.

Since the ultimate goal is to stabilize and grow the economy, the government does in fact need to not borrow until the currency collapses, and needs to be able to keep its debt to some reasonable multiple of GDP.

You need more money sloshing around as the economy grows or you get deflation.

Really, I'm gonna post 'borrowing is fine' in reply to lots of messages that act like the US government is running a household budget.

Can the current rate of spending continue indefinitely with normal necessities remaining affordable for the majority of individuals?

If not, when will it end?

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I recently read that Trump's tax cuts for the rich cost more than the stimulus checks.

Bezos literally got his phone hacked by foreign intelligence services for being supportive of the party that wants to fix this situation. He's benefiting because Amazon is well run and well positioned for this. He couldn't control how the response was managed and he doesn't control tax policy. Do a better job of blaming the people who are actually at fault, or you are abetting them.

Amazon has been using tax havens for years and years. Amazon has been actively preventing unionization of employees.

Jeff Bezos has personally donated to both political parties. Don't confuse his personal dislike of Trump with some sort of undying support of the Democratic party or their tax policies.

Of course he donates to both political parties, he's not a moron. Of course he uses the most advantageous legal tax strategy available. Almost every US company prevents union organization (nothing they've done comes close to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart#Labor_uni..., and I wouldn't be surprised if companies astroturfed union initiatives in competitors) He is a private citizen and just because he's wealthy it's not his job to fix the US financial system.

I don't have time or inclination to rehash it all so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_of_Jeff_Bezos%27s_phone, but he owns WaPo and the hacking was probably retribution re Khashoggi. There was nothing done about it because "somebody" didn't like the WaPo editorial stance.

>Of course he uses the most advantageous legal tax strategy available. Almost every US company prevents union organization

>just because he's wealthy it's not his job to fix the US financial system.

In other words, he should be lumped in with all the other billionaires that avoid taxes and aren't doing anything to uphold the social contract.

Long post alert...

If Bezos's and the other mega billionaires wanted to truly change the tax code for a top .0001% tax rate or whatever they could almost certainly get it done.

How much does Bezos spend on lobbying (not Amazon specific interests)? Virtually a 25 cents to him - .000086

Adelson spent something like $500mm over a decade and he probably has 75% or more of the 'credit' for changing pro-Isreal policy.

Bezos and the rest of them could put a few billion into treasuries and still not lose any basis just use the dividends politically.

In addition if they stopped following shareholder primacy Bezos could direct Amazon to repatriate profits continually and pay the tax. Stop relying on legal 'loopholes' to lower tax % and just pay in 'best faith' and stop pitting local governments against each other in a race to the bottom.

Hell they could even send a check to Treasury but spending only a billion $ lobbying for new laws would be more effective and longer term.

Personally I'd like to see something like a sovereign wealth fund that benefits social security/healthcare and directly supports the bottom 40%. Look to Alaska as an example.

Each 'bailout' the taxpayers should get a % of shares for their investment, basically free money from the Fed which is supposed to make its money back anyways. Fannie/Freddit/TARP is an odd example something more like UAE, Norway but passive and only US companies

Go further and make it part of taxes for the mega corps only. 14% profit + a small % of shares annually.

We don't have to turn into CCP with control over Corporate direction. Simply hold the shares passively.

Have to figure out something where corps have no dividends. Maybe a set yearly sale %.

I think about how beneficial it would be to give $1600 cash right now and match another $1600 to each individual in basically a retirement index fund that is only accessible in ___ years or ___ first time homebuyer etc circumstances like a new type of IRA. Hell the government could take a cut in ___ years and it would pay for itself.

That's not his fuckin job!

I'm specifically responding to parent " He couldn't control how the response was managed and he doesn't control tax policy"

saying he could easily exert a LOT of power to change tax policy if he wanted to. And could step up and pay more in taxes even without changing the laws

Yes. And I'm specifically responding and saying:

That's not his fuckin job!

It's ours - and our government's.

It's his too, he is a citizen. with hugely outsized influence.

I am definitely organizing for and personally committed to taxing the mega mega wealthy/corps, and so are millions more. But even working in politics my influence is like 1/100,000th of his.

I have a photography studio in a small (population 1,000 or so) town in Minnesota that has surprisingly become a bit of a shopping destination.

Or had, anyways. Half of the shops on Main Street are now closed. Some were, I think, destined to fail. A candy shop is a pretty ridiculous prospect nowadays. Others have been staples to the town for years and helped make it worth it for other businesses to move in.

