But the accounting difference is real. It is virtually impossible to earn a billion dollars. What is possible but still difficult is to create something worth a billion dollars which you can then sell if you choose so.
And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment.
Also, the most important thing to understand about a society is how people gain status, not just money/wealth. If you focus on money, you won't have an explanation for political movements or artistic endeavors.
It's pretty hard for someone to make something worth a billion dollars then sell it, because someone else could make the same thing and undercut you. We even have a word for the way around this: 'moat.' In the 2000s 'network effects' were the most common moat, and they seemed a little crappy but not outrightly evil. Now the most common scheme seems to be breaking law until your big enough for the rules to not apply. That's why people see it as cheating.
Is it hard? It seems like if you have capital you just buy your moat, isn't that what basically every modern billionaire has done to get there? SpaceX used it's capital sued the U.S. government to get it's contracts and now 20 years later the regulatory capture and Elon's influence in government as a whole is beyond most people's wildest nightmares.
> And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment.
Well that’s wrong. Exploitive businesses do exist. Rent seeking and arbitrage does exist. But the ire today isn’t directed to Wall Street or private equity. It’s being directed to people who built real companies. It’s not inherently exploitive to sell a customer a valuable product or employ someone to build that product.
In the 1990s, it took weeks to order something by mail. Amazon can now deliver me stuff the same day of the next morning. That’s amazing, considering that it’s all done with trucks, warehouses, and other things that already existed in the 1990s. Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.
Okay, now try applying your thinking to abusive healthcare insurance companies and see how well this fares...
Okay, but people aren’t complaining about health insurance companies. None of those are owned by billionaires.
Yes we are, yes they are. You can google dozens of examples of billionaire owners or CEOs of health insurance companies, for example Warren Buffet is deeply invested/has ownership stake.
Why state something so obviously disprovable and false?
Amazon itself used the extremely advantageous rates of USPS for book delivery in the 90s/early 2000s to be able to grow. Combined with the lack of sales tax it could undercut basically any bookstore in sale-tax free states. Part of the reason why USPS couldn't improve itself was because of a law in 2006 which forced them to prefund retiree health benefits for decades into the future making them unable to spend those billions a year into modernisation right when it needed it the most (and private companies didn't face this pressure). Both the sale tax benefit and the USPS disadvantages are reversed now but the momentum amazon got and the slowdown USPS had can't be reversed.
The company also pushed for all sort of regulatory changes to punish competitors (e.g. minimum wage to harm Walmart) while it had labour violations which barely got fined. This isn't to say that I think Amazon didn't provide value at any point in time, with its recommendation algorithm and review system it actually abuses the added value the platform delivered in the past to benefit its own basic products, but I believe there would've always been an Amazon who would've used similar regulatory plays to get ahead. That's why it's kind of difficult for me to say how many of Bezos his billions were 'fairly' earned.
Furthermore I don't believe it's impossible for someone to truly earn a billion, the financial sector is one that has some of the best examples (e.g. Jim Simons) it's just difficult to find a 'close to purely fair' billionaire.
But there are many online stores, and Amazon is one of the worst? On line shopping was an innovation but Amazon, in particular, was just a cash grab from all the others.
If you pay attention to how people spend their money, and not what they say (i.e. actions speak louder than words)
People really love billionaire owned businesses.
We can look at Walmart, which eviscerated mom&pop stores all over rural America, and you'd be hard pressed to find much love of Walmart in those places, but alas, people gave their money to Walmart instead of Jone's Town General.
I saw a Harvard-Harris poll a couple of years ago where Amazon had the highest favorability ratings of institutions/organizations polled, basically tied with the U.S. military and ahead of the police and CDC: https://harvardharrispoll.com/key-results-may-2 (page 15).
People don't have to like things they use though.
> Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.
This bit might be a bit unfair. USPS and Amazon Delivery are different services, fulfilling different needs. Neither will deliver a pizza in 30 min or less, for example.
> Neither will deliver a pizza in 30 min or less, for example.
Looks like Amazon will deliver me a (frozen) pizza in 23 minutes, actually!
> Amazon can now deliver me stuff the same day of the next morning. That’s amazing, considering that it’s all done with trucks, warehouses, and other things that already existed in the 1990s. Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.
