Years ago I was looking at a political cartoon depicting "trickle down" economics and it was a picture of a very wealthy man standing on a raised platform with his pants down urinating on a bunch of very unhappy looking poor people below him. I have always thought that was what "trickle down" economics REALLY MEANT.
I mean, you're not off by much. He has a glass of wine in his left hand and occasionally a few droplets fall onto the mid class that is mopping up his urine.
LOL. True. Another lie is the idea that the stock market is the economy, when most people don't have any money or desire to invest. We're driving a gas-filled sports car (on hyperdrive) on the authoritarian highway; no longer can we claim US "superiority" in any aspect, except that journalists aren't being killed on US soil.That's now our one claim to fame.
Any accountant will tell you that they will gladly take that tax rate with all the loopholes that existed at the time. Why did Switzerland get so rich for example? Offshoring money (for people) is no longer a thing. There were many many others.
@@vessbakalov8958 Geneva has the largest custom house in the world, where the rich hide their wealth, from gold to paintings. It's become a global business now, including the architects designing new ones. The latest place to join this disgusting tax avoidance scheme is Delaware, USA (Biden's home state).
@@GladysAlicea agree that valuable items (as opposed to financial assets) are probably the last best place to store value nowdays especially for ill gotten (cleptocratic) gains. As for Delaware - I don't know why it has this tax haven reputation outside of the US. Many companies are register there but it's not really for tax avoidance reasons (lookup Chancery court of Delaware). It has a simple and very well parsed corporate legal code which makes transactions simple and unambiguous. The state actually has a pretty high capital gains taxes at over 5pct in addition to federal. The only thing it kind of has going for it is that shareholders of private companies are pretty anonymous (no public registry). That being said - try getting a bank account these days without disclosing ultimate beneficiaries. Maybe it has benefits for non US residents I am not aware of. But there is really nothing much besides a level of anonymity of corporate ownership that it affords.
I think it's time to retire. I used to believe and agree with your rants. But have learned that your misleading propagandized videos just try to create more division and hate. It's not like you championed any fixes for the problems you're claiming today back when you had the house and Senate during your time working for the government. You sir are just as much part of the problem, and you're not even rich.
What are you talking about he is still speaking to Congress and advocating to this day. And presenting the truth is just truth. It's like showing the history of black people in America. It makes you mad for a reason. Because it is unjust.
@@kellharris2491 he had a good measage years ago, he's just creating more division now. he profits heavily with speaking engagements and youtube creating anger and division from the haves and have nots... I believed every thing he spoke about from 2016 on but recently realized its a lot of babble to keep his followers following him
The truth is more important than the facts.. I’m exigent on productive information on how to possibly create wealth with my $250K good enough to retire. What’s your say on this approach?
Our perceptions of your approach influence how we interpret, understand, and act on the truth. My opinion on this should be you get yourself an aid cause most successful ones seek the knowledge and skills of professionals and claim to achieve their success without any prior help
Invest in a low cost diversified ETF. VOO is a good one. Depending on age and risk tolerance - add some crypto and if you know folks doing some early stage startups - try to put in some $$s with them but be fully prepared to loose it and dont invest in anything that doesn't already have paying customers. Again - depending on age - anywhere between 10 to 25pct. Bonds as a hedge are currently next to useless but that may change. Good luck.
Professor Reich, I've been a subscriber since the start and this, by far, is the only video that made me smile (a little). America's first millionaires invested in art and culture. Guess we needed that, as a new nation, but these guys are just braggarts. Thank you, sir.
hey lets put a team of heavily crack addicted people in charge of managing all of our wealth. Lets give them the power to tell us how much each person owes them and if we cant pay we go to jail. Lets also give them the abilty to take our loans in our name. These people addicted and completely out of control would probably be more responsible than our current congress. Eachperson would owe the government 100k if we wanted to pay off the US debt. This is an absolute travesty, the government spent all the money we gave it no one knows where it went. 2021 600 billion dollars was lost to fraud,. Please stop voting for democrats, they have never done a single thing they promised voters. The entire thing is a scam.
Ah but the real question is HOW MANY GOVERNMENTS CAN A CENTIBILLIONAIRE BUY??? We know they have completely bought the US House and Senate plus many state governments!!! Could a Centibillionaire buy a continent???
they have bought 90% of the rethuglikkkans,,but only a small % of democrats ! Bernie Sanders wasn't even a millionaire until he wrote his book a few years ago.
Yup. A centibillionaire is the same thing as a decamillionaire. I don't agree with the prefix though. B doesn't express dollars, and we already have G (giga) for billion as a prefix. But I don't like the idea of mixing prefixes, as we never really do that for anything else. 100 G$ seems right to me. Or, we could just start using exponential notation. $1.00E11.
On the other hand "century" and "centennial" mean "100 years" and "100th anniversary." Also, "millennium" (from milli) means "1000 years," not one one-thousandth of a year. We also have "centipede" and "millipede." Basically, "centi-" and "milli-" can mean *_both_* one hundred & and one thousand as well as one-hundredth & one-thousandth.
@@ShadowOfTheVoid An interesting point. Indeed, the logic I was operating on applies to units of measurement pretty strictly. But as you pointed out, outside the realm of science and mathematics, you do get words where the prefixes are inverted. And also to your point, the term centibillionaire does feel more at home in the less scientific category. So, I will concede that point. However, I'm going to stand by my distaste of combining numerical prefixes.
@@plentyofpaper I agree that the confusion arises from conflicts between how the SI system uses those prefixes and how less scientific language uses them. "Deca-," "hecto-," and "kilo-" come from the Greek words for ten, 100, and 1000, while "deci-," "centi-," and "milli-" come from the Latin words for those numbers. The SI/metric system uses the former for the positive powers of ten (i.e., 10, 100, & 1000) and the latter for the negative powers of ten (i.e., 0.1, 0.01, & 0.001). Outside the SI/metric system, various words can use either the the Greek or the Latin words in their original sense.
He wrote a book didn't he, or maybe it was a collaboration with several authors. It was like a "guide to living a worthwhile life" type of book. I'm pretty sure it did NOT say "blessed are the rich, for they give the lazy poor something to aspire to".
