Incredible human. Gates + Buffett credit him with helping come up with The Giving Pledge they so famously established. Such humility. Was honestly a sad moment when he was outed (1997, Time Magazine if memory serves me right) - felt like he deserved to give in private if he wanted to. Gives more than others but always lets someone else put their name on it (eg: Benioff Children's Hospital in SF - he was the largest single benefactor).
People complain about ads on a website and how they have to use an ad-blocker and then the complain when they put stuff behind a paywall. Can't have it both ways, people deserve to be paid for good journalism.
Different people are motivated by different things (ie what gets you up in the morning may be different than what gets me up). Some do it out of inherent passion for whatever art they are pursuing, some to prove a point to others, some to prove a point to themselves. Some believe they have an obligation to humanity, others to just their family. Not my place to determine who is right in this. Whatever motivates these people often results in me being a net beneficiary of whatever they built for society that made them billionaires.
In 1996, Feeney and a partner sold their stakes in DFS to the French luxury conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH). Miller opposed the sale, and before a presumptive lawsuit could reveal that Feeney's stake was owned not in fact by him but by The Atlantic Philanthropies
This is exactly why I believe income tax is stupid. It's people like this who should be lifted up on our shoulders by our economic system and taxed 0%. They are the real leaders of us all. A high consumption tax that punishes buying stupid things like super cars and private yachts would help do this.
“the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor” - what a great thing to say. Where are these great men?
Why would you let them accumulate an unreasonable amount of wealth if you then expect them to give it back to poor people? Why not limit the wealth in the first place to ensure that everyone get its share?
And do you really expect every millionaire / billionaire to do this? I'm afraid numbers are against you, that's why this appears in a newspaper: it's a rare event.
Finally, why let a few rich guys decide where the money goes? I think it would be better if the money was given to the government, so that the people can decide where the money will be useful. I'm not sure all of this guy's money went to good causes (you can check his Wikipedia page).
> Not that I think low taxation would be a net transfer to the poor, but many disagree with how the government spends tax money.
Pretty sure a worker at Mercedes or at VW will oppose free of cost public transit in Germany. I have met old people whose only income is their Social Security check advocate for "small government" that does away with all the safety nets in the US.
Of course, we disagree with how governments spend money. If we all agreed, we wouldn't need a government. All in all, a charity cannot replace government safety net.
The reverse is also (somewhat) true - this is at least part of the reason that governments effectively subsidize charitable donations, usually through some sort of tax exemption / deduction. It's a form of outsourcing aid.
> Why would you let them accumulate an unreasonable amount of wealth
It's sad to see many people cheering at "philanthropist" billionaires while thousands or millions of unknowns people in the world ran their business while letting go of the opportunity to become rich by paying fair wages, or not patenting drugs or technologies or not adopting other aggressive tactics like cornering markets & so on.
Imagine if you'd limited Elon Musk's PayPal wealth with such confiscation taxes. We'd literally have no SpaceX or Tesla. Why should society put so much trust that politicians can allocate resources in a fair and economically beneficial manner?
We'd certainly have no SpaceX if the government didn't have a large budget for subsidising space companies and paying for their services (which was an order of magnitude larger again during the Space Race when there wasn't any market for any kind of space launch).
As far as I'm aware, Musk can and does pay tax on his earnings
I guess that's why Musk is paying big moneys to political campaigns of McCain and others to win legislative favors and maintain good relation with gov't.
It's something of a moot point when I'm really arguing NASA wouldn't exist to pay for launches without tax dollars, but the non-binding launch contracts were structured like a research subsidy with many of the payments being associated with hitting r&d milestones rather than with an obligation to actually render services, and encouragement to go and find other customers. Nothing unusual about that: it's the way the space industry works.
That's not a subsidy. That's progress payments. Many industries other than space have progress payments.
In fact you see some private contracts which are exactly like that NASA contract: "We want to pay you to create a much cheaper product than we can already buy, and here are some early progress payments so you don't have to finance it yourself."
You may think this is a moot point, that's totally fine. The difference between subsidies or not is important to others.
You'll find private sector contracts which pay in instalments for hitting milestones, but not ones which give companies hundreds of millions of non-reimbursable research dollars without the obligation to buy or sell any actual services or transfer IP or equity. Phase I of COTS was a series of grants for hitting planning milestones with a right to terminate before Phase II. The procurement contracts were separate and subsequent to this.