I’m really not sure if it’ll ever bounce back. There are still a couple of clothing shops, a restaurant, a brewery, and a wedding dress shop. If one or two of those go down I might think about pulling the plug myself.

> I sometimes find it very _very_ hard to not see this all a transfer of wealth from the middle/lower classes to the upper classes - either calculated beforehand or just being taken advantage of now I don't think it matters.

Wait, what? You casually suggest that the pandemic was planned as a conspiracy against the middle class, but you don't think it matters whether it was a conspiracy or not? Please clarify if I misunderstood.

Not the parent, but I read that as, whether or not it was a conspiracy, the effect seems to be the same and the damage is done, so whether it is or not doesn't really matter.

As in, focusing on the cause of the problem and whether it was intentional or not isn't going to solve the problem.

Also not the parent, but I assume "calculated beforehand" does not refer to the pandemic per se, but rather either preparedness for when the economy goes south or exploitation of that reality after the fact.

I suspect they meant the economic/financial response to the pandemic, and the larger mom/pop => gig monolith and physical retail => ecommerce trends, rather than the pandemic itself.

They're talking about the upward wealth siphon, not the pandemic.

Sorry if it wasn't clear.

I was trying to say that it doesn't matter what you believe is causing all this chaos, it's independent from what's actually going on in the world right this second.

Whether it's the conspiracy theorists who believe it was pre-planned by the CCP to accelerate them to be the next global super power fueled by vaccines with 5G death-rays and microchips, or if it's these behemoth companies putting in contingency plans and/or having the massive amounts of reserve capital (rivalling even medium-sized governments) to quickly cater to the new economic landscape brought on by lax regulations and tax havens - it doesn't matter, people are suffering in numbers that haven't been seen probably for a hundred years.

It's one of those times I (very begrudgingly) think that China has done well in terms of recovery. They have the hard, enforceable power to lock people in their homes for extended periods of time under who knows what penalty - or they're lying about their recovery to the world... Who knows?

This pandemic was avoidable. I say that because when you work with international colleagues you see it firsthand. Other countries aren't suffering like the US is. The US mismanagement of the pandemic just on it's really diminishes it's global standing. It's not Bezos or Instacart or whomever, it's the basic lack of top down coordination in a response to the virus and dissemination of the vaccine.

These small business would probably not be closed if we had a competent national response. The probably would be closed but not bankrupt if we didn't have an inept fiscal response, also.

In my small town all the locally-owned and operated coffee shops were forced to close due to government mandates, and most are now closed permanently, because they couldn't afford to pay rent without any customers.

McDonald's and Starbucks? Still churning out coffee to people standing in long lines.

It's infuriating, but what can you do?

We've normalized political violence on the left and right this year. One side trashes a bunch of cities, the other the capitol. That genie won't go back in the bottle for sure.

Eventually the poors will get angry and united. So far our industry is helping keep them divided, but I'm not sure how long that will last.

> One side trashes a bunch of cities, the other the capitol

First, both sides are mostly made up of non-violent people dedicated to their cause. Both sides can rightfully claim that a minority of "bad eggs" amongst them caused the violence.

But that's where the equivalency ends. We have to look at the cause itself.

It's quite a stretch to say that a group protesting police brutality (in the face of actual police brutality) is at all equivalent to a group seeking to overthrow a legitimate government (with zero evidence to back their claims).

It's not the same ballpark. It ain't even the same fucking sport.

Bullshit. A great number of those protesting on the left/progressive side during the fairly recent BLM marches were peaceful people legitimately angry about police violence, but more than enough others used the same starting point as a launch pad for mass riots, burnings, lootings and the promotion of extremist (but leftist extremist) political postures that were little different in their love of overthrowing legitimate institutions from anything recently done by the idiots at the Capitol. In terms of sheer scale and distribution, the former protests had much more violence to them than more recent right-oriented protests. Emotional attachment to a certain ideology is no excuse for claiming two obviously related things "ain't even the same fucking sport". They very much are, but from different teams.

This doesn't really make sense. If there's a long line at Starbucks for takeout, why are you saying there aren't any customers?

The locally owned and run stores were forced to close by a government mandate, while the "big boys" where deemed essential and were allowed to stay open.

The joys of being rich, you get to influence the government!

I don’t think this ever applied to a Starbucks or McDonalds compared to a local coffee or burger place.

