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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 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.