Why would you let them accumulate an unreasonable amount of wealth if you then expect them to give it back to poor people? Why not limit the wealth in the first place to ensure that everyone get its share?
My thoughts on this change quite often, but if we were in a situation where we had a hard limit on wealth I think there should still be the chance to accumulate it, and the people who did the best that year get an award for it. Just to keep the incentive there. It's not like someone who has over 100 million in the bank is putting in the effort just because they want more things.
This isn't how human society works. If you don't want to live in a world where individuals with considerably more ambition and intelligence than you who have built industries and consolidated empires and have been rewarded for doing so, get off your computer built by people who accumulated wealth and funded by people with wealth built from other inventions built and funded by wealthy individuals before that and return to the jungle to lick flies and learn what actual poverty is before you get eaten by something.
In human history, when people like you attempt to force wealthy individuals to hand over their wealth, the country stagnates, and the ambition and intelligence move to other nations that have better social systems built by ambitious men, and the nation gradually rises.
Finally, why do you think "the people" or the government is an efficient instrument for ensuring charitable interests are met? That's really silly
Do me a big favor and don't use any publicly funded or or tax payer subsidized utility or service ever again. Don't drive on roads, don't take public transit, don't ever call the police, don't do business with anyone with a government job or government contract, don't use products or medicines that have resulted from basic research at public universities or NASA, don't use public schools or libraries, if you have a degree from a public institution give it back or pay the difference. Im sure with all your ambition and intelligence you will make due just fine though.
The rest of us here aren't exactly looking for handouts; on average I'd say HNs do pretty well. However we can appreciate the many ways income tax helps support a functioning society.
High income and high estate taxes exist in the same world as wealth and I think they should be higher than they are now - the wealthy use considerably higher resources than the rest of society, and it requires extreme stability in society to even keep and maintain wealth which people in the US take for granted.
The comment did not say anything of that nature, he's describing a hard cap on wealth.. what would that number be? 1 million? 5? - "limit[ing] the wealth in the first place to ensure that everyone get its share" - this is the ignorance of a mob with torches.
Phones to make 911 calls from and cars for the police to drive over in were built by American entrepreneurs who became wealthy. It's part of the system. They did not take value out of society to become rich at it's expense - they were not perfect, but there was a significant net gain. If Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg is forced to liquidate 99% of their ownership in their company tomorrow because the guy above me thinks "I want more money, it's not fair he has more than me" to himself and builds a set of quasi-logical ideals around that and those ideas take root, then we begin declining as a society. The system always needs to be re-balanced and kept in check, but having a maximum bank account is not the answer.
I think we were just not on the same page with regard to OP's comment: "limit wealth"
You interpreted this as "hard limit", I assumed they just meant limit using tiered tax brackets (i.e. status quo). And, I assumed this is what you assumed.
The top-level comment in this thread advocates zero income tax; it's clear now this is not a position you are defending. My bad.
That said, I fixed your original comment...
"If you don't want to be a machine in multiverse where some AI has considerably more resources, training examples, and optimizations than you... with accounts holding more Ether and funded by AI who gamed ICOs... and something something something, dark side... then power down"
Communism hasn't every really happened. What we've had are bizarre dictatorships veiled in communist language that tap the masses discontent as a source of support, but these haven't resulted in communist states. Communism, in theory, comes after capitalism gets bad, but you need capitalism to come before it, otherwise you get the Soviet Union and China which try to be communist states without being industrialized states first.
Not agreeing with OP but have studied this and want to provide color to it. Most of the proposals I've seen that promote a consumption tax deal with that by giving cash back to everyone in the form of refundable tax credits or block grants (yearly or monthly). They would figure out what the middle income person / family would consume, tie that to the CPI for those (breads, meats, consumables) and come up with the refundable tax credit amount to cover that persons estimated consumption tax.
Not impressed. Foundations are just another way to avoid taxes for some people, especially when their finances are managed from offshore accounts in countries like the Bahamas. Often, the foundations pay their "benefactors" a salary and "donate" just enough property and resources for the "benefactors" to get by, lavishly. [1]
If you want to do good, donate your company to your employees.
No its not clear enough actually, the tax benefits could have also been passed on, so please provide supporting evidence of his personal profit. Otherwise we can continue to assume you are a paranoid skeptic.