100% for supermarkets and Walmarts, but I can’t see how (in any jurisdiction) McDonalds or Starbucks would be allowed to do take out but local restaurants would not.

Anecdotal, but I laughed when I saw that SL Green, one of the biggest commercial landlords in New York City, and one of the competitors of my former PE firm, was seeking federal relief funds for the pandemic as a small business.

Not looking to give them an "out" - but I wonder if it's because these companies take on so much debt by buying properties and making the bet that people will always be living and working in them, paying rent. Now that people are leaving NYC in droves for other, cheaper locations - the NY real estate market is absolutely tanking because nobody is paying rent.

These property management companies made their bed, imo.

That's kind of their business model, yep.

My old firm sort of moved away from the LBO model, but it's still going strong.

The network effect is strong. If I post a comment to stop using Chrome (since there are better alternatives and Chrome is a near monopoly) we already see how resistant to change we are.

If you order something, people don’t search for alternatives. If your tied into an eco system, you don’t move away from it.

Personally I actively try to support local businesses, use only non-monopolies out of principle.

People do tend to use alternatives that they experience as better (which may not be the same as being better). You have to have a better experience and you have to get people to be aware, consider, and try the alternative experience.

A lot of us switched to Chrome because it was a better experience at the time. A lot bought from Amazon for the same reason. I’ll happily buy from a non-Amazon who gives me an experience better than Amazon, consider a browser that’s better than Chrome, or a search engine which gives better results than Google. Those three still get the majority of my in-category traffic though, because the experience is generally very good, quite consistent, and often best-in-class.

I think the hurdle to building a competitor to Facebook or Twitter is higher than the hurdle of selling me an electronic device instead of Amazon selling it to me. (BestBuy, NewEgg, MicroCenter [semi-local], and randos on EBay do it regularly. No one is casually going to beat Twitter and FB for social.)

The thing is, even when the experience gets worse, you might still be resistant to change. You already have your account setup, that feature X you liked they took isn’t that bad, the extra advertising doesn’t bother you too much, etc.

Maybe feature X in Firefox is actually better than Chrome (just an imaginary example) but because it doesn’t exactly work like you are used too, it doesn’t appeal.

Or your peers are all in the same in-group and Software X is what a Real Programmer should be using.

That all together could mean an experience gets progressively worse yet you don’t switch.

This absolutely is a transfer of wealth up to the billionaire class. Money that would have been put into the hands of waiters, dishwashers, barbers, and bartenders is now being spent on Grubhub and Amazon.

The remedy for this is a transfer in the opposite direction - direct stimulus payments. There's a reason McConnell fought so hard against those.

This entire pandemic response is 100% the modern equivalent of the liquidation of the Kulaks. There's no way around it. If you thought wealth inequality was bad before...

We are jumping into fascism 2.0:

- Suppression of ability to speak freely

- One party system

- The executive organizations of the party agenda are the largest monopolies (instead of Krupp and Messerschmitt we have Google and Amazon for now).

I know I will get a lot of downvotes, but i hope it helps at least a couple of people here to know they aren't alone in thinking this now.

One party system

You're going to have to explain that one. Right now I just have to assume you mean "one party controls all three branches of government", in which case, it's not the fault of Democrats that the GOP turned into assclowns and got voted out.

I took it to mean that it doesn't matter if it's left or right, "Democrat" or "Republican".

The transfer of wealth has (in my personal theory) lead to the lobbying of everybody, no matter which political affiliation - to the point where both "sides" are agreeing on policies that are harming people and favoring corporations.

Ah, the ol' "two rails going down the same track", got it; thanks for a different perspective.

The wealth transfer to Bezos and Zuckerberg in 2020 has been terrifying. Bezos has crossed 200 billion! https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/08/26/wor...

In general, US billionaires have gained over 1 trillion while small-businesses have perished https://www.statista.com/chart/22068/change-in-wealth-of-bil...

You can put considerable blame on those democratic governors and mayors who give shutdown orders to small businesses but allow major retailers to remain open https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/tale-two-pandemics... https://azbigmedia.com/business/covid-small-business-impact-...

That's absolutely shocking to me. I knew it was a lot but on the order of billions/trillions?

I _REALLY_ do not want to get political, but the timing is just too coincidental to not be mentioned... Now that a certain person is going to be kicked out of office, several politicians of mentioned governors and mayors are finally considering re-opening their cities when only weeks ago they were handing out fines - even when there's been a lackluster start to the US vaccination campaign.

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