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At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a panel moderator asked Michael Dell, America's 17th-richest man, what he thought about the idea of raising the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent.
This idea has been in the headlines since Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez floated it in a 60 Minutes interview on January 6 as a way to pay for a Green New Deal.
The Davos panel found the question hilarious. When the laughing died down, Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, dismissed the idea out of hand, claiming it would harm U.S. economic growth.
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For Dell's Billionaire CEO, Taxing the Ultra-Rich is a Joke
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TAPPING? You POLITICIANS! Don't you realize that the END of the "Wash
Cycle" is a TREASURED MOMENT for most people?!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday February 15 2019, @11:55PM (2 children)
There are 2 major reasons for this:
1. Humans, per this classic NSFW demonstration by Penn Jillette [youtube.com], have a hard time picturing and understanding at a gut level really huge numbers. For instance, if you look at polls and such, you'll sometimes see lots of people who genuinely appear to believe that $127 million is more money than $3 billion - part of that is that they're not reading carefully, see the 127 and the 3 and don't understand what the "million" and "billion" really mean, and part of that is that when you see numbers like that most people generally think of them as "far more than I'm ever going to see in my entire miserable life."
2. When rich people and organizations engage in crooked accounting, they can afford to pay smart people big bucks to among other things come up with terminology designed to hide their chicanery. That's how concepts like "Evade corporate profits taxes by pretending all our income went to a hitherto minor Irish subsidiary" became known as "inversion". It's the "you can't understand what I just did, therefor you won't question me on it" defense. In general, the more complicated and confusing the accounting has become, the more I'm going to assume you're up to something, because there's no particular reason for it to be complicated if you aren't doing something shady.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @12:26AM
It's even worse than that though. For some reason people think giving the government money from the rich (those who run it or control the politicians who do) means they are getting money. No, the government will spend it however the rich tell them to.
Like this idea of higher taxes that is supposed to address wealth inequality. Why isn't the idea to collect $1 trillion in taxes and give everyone else $10-20 thousand dollars. Where is the second half of this raise taxes on the rich idea that actually addresses wealth inequality? It looks like another scam to me.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday February 16 2019, @06:55AM
This seems like a shortcoming of English more than anything else. Maybe ebonics and/or engineering notation could help here -- "large" or "g" for 1E3, and I don't know what we'd use for 1E6 and 1E9.