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https://www.foxnews.com/us/jeff-bezos-amazon-ceo-worth-137-billion-to-divorce-wife-of-25-years
"Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie are divorcing after 25 years of marriage, the Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner has announced, potentially leading to the costliest divorce settlement in history with $137 billion at stake."
The richest man in the world, currently worth about $137 billion, according to Bloomberg, made the divorce announcement on Wednesday on his Twitter.
[...]The split could lead [to] the costliest divorce is[sic] history, even if the couple doesn’t divide the money equally. There are no reports indicating the couple has a prenuptial agreement, meaning the wealth accumulated during their marriage would have to be split evenly.
Also covered by CBC, CNN, and CNBC among other news outlets.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 10 2019, @01:09PM (6 children)
It just works. That's all.
What's "too great" about said wealth discrepancy? What is even the difference between earned and accumulated wealth? Why would a "hard look" do anything productive - is there anything better out there?
I see the same envious concerns brought up over and over again. Surely, you should first show that there is a problem worthy of such concern. Second, you should show that you have something resembling a solution, if you're going to advocating taking stuff away from someone because of that problem.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:48PM (5 children)
>It just works. That's all.
So does socialism, communism, and gift economies. The question is only how effective are they at promoting wealth generation, and how effective are they at distributing that wealth equitably. Capitalism seems to be the most successful system yet developed for generating wealth, but it consistently fails badly at distributing it equitably over the long term.
>What's "too great" about said wealth discrepancy?
Well, when wealth inequality is increasing faster than wealth, so that hard-working segments of society are actually losing wealth despite increasing productivity, there's probably a problem (which is currently happening in the U.S., as a large segment of the society is now looking at being less wealthy than their parents, despite a steadily increasing GDP)
> What is even the difference between earned and accumulated wealth?
I already explained that - earned wealth is wealth that you *personally* generate. The craftsman produces wealth with every new widget he builds (or field he tills, or haircut he provides). The merchant generates wealth by connecting craftsmen with customers. The manager generates wealth by managing the logistics so that the craftsman can focus on his craft. The investor gambles by providing capital for others to grow their business. But the craftsman is the origin of most wealth, all others only expedite the process. When managers and investors then demand the lion's share of that wealth for themselves, there is a problem.
> Second, you should show that you have something resembling a solution, if you're going to advocating taking stuff away from someone because of that problem.
So drawing attention to a problem isn't an important first stop to solving it?
I'm also not necessarily advocating taking anything away from anyone - stopping people from taking substantially more wealth than they generate works even better. But those taking the wealth have spent a great deal of time, effort, and power crafting an economic system that favors their parasitic behavior. And convincing people such as yourself that it's an inherently wonderful system worth defending against any questioning. That makes at least taxing them so that we can reclaim some of our wealth to support the social infrastructure a much simpler band-aid solution to implement. Doesn't actually solve the problem, but at least it eases the weight of the yoke around our necks while we look for something better.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 11 2019, @04:20AM (4 children)
Where's the evidence to support that assertion?
The answer is "quite shitty".
Why again is that something we want to do? Take money away from people who create Amazons, then you have less Amazons.
That's not even a thing. First, most of the world isn't even trying to accumulate wealth, even in the developed world where it is pretty easy to do. So right there, we have a huge part we can outright ignore because they don't care enough to do it on their own. Then most of the wealth is of a form that isn't very valuable. Can't feed someone on credit default swaps. So most people aren't even playing and most of the wealth isn't that valuable. Yet we're supposed to care about this alleged situation? Meh.
There's still a lot of overlap between the two, particularly if one invests what one earns.
Only if we have a way to solve that problem. Here, when most of humanity don't even try to save wealth, then it's already a lost cause. You can draw all the attention you want, implement all the solutions you want, and yet not get anywhere because people have and will use their choices and power to thwart your intentions. Give them wealth, and they'll just spend it. It's even baked into most universal basic income plans (usually combined with some goal of increasing economic activity via the spending).
Second, there is this conceit that if some system doesn't perfectly eliminate a problem, then somewhere out there is a better system. Too often, people use minor problems with capitalism to justify throwing out or sabotaging the whole system, and then replacing it with a worse system. A classic example are the money haters. They've decided money is bad, so they have come up with bizarre systems to eliminate that supposed evil while completely ignoring the cluster that would result when money is crippled or eliminated.
Finally, there's the conceit of considering a problem in a vacuum. Wealth inequality is far from the only problem that humanity has - so why is it the only problem considered? For many of the rest of those big problems, capitalism does a really good job of making things better. So rather than optimize for some minor issue, why shouldn't we instead look at the big stuff? Reducing wealth inequality doesn't solve poverty, for example. What's missed is that most of the tools which reduce wealth inequality also reduce wealth altogether. Bezos being worth hundreds of billions of dollars doesn't hurt my ability to care for myself. But wealth equalizing proposals that destroy that wealth (and kill a bunch of jobs in the process) will hurt my ability to care for myself.