Not according to today's Christians. Now he is seen as the giver of fortunes...but only to those who really deserve it. If you are rich, it is because you have an especially good, God loving heart and you are being rewarded. if you are poor, well, you did something to deserve your poverty. Good old 21st century Chrisianity. So many of these evangelists approve of trump because they think he was "blessed" due to his pure heart.,🤢🤮
It’s Revelations, it is preordained and nothing is going to stop it…this beast is too big and we’ve already been consumed and are rolling around in its belly ~
But greed isn't the most human trait. There isn't a single most human trait, but the top contenders are things like connection, communication, empathy, society, cooperation, art, kindness, abstract thought, etc. Greed is common among more primitive creatures though, who focus more on what they personally want and less on what others want. Being good to each other, especially to those who are outside our immediate social circle, is one of the main things which separates humans from other creatures.
Isn't it amazing that not a SINGLE Centibillionaire has ever tried doing any of these things like paying off all medical debt. Not even once. Instead they start foundations and use them as tax write-offs.
@@Zach-ju5vi Zach, how about this. We let Billionaires "give" to whatever charity they like, they like building concert halls (with their name on the concert hall). We can have a concert hall on every street corner, like Starbucks, AND we tax them, fairly. I pay tax Zach. You pay tax too don't you Zach. Elon pays zero tax. Is it legal? Yes. Is it "right"? No. Things can be "legal" and also be Wrong. Let me give you an example. Say a sexually active woman in California hates using birth control, and instead, she has an abortion every time she gets pregnant. Maybe she has 9 or 10 abortions every year, year after year. What she is doing is legal in California, but is it right? See. This is so simple that even Conservatives can understand it, something can be legal, and wrong.
@@Zach-ju5vi My problem as a retired civil servant is that I have to underwrite the taxes they don't pay while having less choice as to what my money is spent on. But then I believe EVERY CITIZEN should pay a set percentage of their income for the privilege of supporting their country.
@@Zach-ju5vi Just because he paid the most taxes in history, it doesn’t mean that he is paying his fair share of taxes. He needs to be paying taxes on all his wealth too. Stop defending the idea that billionaires shouldn’t have to pay their fair share of taxes on their money like the rest of us. It’s nonsense to defend these people at all.
@@Zach-ju5vi You said the correct word, "income tax". The problem is that the majority of the money he makes doesn't come from income. That is why people defend wealth taxes for the rich. Look up "Buy, Borrow and Die", that's how they make their money.
Honestly and with whatever result COVID provides them all, I wonder what else they are planning for the future and more importantly, WHAT ELSE IS GONNA HAPPEN TO US! We The POOR people!!!!!!!
@derekbd Well... If that made you to write a comment here, It positively confirms the fact that "More Matters" !!! Thanks anyway! and good use of the red emoji!! :-) :-0 ;-)
If time was money... a second would be a dollar... so, a million dollars would be 11 days... a billion dollars would be 31 years... a trillion dollars would be over 30,000 years. The oldest known pottery is 20-30 thousand years old. It can be tough to wrap your head around. Bit like imaging three dinensional space. My point is that you probably have no concept of someone worth 250 billion dollars... it ain't your fault... it's just a ridiculous amount.
There is a Million Million in a Billion, hence the name, Bi-illion. But you didn't learn that in school did you. For some reason, you stoped counting to a billion at 1000 million...why didn't you do the same counting to a Million, for every $1000 you've got in your pocket, you could class yourself a millionaire, just like billionaires do 😂😂
I was raised not to be envious of others' smarts, good fortune or whatever. But that was a long time ago before stupid me got on to the reality that money talks even though that talk is mostly BS. Things need to change. No redistribution just pay your fair share. What's a fair share? Let the people that drive the economy-you and me- decide we've had enough. No loopholes!
The farce of the meritocracy is also to blame. If you tell people they need to have the work ethic, smarts, and common sense to be a success, when they fail, they're to blame! It's perfect! What we THOUGHT would promote fairness, is simply used to separate the haves from the have-nots.
It's not really as simple as throwing money at the problem. You can't produce food from dollar bills. Hunger is more of a logistics or a systemic problem. In a lot of cases its the inability to get food too remote places or grow food in remote places or high levels of poverty. Poverty is often a systemic issue in the countries economy or government. Donating billions of dollars to North Korea where many people are starving for example is probably not a good idea and also won't change anything.
@@5893MrWilson, true. But throwing money at the World's problems is a better approach for sustaining ALL of humanity, rather than allowing a few thousand people the vanity of where they place in private citizens' exiting the Earth's atmosphere.
@@stephenroberts2526 also considers that billionaires don't actually have money to solve all world problems. They own buisness that investors find valuable. If Elon, for example sold all his Tesla stock, he would only get maybe get 20-30B dollars before crashing the value by more than 90%. Elon would also pay enormous taxes because it becomes income when you sell. All of that to feed people for a short period of time before the money dries up and these places in the world revert to how they were before. Tesla is arguably doing a better service to the world (and world hunger) by slowing climate change. Climate change makes it harder to grow crops where food is needed the most. Technology has brought many people and places out of poverty so they can import food or the tools to grow their own food.
A good way to look a how much even $1 billion is: If you made $5000 a day with paid vacation that would be an enormous amount of money to live off for the year. If you worked that job for that pay since the day Columbus landed in the Americas you still wouldn't be a billionaire.
I like to think of millionaire (just with an m, never mind b) like this: Lets say you make $50k/year. Not great, but quite a bit above average in the US. Lets say you don't spend a single penny - no taxes, no rent, no clothes, no food, nothing. It will take you 20 years to become a millionaire. Approximately half of the average person's working life. It would take you 20,000 years to become a billionaire at that rate - twice as long as "modern" civilization has existed. And it would be 2 million years to become a centibillionaire - about 10 times longer than humans have existed as a species based on our oldest fossil evidence.
Totally agree. However, just to open a possible can of worms, what prevents these guys from dropping their nationality? How do we enforce it? Unlike most people, these super billionaires can jump from nation to nation in a heartbeat.
@@NL-ws5fv Cut them off from American markets if they wanna leave. Make them pay an exit fee if they ever want to come back on good terms. Also, where tf are they gonna go? Most other developed countries already have higher taxes on the rich. Are they gonna set up shop in a 3rd world country with no infrastructure?
No...money, power, and anything else in the same ballpark, just expose the corruption and ignorance that was already there. An idiot with hundreds of billions of dollars is still an idiot.
The U.S. undeniably has the most billionaires, but that hasn't helped the middle and bottom like it's supposed to. At those levels the U.S. routinely gets beaten by other developed countries on human development, living standards, life expectancy, health care, vacation time and a long list of other things. Benefits have not trickled down. Too many have just worked too hard at great sacrifice to family life and not been rewarded. No wonder the political party that enables it most is always trying to get peoples' attention on other things.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." _Albert A. Bartlett. They think that going from a million to a billion to a trillion is like adding zeroes so, it's like adding nothing. It goes like this, counting at a second per number: Counting to a hundred takes just under two minutes. Counting to a thousand takes two hours and forty minutes. Counting to a billion would take 33 years, 8 months, and life-ending sleep deprivation. Now, you do the math on counting to a hundred billion and then a trillion because I'm already tired just thinking about it!
