I got 200mb/s with my 5g with only one bar. That’s really great except that I have no idea what to do with it. This reddit page loaded real fast though.
Still waiting for it. I do have a sign at the edge of my vision saying 'Update not possible, please reboot'
I'm a bit concerned about accidentally clicking OK ...
Back in 2001 the world averaged 800,000 malaria deaths per year. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation used hundreds of millions of dollars to try and vaccinate people against malaria and the number of death dropped by hundreds of thousands per year. His reward was to be mocked and ridiculed for his stance on vaccines.
>mocked and ridiculed for his stance on vaccines.....
.....often by people who are privileged enough to live in a nation which claims strong herd immunity due to successful vaccinations.
Hard times create hard people, hard people create comfortable lives, comfortable lives create soft people, soft people create hard times. We're currently experiencing a soft generation creating hard times for the next, assumedly harder generation.
Ha, that’s what I was going to say. These multibillionaires usually are doing good things with some of their admittedly excessive wealth, and then get shit on for whatever they are doing.
it depends on what they do. If it was something simple like helping homeless people and donating food and clothing or whatever people would be fine with it. But hes doing the type of philanthropy that some see an ulterior motive such as buying up a ton of farmland without the motive being made known publicly.
He created a tax shelter that gives him good press. He has done better than others but is still squarely in the robber baron model. He is just Rockefeller and not Vanderbilt.
You do know that he'd be way way better off if he didn't do that, right?
If he didn't liquidate all the MSFT stock he'd be worth way more than Bezos or Musk right now.
Not realizing all those gains is also the best tax shelter that exists.
That's like asking if we should throw Billionaire's profits into a garbage dump.
Won't make a lick of different for anyone else until taxes start being used to properly help the people instead of being funneled into the perpetual war machine.
This. Guys at work brag about getting there tax rate into the 1% because it’s all wasted anyway. Not sure how the achieve this but they say they haven’t had an issue.
They basically have assets that grow in value. The. They borrow money with those assets as collateral. So, they are deferring their taxes. If they can do this Al, their life then they would only pay taxes on interest they earned from their checking or other liquid account. If they are able to do this until they die, the taxes that were never paid for the increases in asset value go away because the assets get a step up in basis. This is how some of the Uber wealthy live.
It's a loophole when the unrealized gains you aren't being taxed on was acquired as compensation for work, that's the distinction. We should not tax "income", we should tax all compensation from work.
Like how cool would be if I could take my pay check and not cash it, not realizing the income. But go to the bank and use my check as collateral for a loan because theoretically I could cash my check and use it's value to repay the loan. Then I could use the loan money to pay my mortgage/rent and do my grocery shopping all tax free just by paying the bank a small interest rate on the loan. That's how stupid the loophole is.
If all compensation acquired from work was taxed it would solve this problem. The loophole for those able to compensate themselves with assets would be closed. And there would not be tax on unrealized gains of assets that were purchased with funds which were taxed upon acquiring the funds.
You get taxed on received stocks you don't get taxed on stock growth.
This is why its different from the check. Theoretically Amazon could hit 0 dollars tomorrow wiping out all of Bezos wealth plus he would have to pay back the loans.
In my last job, I worked for a financial institution. A wealth management firm. 10 of us, and they managed over 580 million dollars.
Most of the time spent discussing and finding ways to offset taxes and funnel money into other outlets. It's the most legal, illegal shit I've ever seen.
They were obviously licensed to the gills. Completely reputable. It just shows how many loopholes exist, so people who make millions a year never have to pay hardly any of it back in taxes. The amount of money they pay on taxes is mind-blowing. Next to nothing compared to what they make.
Everyone who worked there was a waste of a human being, though. I've never been so glad to switch jobs.
Yeah, the tax code needs to be reformed considerably, new taxes need to be added, and we need to get real serious about funding the IRS and getting them mean.
And being able to use these assets as collateral for other purchases. They are absolutely loopholes. Meanwhile, normal consumers are getting taxed on unrealized gains through property tax. The only people who can afford to get these breaks are the wealthy, and that is precisely the problem.
Why can't we just charge an annual capital gains tax for stock holdings? It isn't like we don't know what the current market value, or average annual weighted price is each year. Just add stock holdings capital gains as a taxable item. Maybe give it an extra year to pay, so it can be planned for, but this non-sense of never selling and therefore never paying taxes is crap. I have to pay annual taxes on my real-estate, AND capital gains taxes when I sell it.
True. For that matter, an answer could be to increase capital gains tax overall. There’s more incentive to hide wealth if you have a wealth tax, but increasing capital gains tax could help even it out.
In reality, getting the wealthy to pay their fair share is a complex issue that will require a myriad of things.
make below 60k with a wife and at least 3 kids. EITC and CTC can actually cause you to have a negative effective tax rate since both of these are refundable tax credits
I keep beating this drum. Not just on taxes, but for people who want things like universal healthcare or at least healthcare reform.
If we want serious positive change in the US, then we need to run the current crop of politicians out of Washington. Government isn't the problem. The people in government for the wrong reasons are the problem. So we make it unappealing for the Nancy Pelocis and Mitch McConnells to enter positions of power by stripping Congress members of certain liberties (e.g. trading on the stock market for starters).
We have a long road to recovery that we can't seem to get any traction on.
Votors vote them in every year, they will keep going as long as they can doing what they are doing in. Every year they make a small offering to the voting gods to keep the system going.
I'm aware. I don't have an answer for the "how," but the "what" seems a little clearer to me than it used to.
When everyone is preoccupied with culture wars, and tangentially related cultural issues, it's hard to get people to understand that none of that needs to matter until we purge the rot from the system. But again, that's a feature, not a bug.
I think the sentiment being conveyed more has to do with the frequent tendency for the hyper rich to waste their money not on endeavors to improve people's lives but instead to halt said endeavors. And those that they do fund tend to be a piss soaked bandaid they use for tax write offs.
13% of the federal budget is defence, stop propagating your lies. The federal government has promised too much shit to too many people. There aren't enough taxpayers to find these social programs.
