Ok, I’m just going to go ahead and pitch an alternative and then you can weigh in on the relative merits.

In my mind, the issues aren’t the loans themselves, it’s that they’re secured by shares. Billionaires are able to realize real value from those shares without paying taxes in them.

I think if you want to use shares as collateral, you need to pay the taxes on them.

You wanna use shares to back a loan, fine, but the instant you do, all taxes on those shares are due at FMV.

This isn’t without precedent: when an employee has unvested shares with a company and meet a companies retirement eligibility criteria, the IRS sees that those shares are “no longer at substantial risk of forfeiture” and several social taxes are due, despite the shares not being sold or even technically owned by that person.

We can extract fair tax values from securities even before they’re sold. We already do.

Tax the assets used to secure the loans and it gets the taxes into the system without removing voting rights. Win/win, and it’s a scalpel directly targeting the root.

Oof owch owie

It was a fucking ballsy move to advertise their Xmas NFL livestreaming during that trainwreck

This is a bad system for several reasons:

-It requires an arbitrary use-agnostic choice of value. Why 10 million? Why not 5? Why not 50?

-it requires an arbitrary time scale. Why 5 years? Why not 3? why not 10? Why not limit once in a lifetime?

We’re defining a system here with numbers out of thin air with no context around anything. These are fundamentally badly designed systems. No amount of fiddling with the parameters will make up for the fact that it’s fundamentally flawed.

Also, beyond that, you would be amazed how many scenarios exist for people and businesses to secure large loans that this would impact. The goal is to actually tax the super rich who are dodging taxes, not kneecap legitimate useage. You’d hurt hundreds of thousands legitimate borrowers and just shove Bezos and Musk into using alternative mechanisms to leverage their security holdings.

I know you think I don’t understand your proposal. I challenge you to consider that I do, and still think you can reconsider the root cause of the issue and come up with alternative ideas. You’re stuck on the loan aspect. That’s a symptom, not the cause.

They aren’t used interchangeably so this implies a different definition or at least distinct connotations.

The problem isn’t that i “don’t understand the gap”. The problem is that this isn’t what I’m asking.

How do you define for the purposes of this hypothetical law which loans would be taxed as income?

Telling me how rich Bezos is is completely tangential.

I’ve been trying to use the Socratic method to prime the pump that

-The root of the problem isn’t the loans themselves, it’s that they can “realize value” from shares (using them to secure a loan) without selling them.

But that doesn’t seem to have gotten anywhere because of how excited people are to hear any question to be somehow a doubting of how rich these guys are?

If that is the case, and you step back, can you consider an alternative strategy besides just some messy spaghetti definition of “income loans” vs other loans?

My mortgage was many times my yearly income.

So then you just have frequency, which is easily gamed by getting fewer larger loans. Maybe one every three to five years? At that point it really is just a mortgage with stock as collateral rather than a house.

Like, you’re not wrong in your intuition that the system is problematic. Mine (and others) point is that the devil is in the details, and they’re not trivial.

How do you establish that a loan is or isn’t “acting as income”?

Considering he asked twitter programmers to print out their pull requests Im not even sure he’s not cosplaying a programmer

That’s not really true.

If it were, why would a company care about their share price, post-IPO?

Although people generally conceptualize shares as an ownership of the company, there are a ton of mechanisms at play that make that notion essentially a farce.

It’s better to think of shares as a currency for which the company owns the printer. The reason companies want to keep their stock value high is that they can at-will conjure more shares from the ether and sell them. It’s not JUST during an IPO.

So, in a fractionally insignificant way, as a retail investor, every purchase adds buy pressure and shifts the order book towards a higher market price. The higher the market price, the more money the company can raise by issuing new shares while minimizing the dilution effect of the issuing of new shares.

It involves golden tickets and the unsolved disappearances of a handful of children.

Brutal, I know, but it’s the only way.

Short answer: get paid more

Medium answer: become unionized so that you can bargain collectively for more pay instead of individually. It’s like forming a political party with your labour, and then voting for yourself

I think the hope was that they had the capacity to intercept ALL attacks (missiles, drones) before they actually hit anything. If you can provide an impenetrable shield, you can let your enemies flail against it without needing to spend any political capital in the region, which is the ideal outcome.

The USAs stockpile of military assets is for all intents and purposes infinite. The cost of expenditure is nil. So easily replaced. Honestly, excited to replace because it keeps the industrial complex humming along. The know-how is there to replenish that resource.

Political capital in the middle east? THAT is in shot supply. THAT is hard to build back after it’s spent. The know-how isn’t there for that resource.

Wozniak was obsessed with Tetris, and would send his high scores to Nintendo Power Magazine.

Eventually, since nobody was able to touch his scores, Nintendo Power asked him to stop, so he (Steve Wozniak) started submitting them as “Evets Kainzow”, and at least one of his scores was printed under that name.

So, yeah, he has a history as a (the?) Top human player of Tetris in an age past.

Elon is retarded.

But the evidence of how stupid he is is manifested through 1000 other decisions.

EVERY buyout happens for a premium. That’s just how buyouts work.

Microsoft Activision: 45% premium

Broadcom buys VMware 49% premium

Like, this is WHY acquisitions are PRIME TARGETS for insider trading: if you know an acquisition is going to occur before the market, you can buy a ton of the stock with a " guaranteed" ability to sell higher.

Elon is a fucking retard. There are literally thousands of examples of this that you could speak on authoritatively. I don’t understand why people with no understanding of the most fundamental concepts of acquisitions would choose the specific point of a 20% buyout premium as evidence of his idiocy. 20% is a very very acceptable premium.

It’s actually SUCH a meager premium, it’s probably exactly why Elon didn’t think they’d accept it.

It necessarily follows from your formal argument that we need to contract the boring company to drill deep into the Hollywood Hills to mine for all of the precious celebrity tweets.

It was trading publicly at $45 when he initially floated buying it for $54. That’s about a 20% buyout premium, and is well within normal bounds. Honestly it’s a little on the low side.

I hope Wozniak sends this kid a congratulatory card or something.

I think he’s always been a populist mouthpiece. It’s just that during the Clinton era what populism even looked like was very different.

I’m not plugging my ears. I’m just ordering the coexistent issues by immediacy and impact.

Finland’s compulsory service, in the grand scheme of things, makes no difference to South America.

Finland’s compulsory service, in the grand scheme of things, makes a massive and immediate difference to Finland’s continued existence bordering a belligerent nation with clear aims to expand its borders.

Like, you need to understand, the US military is designed to do MANY things, across the globe, as an empire would to maintain a status quo.

Finland’s military, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania… These militaries exist for EXACTLY one purpose, which is self-preservation against a concrete threat.

Again, I think you’re not wrong in your acknowledgement of existent factors. I think you’re wrong in your relative understanding of the specific impacts for these countries in particular. Yes: there is human urine in the ocean, but it’s not practically valuable to conceptualize a swim in the ocean as a bath in piss.