Counting to a thousand takes around 17 minutes, not 2 hours and 40 minutes, which counting to 10 thousand seconds is. Apart from that your maths is correct.
Great example CT JJ! I had an economics professor in college (early 80's) who always posed a question at the start of each quarter, (paraphrasing here) What's the difference between 1 $B and 2 $B? He asserted that the correct answer was $0, because he view money in terms of utility, and there's essentially no additional utility beyond a certain point.
I think comically like Daffy Duck when he and Bugs discover the Sultan's treasure room; it quickly devolved into Daffy hoarding every speck of gold, save for the lamp in the corner containing the genie. ✨ Apparently these lessons are lost on our modern day robber barrons..
Hoarded? Video uses Elon as an example so lets use him. Did Elon increase the price of Teslas shares? No. Tell me why has Tesla's shared increased so much the past few years?
Imagine what a nice life a person could have as a centimillionaire. 100 million dollars could make a very nice life for a person. Interesting that a trillionaire (projecting into the future as it might happen) would be TEN THOUSAND TIMES RICHER than a centimillionaire. From a standpoint of multiplication I am closer to being a centimillionaire than a centimillionaire is to being a trillionaire. A trillionaire would barely have more respect for a centimillionaire than they would have for a homeless person.
Elon lives in a small hut in Texas. As far as consumption I would say he lives a fairly modest life outside of flying between tesla locations as you would expect for the person running the company. He is valued as a billionaire solely based on his ownership in Tesla which has no intention of selling. We should tax based on excessive consumption otherwise what is Elon really taking from anyone? Its only a number if you don't spend it.
Imagine a cardboard box, two feet wide, three feet long, one foot tall, filled with stacks of $100 bills, that's a million dollars. Now fill a train boxcar with one Thousand of these boxes. That's a Billion dollar train car. Elon Musk's wealth would be a train that is 289 boxcars long!! That's a three mile long train!!!
My man Elon is not like the other billionaires just do some simple research. It always surprises me how these educated people have no clue to what’s going on. Keep this up democrats and you’ll loose my vote.
Your "man" Elon is no better than any other billionaire. Honestly, you people who get a hard on over billionaires who don't give a shit about you, really make my head spin.
We’ll all be speaking Chinese and starving long before then, and we’ll deserve it. Rich, powerful oligarchs don’t go backwards. The American experiment has failed.
@@The_sinner_Jim_Whitney Nah, if Republicans steal back Congress we'll be speaking Russian, they want to have CPAC over in Europe so one of Putin's thugs can speak at it.
The CONCEPT *Americans should BE PAID BACK* for their investments seems to be lost on People. *TAXES PAID FOR* _Shouldn't we get some of that Billionaire Wealth too._ *1. Virtually all of Computer Technology was PAID WITH U.S. TAXES, but we get nothing* *2. Virtually all of the Advances in Medicine was PAID WITH U.S. TAXES, but we get nothing*
@@sdpryce What was his percentage and also try and find how much is hidden overseas and then calculate that BS percentage he pays while trying to distract by using an overall number bigger than the average person but substantially lower percentage. I don't fall for the BS numbers games people like to play! Can't tell if we call them the 1% because they have more money than 99% of people or because that's the percentage in taxes they pay!
@@user-gz4ve8mw9l that's not actually how it works though. Their wealth is tied up in the stock of their companies. They couldn't do any of the things he's saying, as they don't HAVE that money.
@@Scubadooper I'm well aware the majority of their money isn't liquid or is tied up in stock shares etc. Go ahead do tell how being a billionaire isn't a criminal against humanity. So far all I've seen is an excuse for an explanation. Not a very good one either as the same lines are spoken by sympathizers everywhere. Which also presume or rely on their opposition being ignorant too bad for you. The reality is a billionaires existence itself is the crime against humanity. A sign of a failed system when the majority are forced to sell themselves for not even enough to live on. While the oligarchs and their crony pals feast off the labors off the working class. What you offered was an explanation stating the obvious. It doesn't function as an excuse for no excuse is a valid one to my knowledge.
If you invested in Tesla or amazon you've done quite well. Lets not forget that millions of small time investors are benefiting from the success of these centibillionaires as well.
This attitude is what's the real problem in my opinion. The people that are ok with the system being corrupt so long as they get a few crumbs. I'm not saying that's you, but we need a paradigm shift in thinking or things will only get worse.
@@barrymak421 The billionaires didn't got rich and throw crumbs at the public. The billionaires got rich because they made a good business and small time investors invest their money into their companies to buy shares, they both got rich TOGETHER as the shares rose in value. Get your facts straight, billionaires got rich because the public CHOOSE them to invest their money
@@hkchan1339 And the fact that they have used that wealth to tip the scales in their favor means nothing right? Hey tell yourself what ever you need to. It's you that's getting the short end of the stick. Keep that anger flowing, but just like others like you make sure you direct it towards those with less power than you and punch down. That way you can brag about always winning.
Its amazing how many people don't understand Economics. Nancy, did you notice in the Video Robert does not go into how these rich people got that kind of wealth?
@@joevlogs4473 This video is Propaganda to install hatred of people who succeeded in life. It doesn't explain how any of these rich people got there. Doesn't show that their wealth is generated in the Stock Market. Not because they own the most shares of their Company. But because every Retirment Fund, every Mutual Fund, Social Security Funds (All those Social Security Taxes you pay each payday) are funneled into the Stock Market. This system keeps pushing prices of Shares up and up and up. Just think for a second. Every Working American pays Social Security Taxes. A lot of Workers contribute to 401k plans and other Retirement plans. All of this money is funneled into the Stock Market. What do you think its going to do? Just earn you an interest on these funds? Its kinda like a protections racket. "We'll protect you from your mistakes in life. Give us some of your money every month and we'll save it for you and return it when ya get old.' Otherwords....Its us who are making these people epically Rich. Just look at the other Comments to the Video. Their angry for they see these Rich People as hording for themselves at the cost to their own lives. Robert here uses Elon Musk as an example. So when Elon donates a Billion Dollars to something he's not giving a Billion Dollars away. He's giving Shares he owns away that are valued at a Billion Dollars. He's not going to tank Tesla by dumping a bunch of shares to donate. Oh no. These Billions don't have Billions just sitting away in the Bank. They have lines of Credit. So Robert is uttering utter bull here in the Video. Just poking everyones emotions .