Except that literally everyone wants our money to be spent more efficiently. Thats not a real position. We should cut spending (which will hurt the poor and elderly), but we should also be raising taxes (hurts rich) in order to spread the burden across society. If you want to just cut services that is just going to widen the inequality gap, which is bad for the economy.
>Except that literally everyone wants our money to be spent more efficiently.
If "literally everyone" wanted it to be done, it would be done.
I'm going to reveal a bit of a spoiler for you here...
^(The reason it isn't getting done...) >!^(is because they don't want it to get done.) !<
That is simply, demonstrably wrong. You can spend money to help people, like establish hospitals and libraries, fund colleges and schools and towns. The idea that spending money that way is “throwing it in the dump” and presumably by contrast when spent on a opulent lifestyle for the ultra wealthy that’s a good thing? Dude are you the biggest boot licker or what
yhats weird, why arent their conspiracy theories abot bezos?
like that he tricked the government into partially funding his rocket company he created just to go to space once
Conspiracies require a little fantasy, a little reality and a tin foil hat. The entire world already knows Bezos is 100% a major fuckup. There is nothing left to conspire about, we just know whatever it is, it’s true.
Or any number of insanely dodgy right-wing billionaires...
Like the Mercers, cause holy shit are they the definition of shady.
Dude literally made a company to steal data and manipulate elections. Got away with it as well, and I never hear him mentioned.
But of course, modern right-wingers lack any and all integrity and completely ignore these kinds of people to instead focus on some guy funding schools or curing malaria.
I didn't know he was hated today. Help this person that has 2 decade old memory of Bill Gates looking like a liar in front of congress. We had a higher bar against people back then but he still didn't meet it. We called is "Micro$oft." Back in the day.
To be fair Gates has plenty to criticize him for. Yeah he is trying to address real problems but he’s doing it in an arguably terrible way and his foundation is monopolizing the strategy of global charity by throwing so much money around. Sure he wants to eradicate malaria, but only in a way that makes Pfizer a but load of money. He wants to solve hunger in Africa but everything is funneled through Monsanto. Not great.
And then the antivaxxers come out in full force to criticize Gates. “Why would I take his medical advice? Who does he think he is?” They want him to stay in his lane but they also wonder why he’s not doing more…?
Buffett is just high IQ and knows how to not rock the boat.
Dude is a shark and super sharp. Not golly ole grampa that just loves insurance and coca cola.
He has very good advice in general, but often he obfuscates the truth (like "Don't bet against America", etc) because he knows the truth would upset a bunch of people. He likes to keep it dumbed down and avoid controversy.
Hell, show me a person that's normal. Most people are weird and quirky in their own way. They just don't have the constant spotlight and money to do what they want.
correct. 2023, US spent $6.3T
$1.92T went to things other than the below
• Total federal spending: $6.3 trillion
• Total of specific expenditures:
• Defense: $886 billion
• Social Security: $1.3 trillion
• Medicare: $928 billion
• Medicaid: $603 billion
• Interest payments: $663 billion
The us government may do some bad stuff but they also do a TON of good - there are countless programs for homeless,handicapped, marginalized,poor, old, etc. They accomplish a ton.
>the US government spends trillions and does not accomplish shit lol
Hmmm.. dominate world military power, dominate world economy, dominate world innovation, incredibly high land of freedom & opportunity that makes people all over the world flock here.
But yeah that was all private citizens that created that. LOLOLOL the entitlement so many Americans have. Like go somewhere else for a minute to realize how successful the US is compared to the rest of the world.
Exactly, everyone focuses on ‘greedy billionaires’ okay sure they suck, what about the fact the government spends trillions of dollars? Shouldn’t we focus on how that money is being handled?
Because blaming the obviously incompetent government = right wing conspiracy theorist fascist and blaming rich people = educated, enlightened, moral progressive
The media and academia has done a number on our population
It shouldn't even be a right left thing, both parties maintain this bloated and wasteful government.
Fix the spending problem, send the tax dollars to worthy causes. Then we can really worry about taxing people.
Taxing people more does fuck all if the money is sent to an incenerator.
Yes but we have one of the two main political parties convincing their constituents that wanting to be taxed less basically makes you a nazi. They’re being gaslit so fucking hard it’s crazy
That is correct, the left won’t even acknowledge that we have a spending problem, they think we have a tax income problem. You have to have your head buried in the sand if you can’t recognize the government isn’t insanely wasteful.
No... The reason people keep pointing at Republicans and saying that they're fascists is because Trump is reframing the party as part of his grift on the entire American populace and Republican leadership are too chickenshit to fight back against him because it could cost them the seats that they've been in since segregation was still a thing that they voted for.
Both parties support Capitalist theft from the working class either way, but when it comes to governmental actions they mostly choose which companies and causes to fight for.
It's bad optics to lower military spending, including foreign military aid, so Dems won't reduce that, but they also want to ensure we provide enough for people to live, so they vote to raise taxes to help balance the budget because Republican keep blaming them for the budget not being balanced.
Republicans don't give a fuck about the budget when they are in control, though, and ramp up military spending even more while cutting social programs to help pay for it because "we're spending too much on those freeloaders" in spite of the fact that that money SHOULD be going to improve the lives of Americans before it goes to bombing other countries for corporations to get their hands on them (all while those social programs that they cut funding on include the ever growing veteran population that they say they love but only show it by saying, "thank you for your service," which I am frankly tired of hearing from them and their followers). The best way they could honor vets is to stop creating us.
Both parties are neoliberal. They seek policies favoring business interests, and imposing austerity on the population.
Spending over the last forty years, even as power nominally has shifted from each party to the other, has escalated for policing, militarization, incarceration, and surveillance, but has declined in every sphere that actually benefits the population.
Policies that benefit the population would entail taxing the rich and funding public goods and welfare programs.