It's also impossible without Amazon exploiting all the workers in the chain - from warehouse workers forced to undergo dehumanizing _unpaid_ searches that take hours when leaving the warehouse, to being forced to pee in bottles.
It is impossible to become a billionaire without exploting people.
Someone working a job they freely chose is not being exploited. This word is losing all meaning. Amazon pays more with better benefits than most other warehouse jobs.
> Someone working a job they freely chose is not being exploited.
This article from 2022 has something to say about that:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/22/amazon-wo... Amazon is right to be worried – its staff turnover rate is astronomical. Before the pandemic, Amazon was losing about 3% of its workforce weekly, or 150% annually. By contrast the annual average turnover in transportation, warehousing and utilities was 49% in 2021 and in retail it was 64.6%, less than half of Amazon’s turnover.
So you mean workers who find it disagreeable freely leave to do something else? Hmm, doesn't sound like exploitation to me.
"People are exploited by this organization so they leave"
"Can't you tell how unexploited all these people are, just look at them leave!"
"A job had requirements I didn't want to do, so I left and didn't do them"
"help, help, I'm being exploited!"
If someone could pick and choose jobs they wouldn't be a warehouse worker, come on now.
Sure if people could just pick whatever they want we'd all be sitting on the beach having drinks with supermodels, but then who's going to make the drinks?
People can pick among various jobs. If they picked warehouse worker that was the best option available to them. Taking it away means they have to choose something worse.
And a job is not a lifetime commitment. Warehouse worker may be a stop on the way to something else. I worked in a warehouse for a while, now I don't. People are not static blobs.
Maybe it's Amazon's predatory pricing and regulatory capture that drove most other nicer job opportunities out of business.
I used to work retail selling software and games as a teen. It was a nice starter job talking about the things I liked most. There were 7 places I could do that back in the day. Now the kids have only 3 such options in my area. Many areas now have none.
Now the kids can learn to code online or post videos on YouTube or do a hundred other things we couldn’t do. The world moves on.
YouTube pays far below minimum wage for all but a tiny fraction of creators.
All 7 places I could have worked (doing what I enjoyed) as a teen paid above minimum wage.
> Now the kids can learn to code online
Starter coding jobs are increasingly rare in light of AI.
> or do a hundred other things we couldn’t do
Can you name a few that pay at least minimum wage?
Under capitalism, man exploits man.
Under communism, it's the other way around!
> It is impossible to become a billionaire without exploting people.
Explain this to me using math not feelings.
At 5% APR compounded daily and zero inflation, a person would need to invest $300,000 weekly to attain 1 billion dollars after 80 years. Fiddle with the numbers as you like.
Do enlighten us as to what actual labor creates $300,000 in real value every week, week after week.
Tim Cook’s labor optimizing Apple’s supply chain easily crates billions in value.
Excellent way to put this, by moving and accelerating Apple's outsourcing of manufacturing and production to countries with more exploitable labor and cheaper corruption to advantage himself with, Tim Cook not only exploited people in multiple countries around the world but helped hollow out American manufacturing and suppress wages!
Through this exploitation he created billions in value for himself and other capital holders.
Here's a useful, easy-to-understand number: "Exactly zero"
That is the answer to the question: "How many of the top 50 billionaires in the world have NOT been in legal trouble for anti-worker, anti-consumer or anti-competitive practices."
Try it yourself! If you ask it to, Google AI Overview will even detail the infractions of each billionaire on the list.
The fact that lawsuits exists doesn’t prove that unfair practices account for any particular share of the wealth. You can’t just wave your hands like Glenn Beck and say “connect the dots.”
Saying "lawsuits exist" obscures the fact that they have almost all resulted in convictions and penalties per billionaire. The fact remains that every single of the top billionaires has been convicted for patterns of exploitation. Are we to reasonably expect that all of these were random, uncorrelated one-off occurrences rather than a pattern of behavior?
And that still underplays their overall scope of culpability. As a lawyer, you are probably best positioned to appreciate how asymmetrically difficult it is for anyone but the most well-funded to realistically take these giant companies to court.
> Saying "lawsuits exist" obscures the fact that they have almost all resulted in convictions and penalties per billionaire.
You need to quantify it for these lawsuits to support your point. The fact that these companies sometimes color outside the lines doesn’t negate the enormous value they create otherwise.
