There’s No Such Thing as a Good Billionaire
ObjectivityIncarnate @ damnedfurry @lemmy.world Posts 0Comments 588Joined 1 yr. ago
ObjectivityIncarnate @ damnedfurry @lemmy.world
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The premise that merely having more than you need is inherently unethical is completely arbitrary, doubly so when only applied to those who have the most.
I live a fairly simple and frugal lifestyle. The amount of money where I am living at the standard of living ideal for me, and my "savings are enough to ride out life in comfort", is likely a much lower number than most others in the US.
Does that make me more ethical than those others? I don't believe so.
What happens when something already owned grows in value past the arbitrary maximum? Net worth is, after all, a function of how valuable everyone else thinks the stuff you own is. It's a price tag.
If you buy a rookie baseball card for $5, and the player has a great year and now your card is worth $100, did you deprive anyone of $95 by continuing to own it?
could solve a lot of world issues and still have enough money left over to not know what to do with it.
There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.
It's just not that simple.
The guy who founded Costco and was its CEO up until a few years ago is this, if not very close. A business lauded for both how it treated its workforce, and its customers. Basically no turnover unless someone retires.
All of your points involved putting words in my mouth, and evading the simple facts:
- It's been tried myriad times already, and has failed not only to increase tax revenue from the wealthiest, but also failed to increase the overall amount of tax revenue, period
- You clearly have no historical knowledge of the above, nor of why they failed and were soon repealed by every nation that implemented it, or neutered completely out of their ostensible aim to target the ultra-wealthy, and becoming just another tax burden for the middle class
- The above makes it extra clear that the 'but it'll work when we do it' is a completely empty claim. If you can't even articulate why it failed all those times before, how can you hope for a more successful attempt?
All you've done here is straw man me and accuse me of being condescending, while desperately evading the above.
Do you really think all those countries that implemented and then later repealed their wealth taxes, got rid of them because they were effective? Use your brain.
You aren't the god of econ 101
Yeah, it doesn't take a god to understand that something we already know doesn't work shouldn't be attempted again.
There is a reason that the could of countries that still have wealth taxes (read: didn't repeal them outright) changed them so that they're no longer aimed at the wealthiest, and they've become just another tax primarily shouldered by the middle class, defeating the whole stated purpose of getting more tax revenue out of the ultra-wealthy.
a false point, that being a wealth tax doesn't help just because it can be done poorly.
You say this as if what's being proposed in the US is materially different from the previously-failed implementations around the world.
It isn't. There has been no good answer to the question 'how do we keep this from being the catastrophic failure it was elsewhere?' from its proponents. They're just doing the infamous definition of insanity, just try the exact same thing and expect a better result, because reasons.
I feel like the Nazi angle range is a bit too wide, lol. Look at the top end of the red, that's definitely still in the range of calling a waiter or flagging down a cab.
He's not the president.
If I refer to the negative outcome of something already attempted multiple times, while people insist we should try doing the exact same thing in ignorance of those attempts and they outcomes, there is no "feigning" going on; I actually do know more.
And my analogy is directed at the people who have demonstrated their ignorance/naivete by insisting that raising taxes always leads to an increase in tax revenue, even though, again, knowledge of that history makes it clear that not only is that not a given, but that it literally caused the opposite every time previously attempted.
You need to stop feigning competence when you're insisting we repeat others' mistakes. Learn some history.
No, they abandon it because the total tax revenue after implementation literally goes down instead of up, lol.
Just because 100 people will buy your product X at $10 and you make $1000, doesn't mean you're guaranteed to make $2000 if you sell X for $20 instead. That's basically the same principle--raising taxes doesn't necessarily lead to an increase in revenue. People react to changes in policy.
This is not speculation, it literally already happened. Stop speaking about this from your assumed expectations and learn the actual history.
No. Leave my IRA and 401k alone.
There is a reason every country that's tried a wealth tax has abandoned it (or neutered it to the point that it's primarily the burden of the middle class, completely defeating the ostensibly-stated purpose of getting more money from the wealthiest), learn some world history.
And it's nearly always these Andrew-Tate-loving pound shop alphas.
Nah, it's not that deep--tons of men and women make this particular mistake (writing "women" when intending to use the singular "woman") for some bizarre reason. I've observed this phenomenon for well over a decade. Notably, I've never really seen someone write "woman" when they mean "women", only the other direction. And never with man/men at all. Very odd, specific error.
Maybe it's a "should of"-type mistake, I can only guess. But what I know for sure is that it's a very common mistake, and almost certainly unintentional.