I was actually thinking about this today while I was biking around. I'm a math teacher. I don't make $100k per year. I would fucking love to. Pretty sure my job is harder and more important than whatever Bezos spends his time doing. But what I was thinking about is how much a single billion really is. If somehow Bezos or Musk came up to me and said, I'm going to pay you $100,000 per year, they could do that for 10,000 years and only use up $1 billion! It's morally monstrous that we allow individuals to have that much money, instead of taxing them at 99.75% and ending homelessness and providing universal healthcare and maybe even UBI. Even just straight up taking 99.75% of the wealth of a centibillionaire would leave them with at least $250 million, which I think is still far more money than any single human should have while others are homeless and going bankrupt from medical debt.
The super wealthy get super wealthy by innovating and changing the human way of life. I am not saying your job is unimportant, but you are training the worker bees. The amount they work isn’t relative to their wealth, but it is probably at least 2-4x the amount of the average person and their impact of society is much larger. Without compensation, there is no innovation. Without innovation their is no progress of the human race. Would you like to hunt and gather your own food, poop in a hole, die at a young age due unsanitary conditions and lack of medical care? Didn’t think so. That is what life would have been without innovators. Life is not fair and whoever told you it is, lied.
@@zacharywissinger3996 i don't think so, most inventors and innovators are not super rich, those who already have capital are the ones who invest in their idea and make billions off their ideas. Think about it, you wanna tell me jeff bezos is responsible for all amazon's inventions and progress? its the workers that do all the work and paid peanuts. If most companies considered paying a living wage to their employees then maybe there will be less hatred towards billionaires
Hey math teacher, if your service to people was really that valuable as you like to think, people would pay you big money for your service, instead of spending money on useless iphones and shiny cars. Your math lessons brings almost no benefits to people, except making them feel smarter.
@@MrDennis5912 I didn’t say inventors, I said Innovators. Innovators revolutionize the world. Ideas are cheap, but gaining traction, figuring out to successfully run a business, manufacturing on large scale, distributing it to the masses, knowing where to focus effort, how to allocate money, and doing things that weren’t done before are the hard parts. Cry and throw yourself a pity party all you want. If you want to be successful you have to go out and do it. Everyone who wants a steady paycheck to live their lives on payment plans are the reason why they are poor. Life isn’t easy or fair. Deal with it.
I'm 70 years old and have been a union officer my whole adult life. I have seen what big money does to hold back the common workers. I'm refreshed to see the young moving to unionize.
The idea that ONE (1) person could have such an impact on America's healthcare, poverty problem, and wage inequalities, and they refuse to do anything to help anyone but themselves and their heirs, makes my blood boil.
@@edwinamendelssohn5129 I guess you don’t understand the harm that billionaires cause by hoarding like that. Or maybe you don’t care. I’m GLAD we have Robert to educate us!
What a ridiculous way of comparing. I have a doubt how much does an avg American politician earns and pay taxes and more over you high other benefits. If they really that much care for people why can't they serve the people without any salary or the same salary of govt teachers.
You don't really understand that teachers are woefully underpaid. Also, I dare you to do all of the stuff a member of Congress, that is active for their constituents, chairs a few committees, passing some legislation while trying to function normally with people harassing you in public and protesting on your lawn and receiving death threats on your family. I don't think you could last a week.
@@JohnRay1969 I accept that teachers are underpaid But I will never believe easily in politicians they only do good to society when they are cornered or if they get any benefit from that.
@@sunisith Do you live in U. S.? No disrespect, I'm just curious because it informs how I will respond to your comment. The quality of people involved in politics is a direct result of the participation of the people. The elections that matter the most are the elections to choose representatives. "Congress" the people that represent us in government. When people become disinterested in participating in our democracy, less savory characters are able to work their way into our system and taint it. With robust participation the representation more accurately matches the populous and also the less likely it is for corruption to run rampant. It is not the corrupt politicians that are the problem, it is voters thinking their votes don't matter and saying "all politicians are out for themselves" and thinking they can't do anything about it. Robust participation is how we keep corruption out.
@@sunisith I only ask where you live because it seems like I hear about how all politicians are so corrupt and evil from people that have experienced really corrupt government and they make it sound so hopeless and beyond our control. In this country we vote. And our circumstances change with participation.
Being of age and how to manage the sequence of returns in those early periods is what seems quite scary in the current market. The market is never a loser in the twenty year cycle, but the 2000s decade scenario scares me and could really disrupt my retirement. When you're no longer accumulating but withdrawing, it's hard to be anything but cautious.
The pandemic really taught people the importance of multiple streams of income. Unfortunately, having a job doesn't guarantee 100% security, rather having different investments is the real deal.
I believe that the secret to financial stability is having the right investment ideas to enable you earn more money. But for now, investors getting started can feel overwhelming. Risk loom large and complicated, unfamiliar financial jargons can be intimidating.
@@steceymorgan814 Apparently that's true, I agree. It is mostly disastrous for newbies or anyone who doesn't adhere to a well thought-out strategy and over all, a professional broker.
Centibilllionaires becoming trillionairrs scary but true. There is only 100% of all the money in the economy. As the 1% gain 0.5% of all income per year that means 0.5% less income for everyone else year over year. Completely unsustainable. As we celebrate juneteenth let us not forget the lessons learned about the abuses of putting absolute power in the few over the many.
I have an idea, how about we never allow anyone to get to that point? What happen to anti-monopoly laws? What happen to paying taxes? How about a flat tax over $100k… first $100k is tax free, pay $0.10 on every dollar after that. There are just too many corrupt scenarios with the rich and mega rich owning our political representatives.
I think we should tax heavily for overconsumption/spending and not wealth itself because wealth is just a number unless you use it to make people do things for you. Elon is good example. He only has 250 million shares of Tesla not dollars. He didn't force people to value tesla for what it is and he has no intention of selling those shares because it keeps people from taking over the company if he is the primary shareholder. Saying he made money in 2020 is the same as saying you made money because your house went up in value. You may have no intention of selling your house so its not fair unless you sold to make a profit. When billionairs sell shares, they get taxed just lke everybody else and often far more than the average person.
@@5893MrWilson I agree, the term “make” must be defined as “realized” just as paying capital gains on realized profit from a home sale. Very valid point, Wilson. Of course, the devil is always in the details.