You know who else has lost tons of lawsuits and paid a huge amount in penalties? The federal government. 40,000 lawsuits are filed agains the federal government annually. The government pays out billions of dollars a year for various wrongdoing: https://settlementinsight.com/research/federal-government-pa.... By your logic, we can assume that the existence of these lawsuits and payments means that the entire value of the government can be attributed to exploitation.
Here's a site you could play with: https://violationtrackerglobal.goodjobsfirst.org/ -- enter any of the large companies you want and see the laundry list of convictions, sometimes multiple per year with penalties and settlements ranging from 6-figures to 10-figures. That is a pattern of behavior.
Yes, they create enormous value, but they get convicted of rule-breaking with such regularity and such large penalties that "coloring outside lines" is not a "sometimes" thing but rather a standard mode of operation. At that point it becomes impossible to separate the genuine value created versus the revenues generated from exploitation.
As an example, look into Project Bernanke, which is part of Google's convictions in the latest Ad Tech antitrust it lost, wherein they rigged all their ad auctions to benefit themselves: https://www.adtechexplained.com/p/google-project-bernanke-ex... -- now try to explain how we could separate that from the profits they made during all those years, which would also require one to consider how they profited from the lock-in they reinforced through that time.
> By your logic, we can assume that the existence of these lawsuits and payments means that the entire value of the government can be attributed to exploitation.
I never said "the entire value" (see point above about attribution) but yes, it applies to governments too. From the site you linked the top reason for lawsuits seem to be Breach of Contract, which does sound somewhat "exploit-y" to me.
>By your logic, we can assume that the existence of these lawsuits and payments means that the entire value of the government can be attributed to exploitation.
In the US? most def. I don't even know where to start with all the exploitative practices of the government - Regan's strike busting is a good place to. And don't forget the institutional practices:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
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What's missing is that the billion-dollar value is based on the expectation of exploiting the employees/customers/environment to achieve profit in the future.
Missing cause it's not true.
Musk minted 4,000 millionaires last friday.
How many paupers did he create? I haven't seen this reported on, seems biased to ignore it.
Having to pay a fat wedge of tax every year on what you "earn" sucks a lot of the life out of the compounding effect.
When capital gains tax is so much lower than income tax, this holds even more true for people who work at the companies being sold for lots of money and make income in wages than the people who own the companies, and that just reinforces the original point
Those taxes are the necessary condition in silly essays like this one from pg. Or why do you think those billionaires miraculously mostly end up in the US and not in countries like Sudan or Peru? I mean if those billionaires would actually be the wealth creators, not depending on society at large, they could become billionaires everywhere, right?
Some countries have far more repressive governments.
Only up to a certain threshold – after which you can afford "creative" accounting which reduces the tax burden and restores the compounding effect ;-)
We pay those taxes because not having the services and societal stability those taxes pay for also sucks a lot of life out.
To add to that: There are also "compounding effects" from investments made by tax money, just as for any other investments, the difference is that the compounding gains are collectively owned and not controlled by an individual.
I think that’s their justification in the abstract, not the justification for most individual tax items.
I don't have to inspect every grain of rice with a magnifying glass to enjoy the overall dish.
Are you arguing that we should have bad taxes because some taxes are good?
Yes, absolutely.
There's a cost to perfection. In our computing world, every extra nine of reliability is more expensive than the last, often with diminishing returns.
See also: Florida drug testing welfare recipients cost more than it saved. https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/just-we-suspected-fl...
You’re arguing that the cost to find bad taxes is not worth the savings. That’s not the same thing.
If I’ve already found with a poor justification or better yet, someone is proposing a new one. Shouldn’t we remove it?
I mean, I'd also argue that the definition of a "bad tax" is notoriously difficult to agree on.
For example:
https://x.com/NEWSMAX/status/1937470443168182386
> A government agency spending $300 million in taxpayer dollars to produce sterilized flies sounds like a dream scenario for a DOGE team looking to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.
A year later:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/09/business/what-consumers-shoul...
> Grocery shoppers could get hit with higher prices if the screwworm cases turn into a full-blown outbreak. That could cost $3 billion across the Southwest, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Good tax, or bad tax?
Returning to your question, though: Yes, I assert the cost of troubleshooting a "bad tax" may exceed the benefits of having addressed it.
