You can 'throw' what you can afford and it will feel as satisfying. Just try it.
I don’t believe donating $400 really feels that satisfying, the impact is fairly negligible in most contexts whereas donating $400k can very visibly improve a lot of lives.
I think this illustrates just how much a billion dollars is and maybe why a very small wealth tax can be used for a lot of good in society.
In many(most?) parts of the world, $400 is the equivalent of months of good salary.
I donated $6000 to a halfway house last year and that doesn’t even come close to covering a single bed for a year. If I was a billionaire I could have built an entire halfway house.
Now if you invest $6000 and no one else was doing it, they would probably have created some percentage of 1 bed out of it. And if 18 other people invest $100 each maybe that's enough to complete the bed for a year. And if those altogether 19 people hear that the money went to good use, they donate again and they tell their friends. Maybe the halfway house in 10 years starts earning $25k per year and they keep costs low and the beds start increasing, they rent more space.
The government forced funding breaks it and turns it into a fake jobs program, the community funding it actually makes the service accountable.
Public spending on things that require (a) maintainance (as almost all things do) (b) are massively less functional if the investment is not sustained (as many things are) is inherently going to lead to suboptimal results. It's equally bad if private entities do this, but for one reason or another, people seem to bitch about this less, because, well "freedom" etc.
Public spending (private too!) is also bad if it creates unnecessary bureaucracies and unnecessary obstacles. This can be tricky because defining "unnecessary" requires a set of values and these may not be universally accepted.
So, if you have a government program that behaves as in your hypothetical example, then the problem is inefficiency, corruption and waste, not government.
Since about 30% of my lifetime pay goes to taxes, and I am estimated over my entire life to make about $7m in salary. $1M of that is taxed, so potentially 300k of money is going to SCAMS.
Think about it, what if the government just decided tomorrow to give back all this money. I could finally afford to buy a house! But instead of me being able to buy a house, let's put another million bucks in a suitcase to fly to Mogadishu.
The problem is when people identify government as the problem, rather than those 3 attributes.
>>I donated $6000 to a halfway house last year and that doesn’t even come close to covering a single bed for a year. If I was a billionaire I could have built an entire halfway house.
We need some mechanism to select people who makes the choice. Popularity/lying contest (politics) ain't it. People making money conducting honest business is the best mechanism we have.
What percent of billionaires have made it through “honest business”?
I’m sure glad Zucc stole all my personal info to sell to advertisers so he can decide where society allocates its capital.
You have no way of possibly knowing this. And I bet you its not true.
I'm no longer a billionaire, partially because I paid an astronomical amount in taxes (I don't play the tax avoidance games). And partially because we're donating a whole lot more than $400K per year. This is ONE donation. We don't publicize most of our giving because it attracts armchair critics like you, and its distracting from the goals.
(I make an exception for Zig and technical things because my influence for better and worse usually is net positive for the initiative)
But, more importantly, I don't think playing these "my donation is worth more than yours" games is productive. If you want to think that way thats fine, I won't defend myself or my family any further than this post.
I do know this for a fact because my income has 10x over the course of my career and as I have made larger donations to match my increased income I do feel more satisfaction.
I’m not trying to belittle what you are doing, I am replying to someone who said to the order of “you can just be like mitchelh by donating as well” which I don’t think is true due to the orders of magnitude more impact that large donations can result in.
Also, a lot more people (more than 1000x) have $400 to give than $400k so in a sense if people with $400 to give were all being very generous, they could amount to a lot more than what billionnaires could give.
What?
About liquidity, yes most people with a million net worth actually have more than half in their house, so technically it is much harder for them to throw cash than somebody with a billion and a much smaller % of their worth in illiquid assets such as property or unlisted companies. I wish I had made this point too.
Also, donating appreciated stock avoids taxes. This donation may have come out of a donor-advised fund.
Rich people can make substantial charitable donations rather easily and make a big difference. I suggest we encourage them.
That $50 million a year is also subject to income taxation and cannot be easily avoided. $50 million a year in interest on returns from cash will be hit at the 37% marginal rate, plus whatever the state assesses, so north of 50% in California.
isn't the accrued billion dollars what remains after a much larger amount was taxed at roughly 50%?
(of course could be spread across multiple years, but the essence remains)
How would the "very small wealth tax" be calculated, that you propose?
Most capital owned by billionaires is not taxed until it is sold, so in the case of Hashimoto and others they most likely have not paid tax on the majority of their wealth.
> How would the "very small wealth tax" be calculated, that you propose?
In the same way we calculate income tax, we make it up. Most numbers I see are between 1-3%. We could just start at 1% as that is the most conservative number.
It is possible to tax unrealized assets. We already do. For example, a property owner pays property tax based on the value of their property, even when they are not selling it.
