immigrants don't need to be 'taken care off' because legal immigrants in the US are net social contributors (in fact particularly large ones because the US government didn't subsidize their upbringing and education).
Five minutes on Google would have told you this, that is why "folks I'm just asking questions" gets downvoted, everyone can see through these pseudo gullible provocations
>because we'll keep running out of other people's money.
that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, for two reasons. For one, as even Paul points out in the piece, a wealth tax below what's practically a risk free return on capital (~5%) doesn't eat into the capital stock, it simply means wealth grows slower, but still increases.
Secondly, there's no monotonous historical direction towards higher wealth taxes, in fact the opposite. We're living in an age of low wealth taxation, with only half a dozen countries or so, if I'm not mistaken, imposing one at all.
The risk free rate of return is usually only a point or two above inflation, and I’d argue that real wealth, rather than nominal wealth, is the true measure to look at to determine whether someone’s position has improved, stayed flat, or decreased.
> it simply means wealth grows slower, but still increases
But what does this mean? If you have a load of money in some companies, that's helping to fund their activities, and the companies' share price goes up a bit, you haven't gained any money. And you won't gain any until you sell some shares, which is already taxed.
The debt doesn't just go away, and interest is paid on it. It's not "free". Etrade's best rate is 10.45%. If your stocks go bust, you're still on the hook for the margin debt.
That’s not how it works, though. Buy, borrow, die doesn’t rely on retail margin rates. It’s closer to 3-5%.
Assets are used as collateral for loans that don’t require any repayment until death. Generally the borrower can borrow up to 75% of their collateralized asset, and that loan is not taxed. When they die the assets are passed to heirs and stepped up to their current value as the new cost basis. They’re sold to repay the loan and interest. No taxes paid on the loan “income”, no taxes paid on the capital gains, 3-5% interest paid for the outstanding balance of the loan and I’m sure some of that gets taxed. Because the collateralized asset stays invested the entire time, it usually grows faster than the interest that will eventually be paid.
The 10.4% margin rate is Etrade's best interest rate, and it's only for large amounts. I looked it up.
> When they die the assets are passed to heirs and stepped up to their current value as the new cost basis...no taxes paid on the capital gains
And then your entire estate is taxed at 40%.
> and that loan is not taxed
Of course it is not taxed. A loan is not income, and is not an asset. It's a liability.
> Because the collateralized asset stays invested the entire time, it usually grows faster than the interest that will eventually be paid.
The higher the return, the higher the risk. It is normal practice to borrow money to invest it hoping for higher returns than the interest. It is not a scam.
Let’s say you put $20M as collateral for an SBLOC loan. The collateral amount and grows at ≥7%/year and you’re charged interest on your loan of 4%/year. You pull $1M/year that goes into the loan. This goes on for 40 years.
At death the cost basis is stepped up to the value at the time of death. All capital gains are erased.
Next, the loan is paid back before any distribution to heirs. This is done at 0% tax rate because it happens before any distribution to heirs.
Finally, the heirs get what remains and any inheritance tax applies to that.
So you got to live with no income tax related to capital gains. The capital gains are wiped out upon death.
Had you paid taxes along the way, you’d leave about $37M to your heirs (and none of that would be touched by inheritance tax).
If you did the SBLOC strategy,
The portfolio grew to around $300M. The loan principal and interest are around $100M. Taxes are $64M. Your heirs get to keep $136M.
There’s less risk since there is never any sales over a longer period, so the returns approach the average.
There’s more tax paid by the SBLOC strategy, it just happens very acutely instead of over time. The heirs are also left with significantly more.
All you're saying is that you can borrow money and invest it and hopefully you make more off of the investment than the interest on the money.
A loan is not income. After all, when you borrow a half million to buy a house, you aren't charged income tax on that. You also are not charged income tax on stuff you charged on your credit card.
would that matter? If it was funded by the public the institution which would own it would likely be a public one, which may come with different and more permissive licensing conditions, but the justification for OPs complaint "I can't even view my own paper", their emphasis on 'my own' wouldn't be true either.
Academics tend to do have a fairly odd and what seems like a romantic attitude to their work. They're employees, their programs and equipment are paid for by someone else whether that's the state or a business, they don't own it unless the terms they signed up to say so.
I think that's always been a feature of contrarianism itself. It's so much more difficult to be contrarian and correct than simply contrarian that it applies most of the time, especially if someone uses that label explicitly.
>But the shiny charmander card is where people draw the line?
this isn't just about trendy commercial items. Michael Sandel in 'The Moral Limits of Markets' called this 'Skyboxification'. These mechanisms like scalping affect sport events where people of different classes used to sit next to each other and where now low income earners are either priced out or delegated to the backrow. Cultural spaces that do not separate people into 'winners' or 'losers' but treat people equally are the basis of any civil society. It's where people from different walks of life come into contact.
they do since Substack was invented because it turns out a digital rehabilitation facility for whiny and overly wordy sore losers is a fantastic subscription business.
