Consider the possibility that Nick Hanauer is a whiney little bitch.

This guy has his head up his ass.  Rich people do not create jobs by buying stuff.  They create jobs by investing their money in businesses which hire people.  Exactly who would provide the capital to spur business development if we taxed all the income of the rich?  Walmart shoppers?

And where did he get his stastics that rich people pay a lower tax rate than working folk.  Not true.  Here is a simple lesson in corporate economics:

Rich guy (and you and I) owns stocks in a corporation through a a stock purchase or mutual fund.
The corporation makes a profit and pays federal income taxes on it at 29 - 39% (the highest in the world)
The rich guy (and you and I) get the leftovers and pay taxes at the investment gains rate of 15%.

Therefore, for every dollar that rich people and anyone with an IRA or other retirement account, pays 45% or more of every dollar of income to the federal government.  Fuck all the class warfare assholes who lie about this to the ignorant masses.  Tell me about the last time you were hired by a poor guy.

So it's in the Rich Guy's best interest to have the government take his money, give it to the poor people so they can use it to buy his stuff, to make him more money? That would almost work if the government was frictionless, but we all know that's not true.

This man is rich himself, and ultimately arguing in his own interest. He's not advocating the destruction of the wealthy class, he's simply saying that the economic engine is working inefficiently and needs to be rebalanced. More radically, he's saying that rich people don't invest for the fuck of it, they invest because there's demand. I work for a number of $100M+ investment funds, and believe me, "sophisticated investors" and "angel investors" leave little to chance - it's not  a crapshoot, it's a drive to bring products to market that are already hotly desired - very often the big investments are made in areas that govt. supports and encourages with various incentives. Would these very rich investors bail out if their personal tax rates went up by 10%? Would that so shrink their capital reserve that they'd lose their taste for iinvesting? (If the answer is yes, then they probably weren't terribly rich in the first place - do you really think they're betting every cent they have? Nonsense - there are great pools of stagnant money out there, benefiting nobody except  banks - money that could be fed back into the engine.) But if demand fell, for whatever reason, most of those investors, however much they enjoy the game, would be out of there in a shot. If taxing the rich a little harder increases demand, then it redounds to the health of an economy and the benefit of everyone.

phreddy wrote:

GooberMcNutly wrote:

So it's in the Rich Guy's best interest to have the government take his money, give it to the poor people so they can use it to buy his stuff, to make him more money? That would almost work if the government was frictionless, but we all know that's not true.

The government likes to decide where you should spend the money it hands out and don't get me started on the strings attached.  Not only is the government not teflon coated, it has a lousy track record on spending the vig it keeps.

Can you name three examples wherein the Government tit squeezes out cash to a person and then demands how it's spent please?

Tall Paul wrote:

Can you name three examples wherein the Government tit squeezes out cash to a person and then demands how it's spent please?

WIC, Section 8 and student loans. Of course, they give you some kind of card or check and are supposed to monitor how it's spent, but all three of those programs give out money that is so easily converted to cash that auditing and enforcement isn't even attempted.

choad wrote:

All have strict proscriptions.

Proscription without penalty is pointless.

GooberMcNutly wrote:

choad wrote:

All have strict proscriptions.

Proscription without penalty is pointless.

What, eviction and having to camp under a bridge isn't harsh enough?

Decadence wrote:

GooberMcNutly wrote:

Proscription without penalty is pointless.

Whilst the penalties vary from state to state, most - if not all - of them do include a prescription for incarceration.

Sure they do. On paper it's all very dangerous to make false statements or use your payments for unauthorized items or trade the cards for cash. But it happens. Every. Single. Day. I have a lot of personal experience in this.

I used to rent out my first house in a neighborhood that was more than 50% Section 8 rented. Every time it came up for rental I was approached by a number of people, often 5 or 6, who were willing to rent my house for MORE than I was asking if I was willing to sign rental agreements with more than one person in the house. So instead of renting for $800 a month I could have gotten $1000 a month, then the 4 adults who would be living there all applied for Section 8 as the renter and got their $800 a month. I always sent them packing, but I know a bunch of the owners in that neighborhood took advantage of that little scam. EBT and WIC cards were openly traded for cash in front of the 7-11 on the corner. I never, not once, heard of someone getting prison time for social service fraud. Sure, if caught flagrantly they might lose their benefits for 3-6 months, but that would be only one of many payments being collected, so it was more of an inconvenience than a punishment.