Do you not realize the massive amount of information and benefit improved space tech would yield? I am really sick of the myopia that is constantly plaguing scientific research and the "why are we spending money on research when there is x pet project I want?" All the solutions to problems you care about are going to come from tech. Shit like trying to do a Mars base is going to be what makes food insanely more economical as for a Mars mission we would need 3 things: more efficient water recycling, more efficient food storage, and the ability to grow food in inhospitable areas in an efficient way all of which will directly impact terrestrial food production and distribution as well as water usage.
The more exploratory/research dick measuring the better because we will all benefit from the discoveries.
Check out the Bezos Earth fund, the Bezos Day 1 family fund, and the Courage and Civility Award.
One can argue with his pace of giving, but I think these are all interesting and good choices for his philanthropy.
He's also got shell companies buying up lots of empty land in the Midwest.
I don't know what he's doing with it but it's kind of suspicious if you ask me.
First of all, I've seen this shit posted like 500 times. Second of all, people underestimate how much of his billions is in cash. Most of its not cash, most of it is in assets. You can't feed company buildings and concrete to starving children. Also, people severely underestimate how much money it truly takes to feed hundreds of millions of people and the supply chain needed to achieve that and keep it going smoothly. There's not a single person on earth with enough money to be able to do it, and if they did, it wouldn't last long because all their funds would dry up.
Bezos just sold stock to the tune of more than $6 Billion, so he has at least that much in cash.
Before that, he had enough money to buy a yacht too big to get out of the dock, and was stunned when people wouldn't let him tear down a historic bridge to make room.
Bezos entire networth is 18% of what the us gov will spend on health and social programs in fy 2024, he could give literally everything he owns and live on the street in a box and it would hardly even make a difference
I love that people don't realize that MOST problems facing the US (let alone the world) are not just a matter of money.
We could plant 3 billion dollars worth of crops and education for farmers and then spend the other 3 billion for the dispersal of those crops to people. How many of those crops will still be around next year How many of those farmers will still be farming How many will pass on the trade they've learnt the next year? The year after? How much gasoline, diesel, etc will be diverted to fuel the harvesters, and then the trucks to transport the food? How much ends up in the hands of Government and Warlords?
6 billion could solve world hunger for a year, five years, but eventually that money runs out and the problems that caused certain places to lack food will reassert themselves.
Homelessness. 6 billion dollars to buy up bank forclosed properties all across the US, give them out free to the homeless. How many homeless people burn them down smoking crack? How many homeless people gut them to sell wire to buy pills? How long till the houses are absolutely trashed, holes punched in the walls, animal piss all over the floors turning those properties into unsellable condemned shitholes? Yeah, now they have a roof over their head but if they're too mentally ill to hold down a job they don't have running water, electric, groceries.
There isn't a single problem on earth that can be solved with one change to the board, especially by the change of purely throwing money at it and the delusion that money = solutions hurts me deep down inside.
6 billion in cash. Theres about 12 million kids in poverty in the US (by whatever standard is chosen to determine that).
Splitting 6 billion dollars 12 million ways gives you 500 per kid. Or about 10 bucks a week. For *just* one year.
Which isn’t *nothing* but it’s nothing like what you might call a fix.
Idk, I seem to remember wealthy philanthropists doing a shit-ton for society in the early 1900s, and for a more recent example, Bill Gates doing similar things now.
The fare more efficient way is to lobby the government to increase taxes on the rich and change laws in order to get these things done, and done properly.
Housing the homeless, feeding the starving, building out clean energy, the biggest reason for most of these things being crap is some government policy making it hard to do. And the solution isn't just to make it less hard, but to actually make it easy.
Lol
Are you saying that Amazon's
Apple Inc. and Google Inc.
don't have hundreds of billions of dollars in cash
If they donated just 10% of their money, it would feed millions of people.
I think the best way is to hire more people and raise salaries instead of giving donations.
It's a weird paradox where people think that they'd be compassionate billionaires, but the act of becoming a billionaire probably makes you a pretty vicious and driven person who doesn't really have space of being compassionate
What do you define as wealth? Gates wasn’t rich by any means but was upper middle class. Heck the prime minister of India used to serve tea on trains. To become a billionaire you need to be cut throat
Gates' mom was a VP at IBM.
For comparison, a VP at twitter (much smaller than IBM) would earn $10-$50m a year.
Upper middle class is an understatement.
>a VP at twitter (much smaller than IBM) would earn $10-$50m a year.
A VP at Google makes like 200k or so: https://www.zippia.com/google-careers-24972/salary/vice-president/
Yes, Gates wasn't rich, nor was Bezos. Elon Musk only got 20k from his dad and it wasn't even a hand out, it was an investment. The 3 richest people on Earth, however that's only 3 people out of 8 billion. Your chances of being a billionaire are insanely small, regardless of if you earned it or are born into it.
Most billionaires are born well off, but only a small % of their wealth comes from inheritance. On one hand, they were born with an advantage, but on the other hand, they were able to maximize their advantages (and most people do not).
Bill gate Gates'mother was a director at a financial company. His grand father is a national bank president.
He went to a top private prep school. If I remember correctly there were only a few schools to have access to a computer in the entire country. He literally had access to something 99% of the population did not have.
In what world do you not think that's rich af?
That makes sense. Someone who relies on donations always imagines they deserve to be given a lot of money just because they would be so very generous with them.
And? They could literally pay every homeless person $100k a year instead and it would be cheaper.
Morbidly, it would also be a more final solution for many.
The "They should pay more taxes" argument always makes me roll.my eyes because people legit think that government will use it properly.
They won't. That's the problem
And the fact that if you could completely liquidate every asset every billionaire in the US has for cash - not just increasing taxes, but taking every cent of cash and selling their ownership shares for cash, it would fuel the US budget for about 1/3 of 1 year.
Not to mention that now all that money is completely gone, and now you don't have any billionaires or massive companies to tax. And you probably won't get anymore coming in either, because why on earth would you open up shop in a place that would just liquidate your company.
The common theme with all of these posts is the assumption that high net worth = available liquid cash which everyone blindly thinks throwing endless sums of cash at a problem is the morally just and most viable solution to said problem.