You’re weasling.
We don’t have to treat taxes as a pool we can look at the pros and cons of each one. Taxes are not benevolent and good by nature.
You seem to be suggesting here it’s impossible or too costly to weigh pros or cons. So I would not consider you for an administrative position
You're avoiding the points.
"Look at the pros and cons of each one" is an enormous handwave; I've provided very clear evidence of our inability to do that successfully in a very topical and concrete case.
What DOGE did is not one I'd consider proper review, so bringing them up doesn't necessarily help your point. There definitely are ways to look at each tax and determine its worth, in a non-partisan way.
> What DOGE did is not one I'd consider proper review…
This illustrates very well how difficult it will be to agree on good/bad tax.
> There definitely are ways to look at each tax and determine its worth, in a non-partisan way.
If you've found one, can I come to the Nobel ceremony?
Sure, although it doesn't require Nobel level effort to understand.
Go on. What are these practical "ways to look at each tax and determine its worth, in a non-partisan way" options?
It is already done today. Academic panels, economists writing papers on impacts of various policies like rent control, monetary policy, and yes, taxes. Are some of them politically motivated or have academic disagreements? Sure, all people have personal politics and biases. But that is better than throwing up ones hands and saying we should accept all bad taxes because good ones also exist. By that logic, any tax I suggest should be accepted by you, because there is no way to tell if it's good or bad right?
> Academic panels, economists writing papers on impacts of various policies like rent control, monetary policy, and yes, taxes.
We have those, and they disagree almost as much as the general public does. Economists get plenty partisan; they're human!
> By that logic, any tax I suggest should be accepted by you, because there is no way to tell if it's good or bad right?
No. But I'm deeply skeptical of "bad tax!" assessments from someone who's calling random people Marxists on this thread!
Why are you taking Marxist as an insult? Maybe that's your first issue, it's an accurate label for someone who believes in the labor theory of value which is something Marx came up.
And yes, economists are human of course (unless they're now AI). Not sure how that changes what I said. Just because they disagree doesn't mean what they do isn't better than throwing your hands up and saying it can't be done.
Again, you asserted:
> There definitely are ways to look at each tax and determine its worth, in a non-partisan way.
You then asserted those are:
> Academic panels, economists writing papers on impacts of various policies like rent control, monetary policy, and yes, taxes.
But Marx himself is an example of that process - an economist, writing papers on all this. You clearly don't agree with his conclusions, so now we're... right back where we started?
Nowhere did I say I have to agree with their conclusions to think that the work they're doing on analysis of policy is worthwhile, while your logic seems to be that it is not, which is what I disagree with. If that's not your argument then apologies.
> Nowhere did I say I have to agree with their conclusions…
So your functional way to effectively assess good/bad tax is ... not so functional.
No? I'm not an economist or policy maker so why does it matter what I think? As long as the economists can broadly agree, which they do on many topics, and enact that into policy, then that's fine. And is what happens today, functionally. So I really don't see how your argument to throw up your hands makes any sense, seems like you don't trust professionals to do their job.
Anyway, you're seeming to misunderstand me when I asked you questions as well, such as why you took Marxist for an insult for example when it accurately describes what I was talking about. I'm not the only one that will answer your questions, seems like there is some sort of sealioning you're doing in this thread.
> I'm not an economist or policy maker so why does it matter what I think?'
Do you vote?
> I'm not the only one that will answer your questions, seems like there is some sort of sealioning you're doing in this thread.
> You seem to be suggesting here it’s impossible or too costly to weigh pros or cons.
Sounds like you agree.
Yes, I agree, at least in part.
We are tweaking a multi-trillion dollar system impacting hundreds of millions of people directly and billions indirectly. The impacts of those tweaks take years or decades to (imperfectly!) assess. Many of the tweaks and their impacts are a matter of deep partisan and academic contention.
The system is incomprehensible complex and unknowable, but it’s probably correct and can’t be improved.
What about new tax proposals? Shouldn’t we then reject them all to avoid butterfly effects in this carefully tuned ideal?
No one said it can't be improved.
I'm noting that our political system seems to generate lots of folks going "this is wasteful spending!" when it's… not.
That results in challenges in determining what's a "bad tax" and what's a "good tax", and the consequences of cutting programs may take time to show up.