I have more examples from even closer to home. My wife's cousin was married to her daughters daddy for years. Then they realized that if she was single she would get more assistance. So she changed her paperwork to indicate that they had separated and he had moved out. He changed the address of his disability (His "profession" is falling off of ladders and slipping and falling on the job) to his Mom's house and Whamo, they were "making" 30% more. He never moved out, nobody ever checked. It was considered a "smart move" by most of the family, but it's really fraud. This kind of shit happens in every town in America. You push, try to game the system out of some more money and every now and then it pushes back, but not very hard.

Everyone just agrees that it costs so much to prosecute fraud (look at the proliferation of law firms specializing in defending welfare recipients from charges of fraud) that a certain amount of it is understood as just easier on everyone involved. It's not like the providers have any incentive what so ever to prevent fraud, they get bigger offices and more money the more money they give away. If they started firing the government payment processors and case workers who have been defrauded for "insufficient fiduciary care" you would see a quick turnaround in the proliferation of fraud.

phreddy wrote:

Tell me about the last time you were hired by a poor guy.

With Siri, Apple is using the results of more than four years of research funded by DARPA via SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center through the Personalized Assistant that Learns Program and Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes Program CALO.

Ask the people working for Apple, us poor folks hired them; for that matter anyone with an Internet related job.

Henny Penny wrote:

I didn't say only rich people hire workers.  I asked how many have been hired by a poor person.  Claiming to spur the economy by subsidizing the poor is a bullshit argument.

And here's a little piece of information for you.  The real deficit last year was not $1.3 trillion.  It was $5 trillion.  You could confiscate 100% of the income from the top 1% (about $1.7 trillion) and not make a dent in the amount of money we are spending or obligating each year.  We are going over the cliff and the drivers are those who keep the ignorant on the teat.  If we don't wake up and make some long-term plan to change direction, we are all fucked.  Denial won't save us.

Deficits from 2004 to 2011 would be six times the official total of $5.6 trillion reported.

Funny thing that, this quote of yours seems to indicate that the drivers started us on this road in a period of complete conservative control (or more precisely, lack thereof). 

However, Henny Penny, before we lose our minds we should all take a deep breath and remember that one USA Today analyst does not necessarily hold all of the truths.

GooberMcNutly wrote:

Emmeran wrote:

phreddy wrote:

Tell me about the last time you were hired by a poor guy.

Ask the people working for Apple, us poor folks hired them; for that matter anyone with an Internet related job.

So ask yourself: Who paid the salaries of the hundreds of Apple software engineers (hundreds of man years of salaries) until Siri was ready for deployment? Or the iPhone it's self? Who fronted the money? Who risked loss for the hope of gain?

Right now I am a partner in a company building new tools for SMS messaging and communications. You know how much I get paid? $500 a month. Until the company starts making a profit, that's all any one in the company will make. I've been working on this company for nearly 2 years now. About 1/2 of our funding is from an Angel investor, the rest has been put up by the partners. You know how much any of us (Including the Angel) make if the business fails: zero. So if I'm going to do without for years in order to build something that never existed, I expect to make a profit if it does. And I know the difference between failing and making money is only one thing: Me.

Any dope dealer knows that if you can front the money, you buy wholesale and retail to make money. Along with the bigger profits come bigger risks. Why can't other people make that out?

Please, SIRI is a separate company funded by DARPA (read: the American taxpaying doofus); the boys at Apple didn't do shit but call a few API's.  So stop driving down our interweb roads and claiming to be taking a chance, we the people built the cow that you are trying to milk.

And for the record - I work for a major PE firm, I sit on the desk with a Bloomberg terminal in front of me; you're now trying to re-convert the pissed off choir.

(also for the record: SIRI is backended by WolfRamAlpha)

Last edited by Emmeran (2012-05-24 20:19:17)