It is possible for billionaires to borrow against their held assets. It is therefore also possible to calculate a tax on them.
If the idea of taxing unrealised gains and investments excites you, there is the EU... which here on HN is constantly being decried as unable to innovate in the startup space, get good startups going, accomplish anything with AI, and so forth.
So many reasons why it's not a good idea to have a wealth tax. But the biggest reason is that nearly all our tax money is going to fraud. This is why our economy would BOOM if we got rid of a lot of taxes and reduced our fed/state governments a LOT. I just want roads, military and police. There is no reason why we should allow our government to be weaponized or turned into a nanny state when SO much of they money they collect is wasted.
Corporations that provide money for causes is often looked at because it's an investment. The world can learn a lot of free market capitalism, but it keeps pretending that half the people won't just DIE in communism.
This is your brain on X.com.
How? It'll just go to the gov. budget which will be mostly used to pay for bloated healthcare, military and interest.
It's not an equivalent. It's proportionally the same but it's completely different.
>>I think this illustrates just how much a billion dollars is and maybe why a very small wealth tax can be used for a lot of good in society.
If anything it illustrates taxes should be lower for people like Hashimoto. Giving even more money to the government instead of leaving it with people like Hashimoto will result in a huge net loss.
Billionaires who do good are the exception, which Hashimoto is.
1. Net worth is significantly less than that (taxes + heavy philanthropy)
2. $400K donation is orders (plural) of magnitude off our actual philanthropic giving in total. This is just one donation.
I am personally just tired of it, and it's brilliant to see someone thriving outside of the zone to working for work's sake. Even if the realities are different.
Hope we had more people like you whom we all could disagree with but mutually respect.
Cheers to a better future. (hope it wasn't too much waxing poetic but I feel like we are just too damn trapped in this tech bubble to value good moments these days)
There are some advantages to tax. But most of it is not spent on making lives of citizens easier.
~400–800 million people (top 5–10% of global earners) could easily pay $833/month without major struggle, assuming they earn >$100,000/year.
So 90% people couldn’t even afford to pay a whole month of salary to a median earner without major struggle.
~3.6 billion people (45% of the global population) can likely afford to drop a $0.25 coin in a hat for a street artist without financial struggle. But that might not feel exactly the same as giving a whole month of median salary, let alone 40 years of it.
Banks try to avoid holding excessive amounts of cash in suburban branches because it makes them attractive armed robbery targets. If you have a need for a large amount of cash, you can let them know (my bank says 24-48 hours in advance), go to multiple branches, or to a large city branch. Inconvenient, perhaps, though temporary. If it's for a business or a recurring need your bank is generally happy to make that part of their regular logistics, "Monday's cash delivery needs X because asimovDev regularly wants $50,000 in cash every Wednesday".
> it has to be approved
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I don't think it's "approved" in the sense of the bank deciding if you're allowed to do so. But hmm: multiple ID checks, or a specific seniority of bank employee doing the check. Or if you decide you want to take out $250,000 and you have to do it in cash, they might a) want a day or two to physically acquire the cash, and/or b) have additional security due to their insurance policy. They certainly might try to suggest you look at a cashier's check or wire transfer or other instrument to do so. There's going to be a CAR for any transaction involving more than $10,000 in cash.
But I'd challenge the assertion that the bank tells you you're "not allowed" to withdraw "large amounts of cash" from an otherwise unencumbered bank account.
[0] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/two-americas-one-bank...
People I know who have $250k in cash or cash like assets generally keep it in a mix of dollars, euros (one paranoid guy I know has a bunch of Canadian dollars - no idea why), junk silver, gold / silver bars (for the former, you're talking about $150k just for a 1kg bar), a collection of watches that appreciate in value, and so on. To quote one guy, "I want to make sure we can wear my family's wealth", which they indeed did (for no good reason, they're just from a cultural background that leads to them being paranoid about banks) when they moved from Scandinavia to Australia - watches, gold bars, etc. on them and their children's persons, valued easily north of $300k in current money.
you give a $200k donation, get a $200k writeoff, saves you about 50% (100K) in taxes you owe, so it's like the government is kicking in $100k and you are kicking in $100k and whatever the govt would otherwise spend the $100K on goes unfunded.
I could, perhaps, see them wanting to be cautious if you appear to be having an obvious mental health crisis (but even then, as a paramedic I've heard more than one tale of families ruined by the spending of someone who was unmedicated and bipolar).
I could even potentially see there being a law enforcement issue of creating a panic or riot, exaggerated for example: "I'm going to take this money and throw it on the tracks at a train station and people can see how much risk they're willing to take to get it".