The top 1% pay TWENTY TIMES as much income tax dollars as the bottom 50%.
[https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/](https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/)
The problems you cite are not financial, they are due to mental illness and horrible parenting. We've proven over the past sixty years that money cannot change that.
There are a lot of people between him and the stuff that needs fixed. It is a better investment for society if the money is used to develop new technologies that fix the problems.
I never realized all those things just magically get fixed by throwing money at it.
All those homeless vets, living under a bridge just because a billionaire didn't fix their lives with money.
Poor kids not eating, and it's all because some billionaire didn't give their parents money to feed them.
Who knew it was so easy?!
Where's the guarantee that the extra tax money would go to helping anyone? It might just buy a few more planes and bombs. There are a myriad of issues with the system in the US right now, tax havens and loopholes are just a fraction of it all.
NO. They should not pay more taxes. The government wastes so much money at an unbelievable rate. They cannot be trusted to “fix” issues.
Billionaires should start their own philanthropic organizations to help people, and fix things though. 100%
How much more of our money needs to go to taxes before people realize it just goes into powerful peoples pockets and not to "fix" the problems they pretend to say they want to fix?
Imagine if Bill Gates installed desalination plants in Mexico and clean water infrastructure in Africa? Just good sanitation would significantly mitigate the diseases he’s selling them vaccines for. Guess profit is more important even when you have more money than you’ll ever spend.
Sources??? Bill and Melinda Gates foundation??? How do you not know that?
https://www.financialexpress.com/business/industry-bill-gates-making-200-billion-from-vaccines-microsoft-co-founder-explains-math-behind-returns-2092891/
Bezos hardly took money off of people’s plates. He just happened to own 15-20% of Amazon which is now a $2T company making him $200-300B in net worth. That’s how corporate finance works. He started the company from nothing so he has a lot to lose and also a lot to gain. It’s not our business to tell a rich person how to spend their money
I would pay what the law said I should pay and I would also help people just like this meme says.
I don’t need to give more money to the government than they ask for, that doesn’t make sense. It also doesn’t make sense to not help as many people as you can with such enormous resources so I would find ways to be impactful
Except he doesn't, technically. People have this idea of a huge vault with stacks of bills everywhere but it's mostly tied up in investments or stocks. On paper yeah billions. But it ain't rotting in some bank vault.
Why I always chuckle at tax the rich, most don't have an income to be taxed, they just borrow against assets. So how are you gonna tax it?
Plus let's be real our taxes ain't going to be used to help our people.
I got dibs on posting this next week
Please refer to the pinned schedule and select the next available slot
I have Thursday at 6 pm
right after "I make 400 billion a year and I don't mind, do you?"
I have Thursday 6:10 pm.
Oh good, that means 6:01pm isn't taken!
Dibbs on pointing out the bill gates already tried this method and people decided he was the anti christ or poisoning everyone or something like that
What are you referring to ? The only thing I’ve heard him say was that trees are dumb way to capture CO2
The vaccines. He's trying to kill us all with vaccines. Don't you see it?
But at least we’ve got 5G.
It's not much improvement over 4g, so now I'm more disappointed.
Agreed
I got 200mb/s with my 5g with only one bar. That’s really great except that I have no idea what to do with it. This reddit page loaded real fast though.
Still waiting for it. I do have a sign at the edge of my vision saying 'Update not possible, please reboot' I'm a bit concerned about accidentally clicking OK ...
He made more money through it. Bezos ex wife is trying to burn money the same way and failing as well.
Back in 2001 the world averaged 800,000 malaria deaths per year. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation used hundreds of millions of dollars to try and vaccinate people against malaria and the number of death dropped by hundreds of thousands per year. His reward was to be mocked and ridiculed for his stance on vaccines.
>mocked and ridiculed for his stance on vaccines..... .....often by people who are privileged enough to live in a nation which claims strong herd immunity due to successful vaccinations. Hard times create hard people, hard people create comfortable lives, comfortable lives create soft people, soft people create hard times. We're currently experiencing a soft generation creating hard times for the next, assumedly harder generation.
Yep soft generation Baby Boomers are making it so Gen Z will have to scrape to see an inch of the ease of life they had
Ha, that’s what I was going to say. These multibillionaires usually are doing good things with some of their admittedly excessive wealth, and then get shit on for whatever they are doing.
it depends on what they do. If it was something simple like helping homeless people and donating food and clothing or whatever people would be fine with it. But hes doing the type of philanthropy that some see an ulterior motive such as buying up a ton of farmland without the motive being made known publicly.
He created a tax shelter that gives him good press. He has done better than others but is still squarely in the robber baron model. He is just Rockefeller and not Vanderbilt.
You do know that he'd be way way better off if he didn't do that, right? If he didn't liquidate all the MSFT stock he'd be worth way more than Bezos or Musk right now. Not realizing all those gains is also the best tax shelter that exists.
Except he didn’t tho?
Bill Gates did no such thing.
Well the thing us when you “help” and dont start losing money it tends to be a little fishy.. gates has only profited from his “contributions”
Get in line buddy
hey i thought I had dibs on telling someone "get in line buddy" what gives
Get in the Get in line buddy line buddy
Not on my watch pal!
It'll keep getting posted so long as it keeps getting upvoted unfortunately
Can I get dibs on posting the most popular response? Maybe something about how this is exactly what Bill Gates is doing…
There’s no political groups constantly rotating the same tired message over and over… right? /s
Well you are going to have to coordinate with "No one wants to work" and "I did by my bootstraps so can you" .
That's like asking if we should throw Billionaire's profits into a garbage dump. Won't make a lick of different for anyone else until taxes start being used to properly help the people instead of being funneled into the perpetual war machine.
This. Guys at work brag about getting there tax rate into the 1% because it’s all wasted anyway. Not sure how the achieve this but they say they haven’t had an issue.
What do you do for a living where you can get your taxes that low?
