It's not for sport, but it's by the same means anyone with even remotely complex assets gets tax advantages. You pay someone to manage your tax returns for you. You will naturally, by trial and error and recommendations from friends (and in the case of these billionaires, probably have accountants knocking on your door asking to do your returns for hefty fees), end up with the person (or organisation) who saves you the most money, because why wouldn't you?
Now, you're still liable for not paying tax you should've paid, but I don't think people are going out of their way to find tax loopholes. Accountants do that for them, and there is absolutely no incentive to find an accountant that's more "ethical" because, for that industry, it makes no sense to do anything other than get the most back for your clients.
You're right though. There would be no tangible impact to these people's lives, and it's for this reason they should all be supportive of increasing the tax they pay.
I've got a pretty good mixture of qualifications and am working in a tech adjacent role so I'm not starting from nothing. I have some decent connections and might be able to carve out something at my current org. So it could be worse.
Reddit death > installing mint on my second PC > realising I can run most of the games I play and installing mint on my main PC > start learning Rust as a first foray into programming in a long time > realise I want to go back to uni and study info tech to get out of my shitty marketing job > get a shitty second hand laptop off my parents that struggles to run windows and install endeavourOS to try something different.
It really is a slippery slope. When does it end???
I actually agree about both games feeling clunky as fuck to play, and struggling to engage with the stories. I always thought I was insane because everyone tells me how good the Witcher is.
Completely agree that it'd be good to actually know someone megarich. I think that's one of the biggest problems in modern society, that people don't have enough opportunities to interact with those outside of their immediate social spheres. I think if the megarich had to interact with normal people (and vice versa) we would all understand each other much better.
I guess I do agree also that no one is entitled to a rich persons money. I guess to go back to fairness though, I find it unfair that there are people going without basic human needs in the same countries as there are people figuratively hoarding piles of gold
I think there are two factors that make it make sense to me.
People who make oodles of money, that these taxes actually impact, generally don't make that money by being any more productive than the rest of us. They won the birth lottery, or found the right way to exploit other people's labour, or created artificial demand, and so on and so forth. So, they don't really "deserve" that money. I personally agree with this, but I don't think it's a great argument in favour of higher wealth taxes because it's a pretty subjective take.
The purpose of tax is to allow us to collectively allocate wealth to improve society as a whole. We might not all agree on how that should be allocated - some people think we should spend more on health or the military or education or social welfare - but tax is a tool that we (as a culture) have decided is a good way to make sure that we make progress in some shared direction. It's not wrong to think that tax is wrong, but I personally believe that if we didn't have that system, the world would go nowhere because everyone would only spend in their personal interests. Cynical, sure, but it is what it is.
With this in mind I think it makes a bit more sense. Increasing the proportion of tax paid by the 0.1% of people who have the most only marginally affects those people, but the amount of money raised which can be used on common interests has the possibility of doing far more good, for far more people. That money has the potential to be more productive if it wasn't tied up in bonds, or gold, or Bitcoin, or etc.
Many/most western countries already use progressive tax brackets. Wealth taxes, to me, are just adjusting those to "catch up" with the modern definition of wealthy.
Equal proportion is not the same as fair. It's a matter of scale. Low, middle, and even upper middle class people will actually feel the impact of, say, a 2% increase in taxes. Someone making more than a million dollars a year will not. It'll be a simple blip on a balance sheet and their quality of life will not be affected in any way.
The overemphasis on bad guy is just exaggerating the way we already place emphasis on the two different meanings of the phrase.
At least in my accent, I place slight emphasis on bad if I'm talking about an "enemy", whereas the emphasis falls on guy if I'm making a character judgement of a person.
I don't know if I'm making any sense at all, but I think that's what they're going for.
Same here. Occasionally served with liqueur, something like Kahlua or Bailey's.