But "you have to give us an acceptable reason"? No. I am of comfortable but not exorbitant means (lower six digit salary), and my cash withdrawal limit, by default, is $15K/day. And the one time I asked for that to be raised temporarily, the only questions I got were for an additional piece of identification, and that they were able to call the contact numbers they had for me on my account to verify that it was me who picked up the call. Not "for what purpose, sir?"
EDIT2: Actually it’s more interesting. The commenters seem have changed their wording away from what I was criticizing.
Original observation: Try to purge envy from your heart. It’s a poison.
There was originally a lot of dark envy in this thread but interestingly it’s been revised out to be more subtle.
I've spent a lot of time in communities trying to grow past 'money' and decided that the usual replacement is allegiance to some other ideology that aligns everyone's incentives to a common cause or cult. I'd rather have diverse incentives with a common language of cash.
If you went to school and believe what you write then you went to terrible schools.
I don't think Humans can ever do anything other than capitalism because at the end of the day, a farmer making food and delivering it is just going to STOP working when he finds out a daycare owner has made $15 in 3 years without actually taking care of kids. And everyone just bubble wraps the explanation - and then they disallow anger. The farmer then writes up a proposal for starting a daycare and the food stops flowing. Everyone dies in communism.
Everyone dies in capitalism as well though. Everyone dies generally at some point in life.
Reality is, currently most of us are wage slaves and I'd love to work a little less and still be able to afford life. An alternative to capitalism would be socialism and killing corrupt people off.
Cool cool that doesn’t sound tyrannical at all
Capitalism has done a lot of good in the world, and it has also done a lot of bad.
The problem isn't that capitalism exists, it is that far too many people treat it as a religion rather than a tool.
There is clearly something broken about the neoclassical market economy where it is optimal to not have children and to collapse the ecosystem with climate change (the economist who got a riksbank price for his climate change work suggested that 4°C warming is economically optimal).
There are just purely economic problems caused by wealth inequality too because while money numbers can just keep going up infinitely, there are only so many real assets (and services like education and healthcare) that can be bought with those money numbers, so the higher the wealth of the top relative to everyone else, the easier they price everyone else out of the economy, which we are very much seeing the effects of over the last few years as things get increasingly K-shaped and the middle class vanishes.
All of this said, the last time and place I'm going to be snarky or critical of any one person's wealth is when they are voluntarily redistributing it to improve things for the common good.
If anything, inflation is the hoarding.
Rich people indirectly hold money by owning shares in companies that hold the money on their behalf. If the money is paid out via stock buy backs, the money is in the hand of the investor. Said money is reinvested into companies, those companies may temporarily pay out salaries, but eventually the money returns back to the investor leading to a dynamic form of hoarding. They started with less money but ended up with more money. The only way dishoarding can happen is if the money is spent on consumption.
Let me repeat:
If you understand the above, then inflation doesn't impact the rich who don't consume anything. If anything the opposite is true. The government/central bank throws just enough money into the system to prevent the economy from collapsing from the hoarding since money is needed as a tool or utility the same way housing is needed. As far as we know the preferred method of giving out that money to cause inflation has never been helicopter money, it's been quantitative easing which historically benefits the capital markets more or basically made the government take on more public debt.
Then there is the fact that any system where income is proportional to ownership basically negates the impact of inflation for said income. If you earn 3% yield at 3% inflation you might say that this nets out to 0%, but it doesn't. In nominal terms that is still a net inflow of money. You might counter that multi billionaires only turn into trillionaires on paper from inflation but they are still just multi billionaires. The point is that despite this real yield of 0%, the total share of money held by said multi billionaires can still go up and increase inequality even if in real terms their actual wealth did not change simply because consumers pay inflation and the billionaires don't.
If you ever bothered doing even a little bit of research the standard solution to "growing past money" is either something like a demurrage currency or the banking version called oeconomia augustana by dieter suhr (the bank charges a liquidity fee on both positive and negative balances to encourage getting to 0 residual balances, the liquidity fee is automatically determined by competition between banks, it is essentially a private implementation of Keynes' bancor proposal).
Now you might argue that “vacations” aren’t “life changing”, but I would certainly argue that if you never would have had the experience or seen the place then they absolutely can be. But even if not, I refer you back to the original thesis which is that “life changing” is relative. Because the sums of money we’re talking about would have been “pay my rent for a year”, “buy a reliable (used) car”, “reduce my student loan balance by nearly a third” sort of money. And those I think could all be reasonably said to be life changing sorts of things.
Finally I would suggest that if you are “throwing away” this sort of money on actually changing someone’s life, then you are by definition not “hoarding money” and can hardly be said to be poisoning society with your relative wealth.
I don't feel a need to know too much about the particulars of mitchellh's life or what else he spends his money on.