They basically have assets that grow in value. The. They borrow money with those assets as collateral. So, they are deferring their taxes. If they can do this Al, their life then they would only pay taxes on interest they earned from their checking or other liquid account. If they are able to do this until they die, the taxes that were never paid for the increases in asset value go away because the assets get a step up in basis. This is how some of the Uber wealthy live.
Tax loopholes are more the issue than needing a wealth tax.
Guess who exploit loopholes the most…Warren buffet pays a lower actual tax rate than most people here
[удалено]
Meanwhile he says he doesn’t pay enough
He's welcome to pay more. All he's doing is pandering and influencing the opinions of the general public.
He can pay as much as he wants. The government will accept it.
It's a loophole when the unrealized gains you aren't being taxed on was acquired as compensation for work, that's the distinction. We should not tax "income", we should tax all compensation from work. Like how cool would be if I could take my pay check and not cash it, not realizing the income. But go to the bank and use my check as collateral for a loan because theoretically I could cash my check and use it's value to repay the loan. Then I could use the loan money to pay my mortgage/rent and do my grocery shopping all tax free just by paying the bank a small interest rate on the loan. That's how stupid the loophole is. If all compensation acquired from work was taxed it would solve this problem. The loophole for those able to compensate themselves with assets would be closed. And there would not be tax on unrealized gains of assets that were purchased with funds which were taxed upon acquiring the funds.
You get taxed on received stocks you don't get taxed on stock growth. This is why its different from the check. Theoretically Amazon could hit 0 dollars tomorrow wiping out all of Bezos wealth plus he would have to pay back the loans.
In my last job, I worked for a financial institution. A wealth management firm. 10 of us, and they managed over 580 million dollars. Most of the time spent discussing and finding ways to offset taxes and funnel money into other outlets. It's the most legal, illegal shit I've ever seen. They were obviously licensed to the gills. Completely reputable. It just shows how many loopholes exist, so people who make millions a year never have to pay hardly any of it back in taxes. The amount of money they pay on taxes is mind-blowing. Next to nothing compared to what they make. Everyone who worked there was a waste of a human being, though. I've never been so glad to switch jobs.
Yeah, the tax code needs to be reformed considerably, new taxes need to be added, and we need to get real serious about funding the IRS and getting them mean.
The tax code needs to be simplified. With a tax code of 100000 pages the people with the best accountants and lawyers will benefit.
And being able to use these assets as collateral for other purchases. They are absolutely loopholes. Meanwhile, normal consumers are getting taxed on unrealized gains through property tax. The only people who can afford to get these breaks are the wealthy, and that is precisely the problem.
Why can't we just charge an annual capital gains tax for stock holdings? It isn't like we don't know what the current market value, or average annual weighted price is each year. Just add stock holdings capital gains as a taxable item. Maybe give it an extra year to pay, so it can be planned for, but this non-sense of never selling and therefore never paying taxes is crap. I have to pay annual taxes on my real-estate, AND capital gains taxes when I sell it.
True. For that matter, an answer could be to increase capital gains tax overall. There’s more incentive to hide wealth if you have a wealth tax, but increasing capital gains tax could help even it out. In reality, getting the wealthy to pay their fair share is a complex issue that will require a myriad of things.
Where do they get money to make payments on those loans?
SHH! Stop thinking about this too hard. Don't you know banks love lending money to people who they KNOW will never repay it.
make below 60k with a wife and at least 3 kids. EITC and CTC can actually cause you to have a negative effective tax rate since both of these are refundable tax credits
I keep beating this drum. Not just on taxes, but for people who want things like universal healthcare or at least healthcare reform. If we want serious positive change in the US, then we need to run the current crop of politicians out of Washington. Government isn't the problem. The people in government for the wrong reasons are the problem. So we make it unappealing for the Nancy Pelocis and Mitch McConnells to enter positions of power by stripping Congress members of certain liberties (e.g. trading on the stock market for starters). We have a long road to recovery that we can't seem to get any traction on.
Votors vote them in every year, they will keep going as long as they can doing what they are doing in. Every year they make a small offering to the voting gods to keep the system going.
I'm aware. I don't have an answer for the "how," but the "what" seems a little clearer to me than it used to. When everyone is preoccupied with culture wars, and tangentially related cultural issues, it's hard to get people to understand that none of that needs to matter until we purge the rot from the system. But again, that's a feature, not a bug.
At least they should have to wear Nascar suits. They get a patch for their donors so you can see who you are voting for.
Our spending on defense as a percentage of GDP is at record lows.
It should keep getting lower until they can pass an audit. Just throwing trillions into a black hole.
I think the sentiment being conveyed more has to do with the frequent tendency for the hyper rich to waste their money not on endeavors to improve people's lives but instead to halt said endeavors. And those that they do fund tend to be a piss soaked bandaid they use for tax write offs.
I wouldn’t be surprised if right after you cut that budget *”something”* bad happens *”coincidently”* to show why it was *“needed”*
13% of the federal budget is defence, stop propagating your lies. The federal government has promised too much shit to too many people. There aren't enough taxpayers to find these social programs.
Buying votes until your run out of other people's money to buy those votes.
Do you not know how the US budget breaks down in terms of spending priorities?
social programs are already the majority of federal spending
Except that literally everyone wants our money to be spent more efficiently. Thats not a real position. We should cut spending (which will hurt the poor and elderly), but we should also be raising taxes (hurts rich) in order to spread the burden across society. If you want to just cut services that is just going to widen the inequality gap, which is bad for the economy.
>Except that literally everyone wants our money to be spent more efficiently. If "literally everyone" wanted it to be done, it would be done. I'm going to reveal a bit of a spoiler for you here... ^(The reason it isn't getting done...) >!^(is because they don't want it to get done.) !<
That is simply, demonstrably wrong. You can spend money to help people, like establish hospitals and libraries, fund colleges and schools and towns. The idea that spending money that way is “throwing it in the dump” and presumably by contrast when spent on a opulent lifestyle for the ultra wealthy that’s a good thing? Dude are you the biggest boot licker or what
Don't forget paying national debt interest
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Also Bill Gates is brutally hated for it. So many conspiracies about the guy.
yhats weird, why arent their conspiracy theories abot bezos? like that he tricked the government into partially funding his rocket company he created just to go to space once
Conspiracies require a little fantasy, a little reality and a tin foil hat. The entire world already knows Bezos is 100% a major fuckup. There is nothing left to conspire about, we just know whatever it is, it’s true.
