Gary’s story is dystopian: jail and slavery to a big corporation. Based move would be to get min wage job or live off benefits and do open source work.
Some people clearly like consumption. Many are probably like me where income has gone up reasonably career progression but largely live the same lifestyle as where comfortable many years back. Any increasing excess goes onto the mortgage and savings type deal.
For me I'm happy wearing whatever clothes vs designer and actually like driving an older/cheaper car for zero care factor type thing and have few things I wish to splurge on.
At the same time money really matters as I never want to think about it. Once over a threshold it's low on my motivation and I'd generally choose more interesting work. Below the threshold I will become very motivated with it.
My wife is a teacher, and pay is a huge concern for every single one, except for the handful that are rich, and just doing it for the fun of it.
I would highly recommend “basic economics” by Thomas Sowell. Will explain how profit motivation leads to people producing more with fewer resources. (efficiency) vs anything else that leads to less efficient use of resources.
You're introducing an interesting counterpoint but I feel that it's not the question I was attempting to respond to. I was commenting on the matter of huge taxes demotivating everyone from creating anything.
I am assuming that any more or less reasonable taxation would either decrease the revenue of everyone or decrease the revenue of most of the members of the wealthier N% of the population (as usual, the richest will somehow manage to avoid most taxes). Do you believe that such a scheme would make your wife leave her career for something less creative/generally useful?
> I would highly recommend “basic economics” by Thomas Sowell.
Adding to my looong list of books to read, thanks!
no. communism, wherever introduced, has never worked
By the way, can you think of a country in which taxation is so high that work is disincentivized?
I'm not so sure if we can classify a whole country into one stereotype, and to do so would most definitely be small and close-minded thinking.
Denmark, this is a very common topic here with many people like doctors saying so
I am also curious to hear of any real-world countries where people choose not to work because taxes are too high.
I thought the reason for delaying selling of stocks is to avoid capital gains tax, not income tax.
I did a quick google, and most sources seem to support that taxes are due at RSU vesting time, e.g.
> With RSUs, you are taxed when the shares are delivered, which is almost always at vesting. Your taxable income is the market value of the shares at vesting.
https://www.schwab.com/public/eac/resources/articles/rsu_fac...
Why would this be different for the salaries of rich people? Isn't it more that they usually get large amounts of stocks at low prices if they stick with the company for a long time?
Depends on the details.
For founders and early employees, the 83(b) election[1] can make a huge difference. Basically, you have the option to pay taxes on the value of the stock portion of your compensation at the time of granting, rather than when it vests. For an early stage company, that's basically $0.
I'm not 100% clear on the details, so if you're interested that's 1 good place to look.
---
> ISO – no tax liability for exercising the option. You pay capital gains tax when you sell your contract or sell the stocks in your option.
> As you can see, there are tax benefits to going with the ISO – you don’t pay any ordinary income tax at any point.
ISO = Incentive Stock Option
https://www.vectorvest.com/blog/options/how-are-stock-option...
The second you convert it to actual money by selling, you get hit with taxes (or Nintendo standing behind your shoulder), and you pay off your responsibilities using a chunk of money you've just received.
I agree.
> Until you sell the contract or the shares from exercising the options, you don't have any actual money
There are other ways of converting them into money, like lending against them. And that is what billionaires are often doing, as it is financially much more attractive. With how things currently are, it would be stupid not to.
That is what I am trying to get across: If we managed to invert the incentives, billionaires might actually sell their stocks, and get taxed on that, rather than finding creative workarounds.
Then the state could profit, instead of banks.
Isn't that essentially the same as reverse-mortgaging a part of your equity in your house (i.e., borrowing money against a chunk of ownership of your house) to get some liquid cash and then paying that off over time (which would make any income used towards paying off that loan also untaxed)? I was under an assumption that this was something that non-billionaire normal people do as well fairly often (disclaimer: i don't own any property myself, so I am not speaking from my own experience with it).
Of course you need to own a property to make use of that, so that would exclude plenty of people (i.e., non-homeowners), but it can be literally any property you own in any location (from California to Oklahoma to wherever else in the US). And the number of homeowners in the US is significantly larger and is more accessible than just billionaires and other megarich people.
Note: my comment talks about this in the context of the US-only, since that's what the rest of the comment chain is discussing + you can probably write a thick book if you tried answering it comprehensively in the context of all countries in the world.
(They might have if they were over the $12.02m lifetime gift limit but they probably weren’t if they had $12.02m to give away).
E.g. he starts an LLC, profits stay in the company, company provides meals, vehicle, and phone+plan for the execs, plus travel expenses, and he gets a low salary from which I guess he still has to pay his rent.
Or just plain rent it and sublet it to the CEO for peanuts.
(This is all fun speculation, but Nintendo lawyers aren't idiots - the actual settlement likely covers LLCs, startups, benefits, and all other obvious workarounds. Hell, it probably makes Nintendo entitled to the 30% of unreported cash income and proceeds from crime as well.)
It's unclear from the article what the nature of the payment is. It's described as a "fine" rather than "damages" but also mentions an "agreement with Nintendo".
He might be one tick better if someone else owned the LLC?