What the fuck and die
Yeah, that is definitely a newer development. I'd bet the vast majority of men's rooms that have them didn't get them at the same time as the women's rooms, unless the building itself is fairly new construction.
At the same time, any effect like this would likely be present to an equal or very similar degree in any measurement of DV among the general population, so while it could be harder to confidently report an absolute figure, you could much more confidently compare them relative to each other (such that you can easily refute "three times more likely" claims like in the OP).
And I'd be right to, if I was the kind of person who called someone else names for no reason beyond supplying evidence that contradicts an assumption/bias of mine.
You're the one who fits that description here, though.
The original source of the oft-spread "40%" figure also counted incidents where the one reporting was the victim. If cop/civilian couple had "a one time push, shove, shout, loss of temper, or an incidents where a spouse acted out in anger" within the relationship, with the cop being on the receiving end of the civilian spouse's 'abuse', that relationship was tossed into the 'domestic violence' bucket, because it was actually counting relationships, not cops.
My point is that yes, you can definitely argue one might be reluctant to admit to one's own acts of DV, but I don't think anonymously reporting your spouse's acts against you would be 'stifled' the same way.
To add to this, I'll toss in a copypasta I've seen that has a few other/different links/info:
Hello, you seem to be referencing an often misquoted statistic. TL:DR; The 40% number is wrong and plain old bad science. In attempt to recreate the numbers, by the same researchers, they received a rate of 24% while including violence as shouting. Further researchers found rates of 7%, 7.8%, 10%, and 13% with stricter definitions and better research methodology.
The 40% claim is intentionally misleading and unequivocally inaccurate. Numerous studies over the years report domestic violence rates in police families as low as 7%, with the highest at 40% defining violence to include shouting or a loss of temper. The referenced study where the 40% claim originates is Neidig, P.H.., Russell, H.E. & Seng, A.F. (1992). Interspousal aggression in law enforcement families: A preliminary investigation. It states:
Survey results revealed that approximately 40% of the participating officers reported marital conflicts involving physical aggression in the previous year.
There are a number of flaws with the aforementioned study:
The study includes as 'violent incidents' a one time push, shove, shout, loss of temper, or an incidents where a spouse acted out in anger. These do not meet the legal standard for domestic violence. This same study reports that the victims reported a 10% rate of physical domestic violence from their partner. The statement doesn't indicate who the aggressor is; the officer or the spouse. The study is a survey and not an empirical scientific study. The “domestic violence” acts are not confirmed as actually being violent. The study occurred nearly 30 years ago. This study shows minority and female officers were more likely to commit the DV, and white males were least likely. Additional reference from a Congressional hearing on the study: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951003089863c
An additional study conducted by the same researcher, which reported rates of 24%, suffer from additional flaws:
The study is a survey and not an empirical scientific study. The study was not a random sample, and was isolated to high ranking officers at a police conference. This study also occurred nearly 30 years ago.
More current research, including a larger empirical study with thousands of responses from 2009 notes, 'Over 87 percent of officers reported never having engaged in physical domestic violence in their lifetime.' Blumenstein, Lindsey, Domestic violence within law enforcement families: The link between traditional police subculture and domestic violence among police (2009). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/1862
Yet another study "indicated that 10 percent of respondents (148 candidates) admitted to having ever slapped, punched, or otherwise injured a spouse or romantic partner, with 7.2 percent (110 candidates) stating that this had happened once, and 2.1 percent (33 candidates) indicating that this had happened two or three times. Repeated abuse (four or more occurrences) was reported by only five respondents (0.3 percent)." A.H. Ryan JR, Department of Defense, Polygraph Institute “The Prevalence of Domestic Violence in Police Families.” http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/virtual_disk_library/index.cgi/4951188/FID707/Root/New/030PG297.PDF
Another: In a 1999 study, 7% of Baltimore City police officers admitted to 'getting physical' (pushing, shoving, grabbing and/or hitting) with a partner. A 2000 study of seven law enforcement agencies in the Southeast and Midwest United States found 10% of officers reporting that they had slapped, punched, or otherwise injured their partners. L. Goodmark, 2016, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW “Hands up at Home: Militarized Masculinity and Police Officers Who Commit Intimate Partner Abuse “. https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2519&context=fac_pubs
It's unfortunate the Viagra and Cialis didn't do the trick, but we do have an alternate treatment we can try.
Charities do more than throw money at problems. This doesn't contradict my point at all, which is that money alone is not the answer--if it was, all of these problems would have been solved by now.
As a small example, you can't truly solve world hunger until you achieve world peace, and you can't buy peace.