@@sstolarik I just hate how Elon often gets roped in to the same bucket as other billionaires like bezos. Here elon is working 80 hours a week and sleeping in the Tesla conference room while bezos is partying on a $500M yacht. Elon just owns 25% of Tesla and 50% of spaceX. His net worth is this abstract thing that people label him with as if Elon would sell out of his companies and people would actually pay him $300B without the stock crashing 90%. Frustrating to say the least
How about just a flat 20% on EVERYONE THERE IS, possible exception to the very poor? How can ANYONE find that unfair? And imagine how much better off we’d all be with all that tax revenue.
Even more so. This video proves you could ethically give them each a couple billion while the company is forcibly turned into a co-op, and they either take it, or refuse and get fully expropriated and kicked to the curve with nothing, so they can enjoy the "DayZ Live Roleplaying experience".
I'm a conservative and I watch Reich's drivel. It's done nothing to change my mind, and even further convinced me that liberals/socialists are economic illiterates.
@@FreedomFighter1776 do you know that the Trump administration added 7.8 trillion to the national debt, and gave the central banks a .5% prime lending rate? Endless free money for the richest? Is that what you believe in?
You’ve probably talked about it already, but a video about how those loopholes would be great, and what resources we can use to confirm, just to debunk the trolls who haunt your comment section.
Hi Connor, thanks for watching and commenting. One egregious loophole is called the stepped up basis. You can learn more about it in our video ruclips.net/video/7onxDNmSLwA/видео.html I would also recommend looking at some of ProPublica's reporting on how the richest are taking advantage of the tax code. www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files
@@Zach-ju5vi Tu quoque is a discussion technique that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by attacking the opponent's own personal behavior and actions as being inconsistent with their argument, therefore accusing hypocrisy.
They don't even do anything with all that damn money, they just horde it like a crazy person. Why can't they put the money to good use and digitally imagine how high their number can get, like an NFT for billionaires.
It's a shame that our governments let this happen with such a huge gap between the wealthy and the poor. And Reagan implemented trickle-down economics which the Republican party continues to push on Americans doesn't actually help Americans it just helps the rich and wealthy.
@@chrisw9534 It doesn't if it were true. How many people work 2 to 3 jobs just to make ends meet? How many are homeless? How many are so crushed by a medical debt that the feel suicide is the only way out? If you think everyone in the US is well off, I suggest you get out of your bubble. There are a lot of people hurting out there.
@@barrymak421 I don't know, how many people is that? I don't think everyone in the US is well off. Of course there are poor people in the US. There are poor people in every system in every country. But that doesn't mean that the wealth gap created that problem. Billionaires didn't invent poverty. They're just an easy strawman to attack so people don't have to address the real, more complex issues behind poverty.
@@chrisw9534 So how does this reconcile with your original comment? I agree the wealth gap doesn't create poverty, but what it does do is give the people on the top of the pile a bigger stick to wave at the people pulling the levers of power. I agree that there will always be haves and have nots in any society, but when the haves start to accumulate enough that they can star giving themselves an advantage that's when there is an issue. What I mean by that is, if I walk up to my congressperson with an issue, and someone else with a $100k check with an opposing view, walks up right behind me who is going to be listened to? That's why the wealth gap is a big deal.
I responded to this video and it was taken down. My answer laid the argument out. Here is the short version: Musk invented services and things we had not had before, Bezos provided a service we didn't have. The result was they became very wealthy, but how many people owe their careers and livelihood to them? Both men have created thousands of jobs. Secondly they didn't take anyone else's money to do this, they didn't take your piece of the pie - they enlarged the pie for everyone. Third, if you have insurance, a retirement plan, 401K, 403b, IRA/Roth them most likely you are reaping benefit from their efforts. Lastly, under what ethic do we subscribe to that says someone else has a lot of money therefor we deserve some of it? Stop groping for there's success and make your own. I have yet to see RR make a video that will make your life better, just money grubbing divisiveness. Take care!
I agree with you up to a point: if they pay individually and their companies pay their fair share of taxes then it's all well and good. The problem is: "fair share" is a nebulous concept.
The reality is that anyone with that much money will not dress better, have a better car or eat better. They will have multiple mansions. Their money is unlikely to help the society that helped make them this rich, as their held assets are stagnant.
CENTI- (Latin origin) can mean 100 units OR 1/100th of 1 unit. Hecto- (Greek origin) only means 100 units. Centigrade - 100 degrees Centimeter - 1/100th of 1 meter.
wait wait wait wait, 100 billion could solve homelessness? The US federal budget is $4.79 trillion dollars and it would cost only 100 billion to solve homelessness. Holy fuck why hasnt this been done?
Fun Fact! You are closer to having as much money as Bill Gates (4th richest in world as of this comment) than Bill Gates is to having as much money as Elon Musk (1st richest in world as of this comment)
The people most engorged with the worlds resources have seen their control of wealth more than double during the pandemic. And yet, I have heard not a single person propose a Windfall Profits Tax.
@@RobinHerzig yeah, but it's relegated to the fringe. The tiny minority. The vast segment of the American population has been told to fear anything resembling this. They don't want THEIR wealth taken when THEY make it!
Nor a "second home tax" of some sort. I don't support more burden on the middle class that has a foothold on home ownership, but when Bay Area progressives who vote like they cry themselves to sleep every night over crime, poverty, homelessness and general injustice, then go out and buy a HUGE vacation home, I feel we should tax this. Maybe an upfront tax. Maybe not. Maybe a shared equity tax. Sell it and make $300k? Half goes to the homeless. Again, it would be one thing if progressives weren't gobbling up wealth as fast as they can, but they are. But they sure avail themselves to NextDoor to complain about how the Mayor isn't fixing crime or homelessness!
@@dudeonbike800 Yeah, because obviously there are no poor americans, only temporarily disadvantaged billionaires. The US has gone beyond being just a dystopian nightmare, it's now starting to look more like Bizarro World. Letting children starve and letting people die because they can't afford healthcare are examples of things that are considered normal, whereas the notion that billionaires should be slightly less rich - not poor or struggling - just less rich is considered extremely radical.
This doesn't make sense. The supposed centibillionaires don't actually have any money. It's just theoretical based on some shares they own. If they tried to buy a dozen jets and offered to pay in shares, they would be laughed out of the store. If they sold shares to pay then they would be hit with a gigantic tax bill. If they tried to sell too many they would crash the share price and lose their wealth. This seems a very ignorant video. Pretty basic high school level fail. Phillip.