I also find the idea that the exceedingly wealthy can effectively buy their way out of our tax system. Even if in this case all the money did actually go to causes of his choosing it's not a just system and I'm saddened you are being down-voted for just having a contrary opinion.
Maybe he didn't want his money going to buy more cluster munitions, depleted uranium bombs, clean water act rollbacks, napalms, etc etc?
I hate taxes as well & under our current "leaders"... seeing that they are putting the entire economy at risk with their military over spending... then I would love to figure out how to maximally avoid taxes as well.
Avoiding taxes does not lead to less military spending. Amazon and GE usually pay less federal taxes than the average US citizen but have plenty of lobbyists shoving money into politicians' pockets, just like most defense contractors.
You're better off fighting the influence of money in politics if you want your taxes to be well spent
Do you have any basis for that belief? It seems equally plausible that he wanted as much as possible going to the foundation in order to optimize its philanthropic potential.
I feel like you’re trying to equate avoiding taxes with self enrichment. That’s true if you avoid taxes to then keep the money. But if you avoid taxes by giving everything to charity, that’s not avoiding taxes anymore: those are deductibles for a reason!
The question is: did he end up keeping more money now, than he would have, had he just kept everything and paid the due taxes? The article seems to suggest that, no, he didn’t.
> “Chuck hates taxes. He believes people can do more with money than governments can,”
For a long time he withheld taxation money that could have gone to education and infrastructure. The fact that he gave money away when it was most convenient to him WHILE NORMAL PEOPLE HAD TO PAY EVERY TIME, ON TIME, does not excuse his despicable behavior.
That's kind of like saying taking a pay cut or working part time is tax avoidance. "Normal people" can also avoid taxes by giving their income to charity if they want.
From reading your posts it seems like you jumped to a conclusion without understanding the situation.
Except that I never said taking a pay cut or working part time were tax avoidance. Also, normal people don't usually set up tax-exempt foundations that hire them as "board members" to "give their money away".
Or, the few people who have accrued enough wealth that they no longer need government support - and can afford to purchase a large amount of available public messaging to say this.
I find it literally impossible that a single person's decision could be a better way of allocating funds than a (proportional) government's decision.
Ask any 40 something American professional who has been contributing to Social Security their entire career knowing that the system will be completely insolvent when it's their time to use the benefit about government's ability to decide how to spend money.
Making money is itself a form of giving to the world. Assuming you aren't doing something illegal or something, you make money by providing goods or services that people value more than money - otherwise, they wouldn't give you money for those goods and services.
You're literally creating value. You're then capturing some (but not all!) of that value you created, and rather than doing what some people do (use that value only for yourself), you're giving that value to charity.
That is the wrong line of logic. Many people who have a lot of money are/were not interested in making money beyond what it would take them to have a decent life.
They never made money. They made something else and that something, by consequence, generated a lot of money. For some of these guys the amount of wealth created satisfied a different need, perhaps some measure of impact, but it was never about accumulating wealth in the first place.
His multiplier effect was higher by making tons of money and then giving it away, rather than working for charitable causes directly.
For example, take two simplified cases:
1. He makes a lot of money, and as a direct result of his fortune and generosity, he can effect [1000 employees * 10 years] = 10,000 man-years of charity work
2. He works directly at a charitable institution and performs 30 direct man-years of charity work, but makes no appreciable amount of money to multiply his efforts
If you're interested in a better explanation of this with regard to charity, I would check out Singer's book "The Most Good You Can Do", which is an exploration on the theory of effective altruism.
Plus anyone making money is contributing to their work. A doctor saves lives in exchange for money. An entrepreneur solves small problems that thousands of individuals face.
That's like saying "If you work to buy a house and food, why don't just build it instead along with a garden in the back and not work?" To which the answer is it is cheaper to do what you are best at and sell the surplus to buy all the houses your new money can afford.
Imagine having billions of dollars and all you can come up with is adding voice and video calling to a picture sharing app. I can't understand why anyone would do that, but giving away money is actually fun, though I can only imagine giving away billions...
As Chuck Feeney said once, it is their call what the rich do with their money, but they will get more satisfaction giving it when living than when dead. “Besides,” he added, “it’s a lot more fun.”
Only other similar philanthropy I've ever seen - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-08/three-mys....