In a healthy society that's the case. In an unhealthy one, who knows.
You can still collect taxes without taxing people who have already been taxed in the form of needing to exchange a large fraction of their life for the wage.
I'm entirely onboard with reducing tax on low/mid income folks currently "exchanging a large fraction of their life for the small wage" in favor of increased taxes on the billionaire class, yes.
We already have the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
We already have all sorts of things that I like.
We seem to be making most of the changes in favor of the already very well-off, instead of, say, expanding the EITC.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1960-_Tax_rates_of_r...
That covers maybe the bottom 30% of households, and realistically only if they have kids.
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There again you might pay a lot of taxes and not get the services and have questionable societal stability. Ask some Brits about that.
But the amount of tax we pay is because of inefficient, corrupt and incompetent government.
We have the current inefficient, corrupt, and incompetent government in the US because the anti-tax wealthy class threw an all-out tantrum over even the idea of paying a tiny bit more tax.
I live in Germany and I pay almost 50% of my income in income tax and social tax. There is always "just that tiny bit more tax" that will magically fix the system (it won't).
Turns out paying more money to an already corrupt government doesn't turn it less corrupt. Go figure, hm?
> I live in Germany and I pay almost 50% of my income in income tax and social tax.
I live in the US and pay less raw tax than that, for sure.
But I reported $49k in medical expenses (premiums, deductible, copays, stuff they won't cover) last year on my taxes, and I've got two kids going to college in a year, which may cost $10-40k/year for each.
I'd rather your trade-off.
My trade-off is not seeing a specialist for 6 months and more while paying 10k healthcare premiums a year for state mandated healthcare. Dermatologists in my city only take privately insured patients or self-paying patients. So I pay 300 Eur a visit anyway. On a third of a US software engineer's salary. I don't qualify for private insurance so im OOL.
I’m in the US. We have six month waits for specialists too. And we pay almost twice what y’all pay per capita. Inclusive of both private and public spend.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Average_annual_healt...
You forget that the college expense is temporary while the taxes are forever. And Germany still makes you get private insurance for medical. A single year of taxes in Germany based on my current American income would pay for all of that you just said. So then my question for you is. What were you doing with your money in those other years? I hope it was saving it. Because otherwise I'm gonna eye roll hard at you wanting to increase taxes on everyone just to get a small cut in how much you pay during one fiscal year. Seems silly.
> You forget that the college expense is temporary while the taxes are forever.
I see you're unfamiliar with American student loans.
> And Germany still makes you get private insurance for medical.
We spend about double what you do for healthcare, inclusive of both private and public spending. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expendit...
> What were you doing with your money in those other years?
An enormous amount of it has been going to healthcare for about twenty years now. This wasn't our first year of such costs.
I am very familiar with American student loans. I paid my 40k off in about 11 months by keeping my spending down that year. It was easy. I don't want to pay 15% of my income forever just because you can't budget. Also frankly your kids should be paying their own way through college. That's a nice gift you're giving them but it's 100% a discretionary expense and is basically you saying "I have so much money I can simply gift it to my kids". Shit I wish I had that.
> That's a nice gift you're giving them…
I never said I was - I'll certainly try to help where I can. I don't have that kind of money; see aforementioned healthcare costs! They're gonna need loans, it's probably gonna be quite a bit more than $40k, and I'm pretty dubious in the current job market that they're gonna have $40k in discretional annual income on the other end.
> I don't want to pay 15% of my income forever just because you can't budget.
And I don't want to go bankrupt from ever-rising medical costs, but here we are.
We have an inefficient, corrupt and incompetent government in the US because we voted for it. And we keep voting for it. That's our revealed preference. We obviously like inefficient, corrupt, incompetent governments.
And that government was corrupted by…wealthy business owners via regulatory capture!
People who earn money pay taxes
While at Amazon Jeff Bezos considers his worth to be 80k a year hence he was paid that much, and paid taxes in that salary.
If someone becomes a billionaire by being paid 50m a year for 40 years and paying taxes on that income then congrats.
Bezos has paid $billions in capital gains taxes.
About 1% of the wealth he’s accumulated
Has he earned his wealth over 40 years at an income of 7b a year he’d have paid 115b in tax, not 3b.
Luckily, billionaires don't have to worry about that.