If he did pay a high tax rate every time he realized his gains in any way or tapped his equity through a financial instrument, I think things would be much better. But right now Bezos can pay a realized tax rate of under 20% if he wants.
The data in your source indeed does not seem to consider capital gains tax, as they seem to reflect the top tax bracket on average for different states and locales, whereas if capital gains were considered in relation to the state in which they are realized, it would certainly be much lower.
Except this was true during WW2, also. You have to do an apples-to-apples comparison of what the top 1% of income earners paid then vs now. The shift in income to capital gains tax doesn't matter since the capital gains tax is the same, and the shift would have simply happened quicker with income taxed the way it was.
Also, collateralized loans don't change anything besides simply delaying when the tax is paid. One needs to realize some gain somewhere to be able to pay back the loan eventually.
> The data in your source indeed does not seem to consider capital gains tax, as they seem to reflect the top tax bracket on average for different states and locales, whereas if capital gains were considered in relation to the state in which they are realized, it would certainly be much lower.
Yes, but capital gains taxes have been the same, so in effect this source undercounts the intensity of this effect. It doesn't matter if there are more multi-millionaires today that do not qualify as the "top 1% of income earners", because they would pay the same capital gains tax then vs now.
If you see everyone as atomic agents of work, is Bezos worth so much because of cherry picked models favored by law, or is he himself distributing goods in a universally mathematically efficient way by some unknown force, invisible hands and “free markets (in a nation of laws?)”?
If he’s literally doing it, wow! Ok. But if it’s mathematical efficiency it’s mathematical efficiency. Bezos didn’t measure it. He took object distribution and abstracted it. Wow! Business innovation!
Nevermind guys like Krugman openly admit Hari Seldon like powers of bending social agency are exactly his goal
That’s great if the people in charge are truly benevolent
Old enough to wreck the planet and die before it’s a problem doesn’t really suggest to me they’re going to be motivated to voluntarily acquiesce to measurable anxiety this creates for folks that aren’t quite so old
Again more disingenuous western BS
That carbon emissions have detrimental effects on human health and the environment was pretty obvious in London and elsewhere back in the day
But since it’s not in your neighborhood, those laws of physics that matter for computers are lying to us when we annotate the inputs differently?
Ok. Yup. Shark jump achieved.
> If he’s literally doing it, wow! Ok. But if it’s mathematical efficiency it’s mathematical efficiency. Bezos didn’t measure it. He took object distribution and abstracted it. Wow! Business innovation!
I guess optimization of global supply chains in a way that enables anyone to practically materialize literally anything they want within 2 days might not count to you as a real “innovation”, so I’ll take a different angle.
Half of Amazon’s revenue comes from Amazon Web Services. Starting a business today is easier than it has ever been, thanks in large part to AWS. I work at a small seed-stage tech startup, and our product runs on infrastructure that, until recently, was only available to giant blue chip corporations with the resources to employ 100s of engineers to maintain datacenters, databases, tooling, monitoring & alerting, load balancing, etc. All of that is now available to our tiny little team for a simple monthly subscription fee. You can attribute the value of most startups today to the availability of this infrastructure as a service.
> That carbon emissions have detrimental effects on human health and the environment was pretty obvious in London and elsewhere back in the day
Not sure how this is relevant to income tax rates, gig workers, or labor unions — but we probably agree that carbon emissions are bad. IMO we should tax emissions as much as possible.
I'm much less concerned with one Bezos than I am with thousands of multi-millionaires.
Yes, the vast majority of corporate executive wealth is delivered through stock compensation vs cash compensation. Executive compensation can be in the millions of dollars per year, but that's nearly always in stock options[1]. The marginal income tax rate variation between WW2 and Reagan would not have changed this.
Also, the scary wealth disparity numbers you see floating around are typically attributed to the growth in wealth of BILLIONAIRES (usually ultra paper rich founders). Put simply, the GDP has grown at historic rates over the last 40 years, and the gains from that have gone to the founder-class. Most non-founder executives aren't billionaires.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/02/05/465747726/-682...
we should instead treat all income the same for tax purposes.
Even back then, none of the super rich were paying that income tax rate, because the wealthiest people in the world owe their wealth to ownership in their corporations.
Are you talking about income taxes? Because, yes you're right that Federal income taxes are nowhere near what they were post-WW2, but...
> and the growth in the wealth of the middle class during the same period
...the wealth of the upper class has grown to historic levels because the vast VAST majority of upper-class wealth right now (top 0.1%) is 1) in unrealized capital gains, and 2) once capital gains are realized, they are taxed at the same rate that they were all the way up until the 70's, where it spent a brief decade moderately higher than it is today.
Bezos doesn't have $100B+ sitting around in a checking account, and a WW2-era marginal tax rate wouldn't really raise as much as you think it would. Most of the richest billionaires have a salary of $1.