You don't have a clue how much wealth Bezos generates. My view, of course, is that his compensation is well in line for what he did in the past and does in the present. I think people are very ignorant about what is actually parasitism and there's a lot of propaganda (almost two centuries worth just from Communism) out there to keep their heads in the sand. "Taxing them" is taking away from them BTW.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 11 2019, @04:56AM (3 children)
>Take money away from people who create Amazons, then you have less Amazons.
Where's your evidence for that? Amazon was created by a guy with an idea who put in some hard work. If he had only personally made one billion dollars in assets off it instead of 137 billion, would he really have been much less motivated? You really think it has anything to do with the money at that point?
>Too often, people use minor problems with capitalism to justify throwing out or sabotaging the whole system, and then replacing it with a worse system.
I quite agree, and I think that capitalism has a lot to offer, but it also has some major flaws that we need to figure out how to address. And there is *always* something better. No tool made by man has ever been perfect, there's always room for improvement, though it's not always obvious, and sometimes other seemingly unrelated technologies need to be developed first.
The solution might even come from another direction entirely - for example, what it we left capitalism completely intact, but eliminated inheritance(including substantial gifts) so that genuine skill and merit would be the largest factor in your success, rather than the dynasty of inter-generational wealth transfer? "Spend it or lose it" would also stimulate a whole lot of economic activity that would be good for everyone, and a healthy society would be the largest gift the ultra-rich could give their children, since they can't pass on enough wealth to not care.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 11 2019, @05:09AM (2 children)
The obvious rebuttal is how is he going to employ half a million people, if government took away that money? A business is not a static thing, hiring comes from the profits the business generates not only directly but via loans. And Blue Origin wouldn't be a thing, if he had to give his earnings to the feds to squander.
So how would you solve the problem of the extreme rich people who circumvent that law? It just cripples everyone who can't fund the necessary legal and financial muscle.
Such as next quarter thinking and building pyramids. Economic activity is worthless, if it doesn't create value in the process. It's merely an example of the Broken Window fallacy.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 11 2019, @03:28PM (1 child)
*He* is not employing anyone - Amazon is. And any money Amazon pays it's employees, or spends on new warehouses or developing new technology, is money it doesn't have to pay tax on. Tax is payed on profit, not revenue.
The point of a 90% tax bracket is not to take money away from the rich - it's to encourage the rich to spend that money developing the business and paying their employees better, rather than pocketing it themselves. Building value rather than amassing wealth. Spend it or lose it.
And that is not a broken window fallacy - that involves destroying something to generate more economic activity to replace it - which means that the net wealth created is inherently zero (minus inefficiencies).
Spend it or lose it comes from the opposite end - you have huge incentive to spend this money, but are free to do so in any way you like. If you can't figure out a way to generate real value in the process, you obviously don't actually have the skill you claim got you that money in the first place.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 12 2019, @01:46PM
And I disagree on that to the tune of half a million people.
Unless, of course, it came from a different business, which accounts for virtually all of their starting capital. One of the huge things ignored here is that capital and money gets moved around between businesses and other investments. The 90% taxation ignores that dynamic and would kill one of the big ways new businesses get funded.
To the contrary, the destruction is in the form of economic inefficiencies introduced by policies that incentivize creating economic activity without purpose. It's not as visible as a broken window, but it's still a net drag on society just to get a little more temporary GDP.
You don't get it. There is no good to come out of a policy like that. "Use it or lose it" means you have zero incentive to think about the future.
Just like breaking the legs of everyone on your football team shouldn't be a problem, if they actually have the skill they claim to have. Cripple the decision-making and incentives, and you're going to get very suboptimal decisions.
There is this ridiculous pretense that somehow we can arbitrarily keep knee-capping a relatively good economic system and still have it function as intended. We already have more than a half a century of evidence it doesn't work that way. So much industry left the developed world, for example. Japan has stagnated for the last two decades despite borrowing twice its measured GDP. Several developed world countries (particularly, Greece) are reverting to a more primitive status "despite" (sarcastic scare quotes!) having high taxes on just about everything.
I think it's time to start paying attention to the seed corn, to what makes all these policies remotely feasible. That's businesses, employers, and investors. It's not the unemployed and the underemployed, nor the people who can't be bothered to save a dime. We have too many of the latter not enough of the former. Things like Bezos's wealth encourages more people to try. I think that's better than shoving a little more tax revenue (or rather a little less tax revenue) through the government machine.