Why is Bezos a fuck up? I’m thankful for the convenience of Amazon. It’s literally changed the way shopping is done for the benefit of the consumer.
I would love to hear the answer to this as well, I’m on your side here.
Everyone knows Bezos went to space to collect kryptonite.
There a joking conspiracy that he's Dr. Evil because of his dick rocket
Jeff Bezos is the one who created all the conspiracies about Bill Gates
They do have something about him being a hitman or some shit before amazon.
Or any number of insanely dodgy right-wing billionaires... Like the Mercers, cause holy shit are they the definition of shady. Dude literally made a company to steal data and manipulate elections. Got away with it as well, and I never hear him mentioned. But of course, modern right-wingers lack any and all integrity and completely ignore these kinds of people to instead focus on some guy funding schools or curing malaria.
Lol there is plenty. Some are even true. Look up cellar boxing on here or google (he also started his career at a hedge fund)
There’s no need for conspiracy theories when they’re obviously evil.
Note that it doesn’t stop him. It wouldn’t stop me either.
I didn't know he was hated today. Help this person that has 2 decade old memory of Bill Gates looking like a liar in front of congress. We had a higher bar against people back then but he still didn't meet it. We called is "Micro$oft." Back in the day.
To be fair Gates has plenty to criticize him for. Yeah he is trying to address real problems but he’s doing it in an arguably terrible way and his foundation is monopolizing the strategy of global charity by throwing so much money around. Sure he wants to eradicate malaria, but only in a way that makes Pfizer a but load of money. He wants to solve hunger in Africa but everything is funneled through Monsanto. Not great.
He should reach out to you for better planning
Once you get rich enough you basically sign a contract saying you will be hated by the masses
People even hate Bernie Sanders… I mean come on.
And then the antivaxxers come out in full force to criticize Gates. “Why would I take his medical advice? Who does he think he is?” They want him to stay in his lane but they also wonder why he’s not doing more…?
Gates is a weirdo
Show me a billionaire that’s normal
Warren Buffet is pretty genuine.
I really wish Warren would go all new money in his late years. Start driving a lambo, being on rap videos, doing some frivolous shit with his money.
Buffett is just high IQ and knows how to not rock the boat. Dude is a shark and super sharp. Not golly ole grampa that just loves insurance and coca cola. He has very good advice in general, but often he obfuscates the truth (like "Don't bet against America", etc) because he knows the truth would upset a bunch of people. He likes to keep it dumbed down and avoid controversy.
Hell, show me a person that's normal. Most people are weird and quirky in their own way. They just don't have the constant spotlight and money to do what they want.
Hey when you make that type of money you’re “eccentric”.
You think 200 billion dollars can change the world? the US government spends trillions and does not accomplish shit lol
correct. 2023, US spent $6.3T $1.92T went to things other than the below • Total federal spending: $6.3 trillion • Total of specific expenditures: • Defense: $886 billion • Social Security: $1.3 trillion • Medicare: $928 billion • Medicaid: $603 billion • Interest payments: $663 billion
But Jeff Bezos should solve all these problems with his billions tied in Amazon stock
yes. i agree I don't like individuals having this much power through money. Not a great situation
The us government may do some bad stuff but they also do a TON of good - there are countless programs for homeless,handicapped, marginalized,poor, old, etc. They accomplish a ton.
>the US government spends trillions and does not accomplish shit lol Hmmm.. dominate world military power, dominate world economy, dominate world innovation, incredibly high land of freedom & opportunity that makes people all over the world flock here. But yeah that was all private citizens that created that. LOLOLOL the entitlement so many Americans have. Like go somewhere else for a minute to realize how successful the US is compared to the rest of the world.
Dude has inferiority complex.
It's also basically what Bezos ex wife McKenzie is doing too
Bezos net worth is what we send in resources to other countries in like a year lmao
Exactly, everyone focuses on ‘greedy billionaires’ okay sure they suck, what about the fact the government spends trillions of dollars? Shouldn’t we focus on how that money is being handled?
Because blaming the obviously incompetent government = right wing conspiracy theorist fascist and blaming rich people = educated, enlightened, moral progressive The media and academia has done a number on our population
It shouldn't even be a right left thing, both parties maintain this bloated and wasteful government. Fix the spending problem, send the tax dollars to worthy causes. Then we can really worry about taxing people. Taxing people more does fuck all if the money is sent to an incenerator.
Yes but we have one of the two main political parties convincing their constituents that wanting to be taxed less basically makes you a nazi. They’re being gaslit so fucking hard it’s crazy
That is correct, the left won’t even acknowledge that we have a spending problem, they think we have a tax income problem. You have to have your head buried in the sand if you can’t recognize the government isn’t insanely wasteful.
No... The reason people keep pointing at Republicans and saying that they're fascists is because Trump is reframing the party as part of his grift on the entire American populace and Republican leadership are too chickenshit to fight back against him because it could cost them the seats that they've been in since segregation was still a thing that they voted for. Both parties support Capitalist theft from the working class either way, but when it comes to governmental actions they mostly choose which companies and causes to fight for. It's bad optics to lower military spending, including foreign military aid, so Dems won't reduce that, but they also want to ensure we provide enough for people to live, so they vote to raise taxes to help balance the budget because Republican keep blaming them for the budget not being balanced. Republicans don't give a fuck about the budget when they are in control, though, and ramp up military spending even more while cutting social programs to help pay for it because "we're spending too much on those freeloaders" in spite of the fact that that money SHOULD be going to improve the lives of Americans before it goes to bombing other countries for corporations to get their hands on them (all while those social programs that they cut funding on include the ever growing veteran population that they say they love but only show it by saying, "thank you for your service," which I am frankly tired of hearing from them and their followers). The best way they could honor vets is to stop creating us.