The billionaires are not responsible for the pandemic and unemployment in 2020. Elon and Jeff are creating jobs and hiring Americans, it's the failure of the US govt that resulted in the lost of jobs and lives. Billionaires got richer because US govt printed money and the people decided to invest in Elon and Jeff that resulted in the growth of their wealth. The rich a hundred years ago also didn't pay federal income taxes, Rockefeller is so rich that he controls the global oil supply and owns the Federal government, the past is not better than present. Americans lost a lot of jobs in the 90s because people like you (Secretary of Labor) working for Bill Clinton failed to protect American jobs as enterprises ship their factories into China. Stop blaming others for your failures, it's petty and weak
Saw a video of musk trying to reason not paying taxes, and people were actually commenting that he was genius....yeah, of course its smart for him to want to benefit off everyone else and not have to pay more back, it's also called selfish
I cried when I saw some of the examples of what CENTI-BILLIONAIRES could do with their money versus what they are currently using their money for. When I remember how cavalierly Musk treated his workers at the start of the pandemic. Or how Bezos CONTINUES to treat his workers.
maybe it would be better to let these people decide how their lives are rather than you doing it for therm? There are a whole lot of Tesla assembly workers who have become millionaires. Is Amazon any worse employer than anyone else?
@@dangrass Society should get to choose where its resources are distributed. However, because the centibillionaire has the money, they own all the resources and what they don't own they can buy. So the centibillionaire gets to decide which medical labs get lab equipment to research what the centibillionaire wants them to research instead of the people. The centibillionaire gets to decide how housing is allocated (usually in a method to make them even more money) instead of the people. The centibillionaire gets to decide how farming is done and what is grown instead of the people. You get the point. It is wrong. We should have the people, informed and advised by trustworthy experts, make these decisions. Just like how the workplace should be run and owned by the workers in that workplace. Not to mention the inherent power the centibillionaires have to dictate terms to municipalities and states because the centibillionaires own the business they suddenly need to attract to their area because that business drove the others out of business or absorbed them, or the power to influence politicians and education and job training and the media and so on... At a certain point, inequalities in wealth and capital (which are also inequalities in power and influence), become a threat to democracy, liberty, and the people's very lives and quality of life (or in the case of climate change and other disasters human civilization and life itself).
@@ArticBlueFox96 Communism has never worked in all of History. Its because people are not trustworthy. There is no such thing as a trustworthy expert to make all the decisions. Capable people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos can make decisions for themselves and thus succeeded in life. Just remember You don't trust me and I don't trust you. Why do you think it would be ok for me to tell what you can do? There will be hell trying to force your communism onto me and most other people.
If this wealth is "largely imaginary" then how do they pass tax-free wealth to their heirs and build space ships and luxurious, private ocean-going ships and fund the real-time functionality of the internet in a war-torn country (Ukraine, Musk) and bend laws to their favor?
Because money is debt and a promise. Explains how the stock market crashes every few years. The system literally runs on everyone collectively believing everyone else is going to pay them back. Then due to random fluctuations in the market at some point enough people lose faith for the whole system to collapse for a bit.
You can't pass it tax free. You can pass about 25m tax free by putting it in a non-revokable trust (I.e. giving up control before you die). The money in the trust may grow because it is invested. So if you die in 20 years, that 25m may be 200m ( assuming market investments double every 7 years or so). But all you can put in is 25m per married couple total life time. Beyond that all of it is very much taxed.
Trickle down i believe started with Regan and just continued along after the Supreme Court ruled that a business is a legal campaign donating entity (like a person). There is no real reason for inflation other than increased profits. I personally believe that if a company is getting record profits in the multi billion dollar range then the employees should be getting record setting pay as well. Why does a company need to have more billions in profits than they did last year? And where do all those billions go from last year?
they need to create more profits because that is capatalism. people invest in companies based on growth. if a company is growing the initial investment will increase in value over time. so in order for companies to gain investment they need to show that they grow and therefore will increase the value of any money invested. which then attracts more investors which can lead to more growth. when the companies make mega-billions in profit that money goes into more growth of the company (new ideas, new offices, more employees, investments into new technology) as well as pay rises, however the payrises rarely reach to the bottom of the pay chain, this is dependant on the size of the company. there are usually more employees at the bottom, so if they see 10% of the profit but there are a million employees then its not to much of a bonus. Where as there is usually only 1 CEO, so if they see only 0.1% of the profit its still a large amount.
"There is no real reason for inflation other than increased profits. " Uhhh what? Tell that to economists. Tell that to Venezuela or the old Soviet Union.
"Why does a company need to have more billions in profits than they did last year? And where do all those billions go from last year?" They invest in new/better products. They expand the business and hire more workers. They payout shareholders.
I finally paid my federal taxes today. This information is depressing. The government should consider the people that actually work to keep this country together and make taxes fair.
I was told 40 years ago by my tax lawyer, a former IRS agent, that the tax codes are written so they ONLY FIT/APPLY to the corporations that designed them!
Is their wealth realized or unrealized? Is their wealth tied to a valuation of a company's stock? It's not like Musk or Bezos have a Scrooge McDuck money bin full of billions of dollars. Their wealth is tied to the number of stocks they have in their own company and the market value of those stocks. If the company valuations were to fall. as too would their wealth.
The thing about extreme wealth is that it grows faster than you can reasonably spend. With $1 billion, it's trivial to get a 3-5% return which is $30-50 million per year, i.e. about twice my yearly income every single day. The solution is a wealth tax.
Interesting. Twice your yearly income. I think you've got too much yourself too. We should tax you much more too. Your making like 15 mill a year? Wow.
the 1st German billionaire supported high tax rates for billionaires because he stated that he would rather be rich in a wealthy country than rich in a POOR COUNTRY !!
love your videos very informative. however I must say until we vote out all the ones in senate and congress who take more than needed. nothing will ever happen. I just hope one day that all changes.
How would "voting them out" achieve anything? To get in office, you have to play the game! So when you replace the old, you get more of the same new! Fundamental campaign finance reform is what's required. Make lobbying a treasonous offense. ALL elections funded by public monies. No more donations.
@@dudeonbike800 true but when you vote for the ones you hope will do a better job ahead. Then maybe something will get done. However look into the ones carefully before voting. The ones in office now however care nothing for the fellow person but just for themselves.
You won't solve this problem by voting because electoral politics is too corrupt. But there's more to politics than voting once every few years for which corrupt politicians will rule over you for the next few years. Join grassroots organizations that are pushing for meaningful change, and in the meantime look after ordinary people through union organising and participating in mutual aid. Politics is in every action that affects the material conditions of society.