Might want to think about selling that one to Disney as well and then writing about your great regrets of selling your substack on substack v2 in ten years, that's gotta be amazing content for another ten posts
What are your criteria for recognizing a useful insightful blog into a poster's previous business ventures?
Few tellers are neutral and objective, many writers get accused of selectively editing things:
Philip Greenspun's account of the demise of Ars Digita springs to mind. Or Jerry Kaplan on Go (mobile startup). Or Joel Spolsky on the last decade of StackOverflow.
Maybe it's just a stylistic choice, but if this happened to me, I wouldn't write a long post about it. I'd tweet, "They deleted the archive; what a sad end to this chapter of my life" (or something like that to let the world know what happened & that I was disappointed), but I wouldn't write a long rant. Maybe a short blog post, maybe.
I don't view his post as useful or insightful, but instead view it as demonstrating a lack of understanding of normal business practices. It's like he didn't anticipate that this could happen, whereas it's always a risk when you sell out. The exact same thing has happened to lots of other small blog/media outlets, like Kara Swisher's Re/code. This isn't an unexpected situation, but he's acting like it is. And that simply demonstrates a lack of maturity.
it wasn't. Slave economies are exceptionally unprofitable and unproductive. To take the US as an example. Liquid wealth, i.e. capital, was vastly larger in the North than in the slave owning states, the industrial output of New York exceeded the entire Confederacy and it was that profitability, wealth and mechanized agricultural production that did them in.
Even Marx recognized this by the way, following feudalism capitalism was a progressive force, it was profit, productivity and surplus that enabled civil society, the north was more civil because it was rich and had unlocked modern forms of production. The problem of capitalism is not profit or lack of civil society.
Profitable/unprofitable is the wrong way of looking at it, because it implicitly ignores opportunity costs. Putting your money in a savings account at a big bank might be "profitable" in the sense you're getting paid some meager interest rate (eg. 0.1%), but it's definitely not the best option, like a money market fund or equity ETF. What OP probably meant was that slavery was worse than the alternatives, like putting your money in a savings account with meager interest rate.
I think you're missing the point OP was making. He's saying it's profitable but not optimal, those who recognised that quickly outstripped the slave owners in wealth.
I could ask you about your spending habits and why you don't pump all your money into an S&P 500 ETF, but that's ignoring time and consumption preferences you have, as well as perceived opportunity cost. It's not a useful observation to make at an individual level.
True, but "better than slavery or feudalism" isn't a winning tagline. Nor should it be an excuse for letting capitalism tear down civil society as it has been doing in the US recently.
he's not dumb or desperate compared to the average person, but it's very possible to be dumb and desperate compared to the delusional promises and outsized amounts of money in the industry. Manages to make smart people look extremely stupid every day.
>think some good evidence for this is that Ken Olsen, by most accounts, was a saint and he owned DEC
You're right that the money itself does not cause it but what mattered with people like Olsen was that he had a Scandinavian background and was born in the 1920s. 'Saint' is a telling description because people like him came out of a, not necessarily explicit but still functioning culturally Christian environment with virtues that tempered the influence money had on them, he often remarked that humility was most important to him.
Very different person from the current class of individuals who are completely unrestrained by the values people took for granted for a long time.
Has US Christianity always been like this or has it changed? It all feels very manipulative to me now and the morals / virtues seem to have fallen by the wayside.
it isn't, not in his sense anyway. The moderate, central and northern European mainline Protestantism that fostered democracy, education, an egalitarian social contract and temperance you if at all find now only in small pockets.
It's a huge mistake to confuse that kind of deep cultural Christianity with what has been politically ascendant for a long time now in the US. That older, European set of values is still much more alive in say Sweden, which despite an even higher per capita rate of billionaires would not produce Garry Tan or Bezos or Musk.
of course an editor like Zed is faster than CLion but it makes little sense to compare the two. People use full blown IDEs like Jetbrains or Visual Studio for their heavier features like debugging and profiling, not because they feel snappy. When I write C++ my workflow has always been to use vim for editing and use VS for debugging.
This isn't "curious discourse", whatyou're doing is JAQing off (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions)
immigrants don't need to be 'taken care off' because legal immigrants in the US are net social contributors (in fact particularly large ones because the US government didn't subsidize their upbringing and education).
Five minutes on Google would have told you this, that is why "folks I'm just asking questions" gets downvoted, everyone can see through these pseudo gullible provocations
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