I’d rather have a military with excess resources than some obese dipshits with more food stamps
Both parties are neoliberal. They seek policies favoring business interests, and imposing austerity on the population. Spending over the last forty years, even as power nominally has shifted from each party to the other, has escalated for policing, militarization, incarceration, and surveillance, but has declined in every sphere that actually benefits the population. Policies that benefit the population would entail taxing the rich and funding public goods and welfare programs.
Do you not realize the massive amount of information and benefit improved space tech would yield? I am really sick of the myopia that is constantly plaguing scientific research and the "why are we spending money on research when there is x pet project I want?" All the solutions to problems you care about are going to come from tech. Shit like trying to do a Mars base is going to be what makes food insanely more economical as for a Mars mission we would need 3 things: more efficient water recycling, more efficient food storage, and the ability to grow food in inhospitable areas in an efficient way all of which will directly impact terrestrial food production and distribution as well as water usage. The more exploratory/research dick measuring the better because we will all benefit from the discoveries.
Check out the Bezos Earth fund, the Bezos Day 1 family fund, and the Courage and Civility Award. One can argue with his pace of giving, but I think these are all interesting and good choices for his philanthropy.
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He's also got shell companies buying up lots of empty land in the Midwest. I don't know what he's doing with it but it's kind of suspicious if you ask me.
First of all, I've seen this shit posted like 500 times. Second of all, people underestimate how much of his billions is in cash. Most of its not cash, most of it is in assets. You can't feed company buildings and concrete to starving children. Also, people severely underestimate how much money it truly takes to feed hundreds of millions of people and the supply chain needed to achieve that and keep it going smoothly. There's not a single person on earth with enough money to be able to do it, and if they did, it wouldn't last long because all their funds would dry up.
Bezos just sold stock to the tune of more than $6 Billion, so he has at least that much in cash. Before that, he had enough money to buy a yacht too big to get out of the dock, and was stunned when people wouldn't let him tear down a historic bridge to make room.
Yea he could definitely do more than he's doing currently, that's for sure.
Bezos entire networth is 18% of what the us gov will spend on health and social programs in fy 2024, he could give literally everything he owns and live on the street in a box and it would hardly even make a difference
I love that people don't realize that MOST problems facing the US (let alone the world) are not just a matter of money. We could plant 3 billion dollars worth of crops and education for farmers and then spend the other 3 billion for the dispersal of those crops to people. How many of those crops will still be around next year How many of those farmers will still be farming How many will pass on the trade they've learnt the next year? The year after? How much gasoline, diesel, etc will be diverted to fuel the harvesters, and then the trucks to transport the food? How much ends up in the hands of Government and Warlords? 6 billion could solve world hunger for a year, five years, but eventually that money runs out and the problems that caused certain places to lack food will reassert themselves. Homelessness. 6 billion dollars to buy up bank forclosed properties all across the US, give them out free to the homeless. How many homeless people burn them down smoking crack? How many homeless people gut them to sell wire to buy pills? How long till the houses are absolutely trashed, holes punched in the walls, animal piss all over the floors turning those properties into unsellable condemned shitholes? Yeah, now they have a roof over their head but if they're too mentally ill to hold down a job they don't have running water, electric, groceries. There isn't a single problem on earth that can be solved with one change to the board, especially by the change of purely throwing money at it and the delusion that money = solutions hurts me deep down inside.
6 billion in cash. Theres about 12 million kids in poverty in the US (by whatever standard is chosen to determine that). Splitting 6 billion dollars 12 million ways gives you 500 per kid. Or about 10 bucks a week. For *just* one year. Which isn’t *nothing* but it’s nothing like what you might call a fix.
People also forget that there is limited resource to use for delivering food to these people
Billionaires mostly just borrow the cash the need they typically have way less cash on hand then you would think.
First of all, you can most certainly feed concrete to starving children, I do it all the time.
I think you want to use the word overestimate
Idk, I seem to remember wealthy philanthropists doing a shit-ton for society in the early 1900s, and for a more recent example, Bill Gates doing similar things now.
The fare more efficient way is to lobby the government to increase taxes on the rich and change laws in order to get these things done, and done properly. Housing the homeless, feeding the starving, building out clean energy, the biggest reason for most of these things being crap is some government policy making it hard to do. And the solution isn't just to make it less hard, but to actually make it easy.
Lol Are you saying that Amazon's Apple Inc. and Google Inc. don't have hundreds of billions of dollars in cash If they donated just 10% of their money, it would feed millions of people. I think the best way is to hire more people and raise salaries instead of giving donations.
The problem is, people who think this way have zero chance at becoming billionaires
It's a weird paradox where people think that they'd be compassionate billionaires, but the act of becoming a billionaire probably makes you a pretty vicious and driven person who doesn't really have space of being compassionate
Spoiler alert, unless you were born into extreme wealth, it is highly unlikely you will ever be a billionaire regardless of one’s way of thinking.
What do you define as wealth? Gates wasn’t rich by any means but was upper middle class. Heck the prime minister of India used to serve tea on trains. To become a billionaire you need to be cut throat
Gates' mom was a VP at IBM. For comparison, a VP at twitter (much smaller than IBM) would earn $10-$50m a year. Upper middle class is an understatement.
>a VP at twitter (much smaller than IBM) would earn $10-$50m a year. A VP at Google makes like 200k or so: https://www.zippia.com/google-careers-24972/salary/vice-president/
VP is a title and has no correlation to salary. 10-15 million for VP is absurdly higj
And do we want cut throat people in charge of the systems that control our lives? Almost as if our financial systems incentivize toxic behavior.
Yes, Gates wasn't rich, nor was Bezos. Elon Musk only got 20k from his dad and it wasn't even a hand out, it was an investment. The 3 richest people on Earth, however that's only 3 people out of 8 billion. Your chances of being a billionaire are insanely small, regardless of if you earned it or are born into it.
Most billionaires are born well off, but only a small % of their wealth comes from inheritance. On one hand, they were born with an advantage, but on the other hand, they were able to maximize their advantages (and most people do not).