@@grzyruth9205 Oh man I'm so worried that reddit will stand up for trash when low tier trash like stock brokers have already made attempts to prevent reddit from doing things in stocks. Oh no I might lose my karma
The hazards of excessive wealth can lead to problems like what we're seeing in Russia;. It's a good idea to limit money, because the other side of the coin is power, the most dangerous drug known to mankind. Not one more cent to the centibillionaires! 🗽🗽🗽
Then you should tell people to stop buying Stocks and Bonds. Thats where all this money is coming from, correct? It surly isn't Elon Musk's yearly salary. Have you really thought about how all this works?
Call + email your congress members + demand that they #TaxTheRich imho #BillionairesShouldNotExist 👏 also this gorgeous content belongs on the Gravel Institute channel
02:38 That is incorrect. Elon Musk pay $9 billion dollar in taxes which should decrease the homeless people, but nope, we still have a increase of homeless people. So Robert you are incorrect with a lot of your statement.
Homelessness is generally about the lack of the right to land at birth. We sell the right to land, but we aren't making any more of it. If people are to have jobs, they need to live near those jobs, but someone else already owns the land. As wages go up, so do the rents people can afford bidding against each other, so who wins... the landlord. The solution is to return to people an equal share of the rent on their land (not the houses and buildings.. just the location). That's the principle behind land (aka location) value taxes (LVT) and sharing them out as a Citizens Dividend.
@@protennis365 I don't watch TV News. And I smoke indica, what are you smoking? Just because somebody on TV says it happened doesn't mean Elon actually did it. He also said if people on Twitter voted for it he would sell off a load of stock and end starvation around the world and I don't think he did that, he also didn't buy Twitter like he said he was going to, so he's 0 for 2. Strike 3 you're out. He talks a lot of shit. I'm gonna have to look for more information damn it.
Centi? That means one divided by 100. For example a centimeter is 0.01 meters. And a meter is 100 cm. So a centibillionaire has ten million dollars. Hecto is the metric prefix for 100. 100 billion is a hectobillion. And one who has that much is a hectobillionaire.
I throw my hands in the air! In NZ you now have to be a millionaire to buy a house. Rents are through the roof. This is insane. We are dooming an entire generation to abject poverty.
If anybody needs a title for a documentary, I'd like to suggest "The Inhuman Centibillionaire". The title lets you know that it'll be hard to watch, and horse-and-sparrow economics is comparable to the premise of the film from which it takes its name.
an American walks in to a Swiss bank with some cash. At the teller he whispers, pst I do have a Million Dollars in cash with me which I do want to deposit at your bank. The reply what he got was: why are you whispering? Poverty is not shameful.
Billionaires shouldn't exist... and _centibillionaires_ are a crime against humanity. Their very existence is impossible without countless other people being harmed.
The complaint that billionaires have a million times the amount of wealth of common workers but don't work a million times harder is flawed logic. I'm embarrassed that a professor uses this argument. The top 1% of actors receive most of the leading roles and earn most of the money. Is that because they are SO much better at acting? No. Success breeds success. When you achieve success, other people want to invest in your success. Russell Brand was asked about this one time. When he had his first big hit in movies, all of a sudden he received a lot more offers and a lot more money to make movies. This isn't a result of Capitalism, this is just human nature. There are no rules in Capitalism requiring this to happen. And, in order to stop this from happening, you will need massive government interference. Is that what people want?
Years ago I was looking at a political cartoon depicting "trickle down" economics and it was a picture of a very wealthy man standing on a raised platform with his pants down urinating on a bunch of very unhappy looking poor people below him. I have always thought that was what "trickle down" economics REALLY MEANT.
Pissing on the poor?! Yup, that's pretty accurate.
And you’re absolutely correct.
Pretty much.
I mean, you're not off by much.
He has a glass of wine in his left hand and occasionally a few droplets fall onto the mid class that is mopping up his urine.
LOL. True. Another lie is the idea that the stock market is the economy, when most people don't have any money or desire to invest. We're driving a gas-filled sports car (on hyperdrive) on the authoritarian highway; no longer can we claim US "superiority" in any aspect, except that journalists aren't being killed on US soil.That's now our one claim to fame.
U.S. GDP growth was much higher in the 1950s and 1960s when taxes on the rich (the top marginal rate) approached 90%.
Any accountant will tell you that they will gladly take that tax rate with all the loopholes that existed at the time. Why did Switzerland get so rich for example? Offshoring money (for people) is no longer a thing. There were many many others.
And there were more good union jobs. People had pensions CEOs didn’t make extraordinary amounts of money more than their workers
@@vessbakalov8958 Geneva has the largest custom house in the world, where the rich hide their wealth, from gold to paintings. It's become a global business now, including the architects designing new ones. The latest place to join this disgusting tax avoidance scheme is Delaware, USA (Biden's home state).
@@GladysAlicea agree that valuable items (as opposed to financial assets) are probably the last best place to store value nowdays especially for ill gotten (cleptocratic) gains.
As for Delaware - I don't know why it has this tax haven reputation outside of the US. Many companies are register there but it's not really for tax avoidance reasons (lookup Chancery court of Delaware). It has a simple and very well parsed corporate legal code which makes transactions simple and unambiguous. The state actually has a pretty high capital gains taxes at over 5pct in addition to federal. The only thing it kind of has going for it is that shareholders of private companies are pretty anonymous (no public registry). That being said - try getting a bank account these days without disclosing ultimate beneficiaries.
Maybe it has benefits for non US residents I am not aware of. But there is really nothing much besides a level of anonymity of corporate ownership that it affords.
I think it's time to retire. I used to believe and agree with your rants. But have learned that your misleading propagandized videos just try to create more division and hate. It's not like you championed any fixes for the problems you're claiming today back when you had the house and Senate during your time working for the government. You sir are just as much part of the problem, and you're not even rich.
What are you talking about he is still speaking to Congress and advocating to this day. And presenting the truth is just truth. It's like showing the history of black people in America. It makes you mad for a reason. Because it is unjust.
@@kellharris2491 he had a good measage years ago, he's just creating more division now. he profits heavily with speaking engagements and youtube creating anger and division from the haves and have nots... I believed every thing he spoke about from 2016 on but recently realized its a lot of babble to keep his followers following him
The truth is more important than the facts.. I’m exigent on productive information on how to possibly create wealth with my $250K good enough to retire. What’s your say on this approach?
