If you want to access public markets you have to disclose your beneficial ownership, it’s marked to market every 12/31, you pay 2% of the total. Hide and cheat, you go to jail. It’s not as hard as the WSJ editorial page would have you believe.
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What about large private fortunes like the Koch brothers?
They can mark to market 2% or they can turn over shares which will be auctioned off. That last option is going to get selected a ton for big private companies. They seriously aren’t easy to value. There will no doubt be a ton of corruption around the auctions.
Not that any of this will happen lol.
Yeah don’t dare pass the stuff billionaires dont want because they say they’ll just cheat it…
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It’s complicated… but yeah the first step would be cutting off the avenues for cheating.
You want to know who you’d be threatening to use the US military on if you were acting in the best interests of the American people? Tax havens. You’d also shut down Delaware which is one of the largest global tax havens on earth. It’s very hard to have any credibility on cracking down when one of the biggest places for tax avoidance is inside your own borders.
Global tax avoidance is a global problem that costs the governments of the world an awful lot. If you truly declare war on that process you’re raising the global tax rate quite a lot on the very wealthy.
The way you cut down on cheating is PUTTING PEOPLE IN JAIL. The main reason everyone already cheats is there is no real penalty.
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Nothing you’re saying applies to my industry especially in a talent/creative position. In a normal world inside the industry you might work from 9 to whatever or 10 to whatever, but there is never a situation where the work day can or will end at 3pm. There is also never a situation where someone like me could work a 4 day work week doing 10s.
At one company I was at, one person had that sweet 4 10s in the early 2000s, and the only reason the person could do that was because she was a coordinator/scheduler. You never know what’s going on day to day in my industry, and it’s one that has super long hours and often weeks at a time with no days off depending on the project. Sometimes you do nothing, but the often most difficult days in the industry are Mondays and Fridays, which would both be the targets of a 4 day work week.
It’s no coincidence that this site’s peak traffic is from 9-5 Monday-Friday lol
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Instead of being auctioned and revenue being used for taxes, the 2% of shares should just be distributed to rank and file employees of the company.
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This year I’d be shocked if I’ve averaged 2 hours of work a day.
Not exactly normal for me, but my whole industry is busted in 2019. Fucking market cycles aren’t fun. The boredom is eating my brain.
Not a terrible idea, but not very good for wealth inequality either. Upper middle class employees with real bargaining power from marketable skills are doing fine in this economy.
This is unhealthy though. Like, it doesn’t NEED to be this way, it’s just that the people who employ you to do sound mixing or whatever care more about pumping out additional content every year to line their pockets than they care about their contractors having healthy happy lives.
What you’re saying basically boils down to “well the rich would be pretty unhappy if I worked 9-5, so let’s scrap that idea”
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The people I know in the entertainment industry (and I know a few - I live in SoCal) mostly don’t work a huge number of hours a year or anything, but some do crazy hours when busy. A recent solar client of mine is semi-retired, but he works maybe one or two days a month - and they are like 18 hour days.
It may be worth clarifying that ‘broke’ here means ‘normal, like you and me’, not actually destitute.
This is definitely my career in a nutshell. When I’m busy I’m very very very busy. I’ve worked melon seasons where I worked very nearly 18+ hours a day (wake up at 5am to work, finish working around 7pm, go to sleep at 9pm, get woken up twice before 5am by trucks needing stuff because of overnight deliveries to grocery store warehouses) from 5/1 to 11/1… and had almost nothing to do the rest of the year basically.
I don’t miss brokering loads of produce lol. At all.
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When Trump first declared bankruptcy in 1990 he had to get by on $450k a month, or $890k a month in 2019 dollars.
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Man of the people.
Yes, the problem is the studios, who contract with the people I do the work for. The problem has always been the studios. I like to work, and the studios give you a deadline. You get it done, or you don’t work. Simple as that.
‘Health’ has nothing to do with it (I’m a very rare case in what I’m capable of regarding work hours), and you can go back and do research about how much worse it was in Hollywood in the early days of cinema. The unions can thank Boris Karloff and Jimmy Cagney for a lot of the changes that happened.
I’ve never been in a union, and I’ve been screwed out of years of overtime via wage theft at companies (most of the companies I worked at charged the studios for my time at a markup for overtime, and I never saw it). These days I own my own business, so my ‘overtime’ is when I have two or three separate clients booked on the same day, or if I’m given a particularly egregious deadline. Inside a company, I would in no way make the kind of money I do in those situations that I do in my own business, and the lightning fast turnaround I can provide in the evenings or nights is also something that wouldn’t happen. The trade off is that I’m ‘available’ from the moment I get up to the time I go to bed.
This is accurate in general if you change it to days worked vs. hours worked (though at my last company job I probably worked about 10.5 or 11 years worth of billable time in 8 years with a lot of downtime). Keep in mind that someone working one 20 hour day is the equivalent of 2.5 days in the 9-5 world (during one of the biggest titles I worked on I would do 8 weeks of 7 day a week schedules, where I would do 10s during the 5 day week and minimum 12s on Sat-Sun [I was paid time and a half OT on weekends, but not weekdays]).
I made about 75 percent of my money this year in less than 3 months (3 absolutely insane schedules being double and triple booked across a 2-3 week period 7 days a week in 3 different months with one of those being a full four week period 7 days a week). I’m now in my slow season as of about two weeks ago.
My slow season is usually something like mid-late October-January/February, and my busy season is July-September (my busy season went almost all the way to the end of October this year). During the slow season I’ll get a handful of jobs here and there, but in the busy season I’ll be triple booked frequently. I have had 3 40+ hour days this year, as an example. In the not slow times, I’ll generally just have a relatively steady flow of several projects a month (some with long hours, but usually not), but no real double or triple bookings. Right now the industry is in a change cycle, so things haven’t been normal the last couple of years.
I’m OK with the idea that people that work for their money should be able to pass down what they’ve got left to leave their children with better lives, I just think we should tax the fuck out of it beyond a certain amount. Like, zero tax on the first million, 50% tax on the next million, 95% tax on everything over 2 million.
We may disagree on what “set for life” means. I would consider someone being left a million dollars to be “set for life,” especially if society is providing universal education and Healthcare. Individuals do not need hundreds of millions to be set for life; if anything, inheriting obscene wealth just seems to be a recipe for failsons.
To keep this on topic of the 2020 elections, while I like the concept of a wealth tax, I’d rather see candidates pushing for a much higher estate tax first as it seems more achievable and avoids the “but they worked for that money!” argument. (or, why not both?)