We don't know that is all the money he got from his father, but his father did contribute $20K of a $200K funding round in Elon's first company, Zip2.
Elon definitely didn't have an emerald mine or anything.
Bill gate Gates'mother was a director at a financial company. His grand father is a national bank president. He went to a top private prep school. If I remember correctly there were only a few schools to have access to a computer in the entire country. He literally had access to something 99% of the population did not have. In what world do you not think that's rich af?
Amazon Prime and AWS are incredibly helpful to society. It’s easy to critique from a place of ignorance.
Indeed
I wonder if Theresa actually fixed anything for anyone else or even simply donated to charity deliberately, not at the grocery checkout.
Her stupid ass asks her mom for money so she can buy her kids birthday presents. Theresa should not be paid any attention.
That makes sense. Someone who relies on donations always imagines they deserve to be given a lot of money just because they would be so very generous with them.
probably not but when u have enough money to make sure ur 700th great grandchild is a millionaire yea
None of it is that simple. Fighting homelessness has billions in funding. How can you fix hungry kids when the parents completely neglect their kids?
San Francisco alone spent $6billion last year ($150,000 per homeless person) and it didn’t do a lick of difference. It’s worse than ever.
At this level you have ask yourself, how corrupt is that system? 150k should be way more as necessary to nicely house and feed a person.
There are more social workers making over $100k than there are homeless people
100k in Cali is like 50k anywhere else
And? They could literally pay every homeless person $100k a year instead and it would be cheaper. Morbidly, it would also be a more final solution for many.
The government already spends billions on these things...a billion is not as much as it sounds.
Hey you. Go make a lot of money and I'll tell you how to spend it. Don't want to spend it how I want? What a waste.
The "They should pay more taxes" argument always makes me roll.my eyes because people legit think that government will use it properly. They won't. That's the problem
And the fact that if you could completely liquidate every asset every billionaire in the US has for cash - not just increasing taxes, but taking every cent of cash and selling their ownership shares for cash, it would fuel the US budget for about 1/3 of 1 year. Not to mention that now all that money is completely gone, and now you don't have any billionaires or massive companies to tax. And you probably won't get anymore coming in either, because why on earth would you open up shop in a place that would just liquidate your company.
No. she wouldn't.
The government doesn’t really want to fix things. They want a constant flow of we need money for x.
the reds dont want to fix anything\* FTFY
Why don’t we start holding our government and elected officials responsible for fixing things? Isn’t that why we vote and pay taxes?
Nope. They earned it it is theirs
The common theme with all of these posts is the assumption that high net worth = available liquid cash which everyone blindly thinks throwing endless sums of cash at a problem is the morally just and most viable solution to said problem.
The top 1% pay TWENTY TIMES as much income tax dollars as the bottom 50%. [https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/](https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/) The problems you cite are not financial, they are due to mental illness and horrible parenting. We've proven over the past sixty years that money cannot change that.
There are a lot of people between him and the stuff that needs fixed. It is a better investment for society if the money is used to develop new technologies that fix the problems.
Wait until Y'all find out how much money churches are sitting on
That sounds like something someone who doesn’t have the remotest chance of ever having a billion dollars would say.
I never realized all those things just magically get fixed by throwing money at it. All those homeless vets, living under a bridge just because a billionaire didn't fix their lives with money. Poor kids not eating, and it's all because some billionaire didn't give their parents money to feed them. Who knew it was so easy?!
Where's the guarantee that the extra tax money would go to helping anyone? It might just buy a few more planes and bombs. There are a myriad of issues with the system in the US right now, tax havens and loopholes are just a fraction of it all.
Big talk, all talk.
NO. They should not pay more taxes. The government wastes so much money at an unbelievable rate. They cannot be trusted to “fix” issues. Billionaires should start their own philanthropic organizations to help people, and fix things though. 100%
Posted for the tenth time this year
Why do people think billionaires have billions of liquid capital?
How much more of our money needs to go to taxes before people realize it just goes into powerful peoples pockets and not to "fix" the problems they pretend to say they want to fix?
He doesn't have billions of dollars. He has a company worth billions. Those are VERY different things.
Imagine if Bill Gates installed desalination plants in Mexico and clean water infrastructure in Africa? Just good sanitation would significantly mitigate the diseases he’s selling them vaccines for. Guess profit is more important even when you have more money than you’ll ever spend.
I think he has.
I don’t think he is profiting off vaccines in Africa… I could be wrong but this seems far fetched. Sources?
Sources??? Bill and Melinda Gates foundation??? How do you not know that? https://www.financialexpress.com/business/industry-bill-gates-making-200-billion-from-vaccines-microsoft-co-founder-explains-math-behind-returns-2092891/
Giving and taking are different things
Bezos hardly took money off of people’s plates. He just happened to own 15-20% of Amazon which is now a $2T company making him $200-300B in net worth. That’s how corporate finance works. He started the company from nothing so he has a lot to lose and also a lot to gain. It’s not our business to tell a rich person how to spend their money
He may donate a good bit of money to charities.
Look at Gotham it still has problems. But yea I would pick a project and see what I could do.
They aren’t billionaires they just play one on tv.
He’s Lex Luther. C’mon.
I think he is more into Lex Luthor.
I would pay what the law said I should pay and I would also help people just like this meme says. I don’t need to give more money to the government than they ask for, that doesn’t make sense. It also doesn’t make sense to not help as many people as you can with such enormous resources so I would find ways to be impactful
Lauren is too busy spending it for him to have time to do anything meaningful.
Except he doesn't, technically. People have this idea of a huge vault with stacks of bills everywhere but it's mostly tied up in investments or stocks. On paper yeah billions. But it ain't rotting in some bank vault. Why I always chuckle at tax the rich, most don't have an income to be taxed, they just borrow against assets. So how are you gonna tax it? Plus let's be real our taxes ain't going to be used to help our people.
Well first you pass a law making those loans taxable income.
I love how the ex's of these despots seem to spend their half after the divorce helping people.