Our perceptions of your approach influence how we interpret, understand, and act on the truth. My opinion on this should be you get yourself an aid cause most successful ones seek the knowledge and skills of professionals and claim to achieve their success without any prior help
@Harry Scott Great! got it
Invest in a low cost diversified ETF. VOO is a good one. Depending on age and risk tolerance - add some crypto and if you know folks doing some early stage startups - try to put in some $$s with them but be fully prepared to loose it and dont invest in anything that doesn't already have paying customers. Again - depending on age - anywhere between 10 to 25pct.
Bonds as a hedge are currently next to useless but that may change.
Good luck.
Professor Reich, I've been a subscriber since the start and this, by far, is the only video that made me smile (a little). America's first millionaires invested in art and culture. Guess we needed that, as a new nation, but these guys are just braggarts. Thank you, sir.
hey lets put a team of heavily crack addicted people in charge of managing all of our wealth. Lets give them the power to tell us how much each person owes them and if we cant pay we go to jail. Lets also give them the abilty to take our loans in our name. These people addicted and completely out of control would probably be more responsible than our current congress.
Eachperson would owe the government 100k if we wanted to pay off the US debt. This is an absolute travesty, the government spent all the money we gave it no one knows where it went. 2021 600 billion dollars was lost to fraud,. Please stop voting for democrats, they have never done a single thing they promised voters. The entire thing is a scam.
Ah but the real question is HOW MANY GOVERNMENTS CAN A CENTIBILLIONAIRE BUY??? We know they have completely bought the US House and Senate plus many state governments!!! Could a Centibillionaire buy a continent???
You might need to be a multi centi billionaire. 🤔😉🙄
they have bought 90% of the rethuglikkkans,,but only a small % of democrats ! Bernie Sanders wasn't even a millionaire until he wrote his book a few years ago.
centi means hundredth, i.e. $10,000,000 (centimeter = 0.01 meter). The prefix desired is hecto, h, hundred. hB = 10^9 * 10^2 = 10^11, $100,000,000,000
Very good point!
Yup. A centibillionaire is the same thing as a decamillionaire.
I don't agree with the prefix though. B doesn't express dollars, and we already have G (giga) for billion as a prefix. But I don't like the idea of mixing prefixes, as we never really do that for anything else.
100 G$ seems right to me.
Or, we could just start using exponential notation. $1.00E11.
On the other hand "century" and "centennial" mean "100 years" and "100th anniversary." Also, "millennium" (from milli) means "1000 years," not one one-thousandth of a year. We also have "centipede" and "millipede."
Basically, "centi-" and "milli-" can mean *_both_* one hundred & and one thousand as well as one-hundredth & one-thousandth.
@@ShadowOfTheVoid An interesting point. Indeed, the logic I was operating on applies to units of measurement pretty strictly. But as you pointed out, outside the realm of science and mathematics, you do get words where the prefixes are inverted.
And also to your point, the term centibillionaire does feel more at home in the less scientific category.
So, I will concede that point. However, I'm going to stand by my distaste of combining numerical prefixes.
@@plentyofpaper I agree that the confusion arises from conflicts between how the SI system uses those prefixes and how less scientific language uses them. "Deca-," "hecto-," and "kilo-" come from the Greek words for ten, 100, and 1000, while "deci-," "centi-," and "milli-" come from the Latin words for those numbers. The SI/metric system uses the former for the positive powers of ten (i.e., 10, 100, & 1000) and the latter for the negative powers of ten (i.e., 0.1, 0.01, & 0.001). Outside the SI/metric system, various words can use either the the Greek or the Latin words in their original sense.
GREED. That most human trait. Wasn't there this carpenter guy talking about that around 2,000 years ago?
He wrote a book didn't he, or maybe it was a collaboration with several authors. It was like a "guide to living a worthwhile life" type of book. I'm pretty sure it did NOT say "blessed are the rich, for they give the lazy poor something to aspire to".
Not according to today's Christians. Now he is seen as the giver of fortunes...but only to those who really deserve it. If you are rich, it is because you have an especially good, God loving heart and you are being rewarded. if you are poor, well, you did something to deserve your poverty. Good old 21st century Chrisianity. So many of these evangelists approve of trump because they think he was "blessed" due to his pure heart.,🤢🤮
As was
It’s Revelations, it is preordained and nothing is going to stop it…this beast is too big and we’ve already been consumed and are rolling around in its belly ~
But greed isn't the most human trait. There isn't a single most human trait, but the top contenders are things like connection, communication, empathy, society, cooperation, art, kindness, abstract thought, etc. Greed is common among more primitive creatures though, who focus more on what they personally want and less on what others want. Being good to each other, especially to those who are outside our immediate social circle, is one of the main things which separates humans from other creatures.
Isn't it amazing that not a SINGLE Centibillionaire has ever tried doing any of these things like paying off all medical debt. Not even once.
Instead they start foundations and use them as tax write-offs.
@@Zach-ju5vi Zach, how about this. We let Billionaires "give" to whatever charity they like, they like building concert halls (with their name on the concert hall). We can have a concert hall on every street corner, like Starbucks, AND we tax them, fairly. I pay tax Zach. You pay tax too don't you Zach. Elon pays zero tax. Is it legal? Yes. Is it "right"? No. Things can be "legal" and also be Wrong. Let me give you an example. Say a sexually active woman in California hates using birth control, and instead, she has an abortion every time she gets pregnant. Maybe she has 9 or 10 abortions every year, year after year. What she is doing is legal in California, but is it right? See. This is so simple that even Conservatives can understand it, something can be legal, and wrong.
@@Zach-ju5vi My problem as a retired civil servant is that I have to underwrite the taxes they don't pay while having less choice as to what my money is spent on. But then I believe EVERY CITIZEN should pay a set percentage of their income for the privilege of supporting their country.
@@Zach-ju5vi Just because he paid the most taxes in history, it doesn’t mean that he is paying his fair share of taxes. He needs to be paying taxes on all his wealth too. Stop defending the idea that billionaires shouldn’t have to pay their fair share of taxes on their money like the rest of us. It’s nonsense to defend these people at all.
@@Zach-ju5vi Amazon paid nothing in taxes
@@Zach-ju5vi You said the correct word, "income tax". The problem is that the majority of the money he makes doesn't come from income. That is why people defend wealth taxes for the rich. Look up "Buy, Borrow and Die", that's how they make their money.
Solve healthcare and home the homeless… powerful.
Honestly and with whatever result COVID provides them all, I wonder what else they are planning for the future and more importantly, WHAT ELSE IS GONNA HAPPEN TO US! We The POOR people!!!!!!!
And power corrupts, you can see the results firsthand...
@@samsen3965 This sounds défaitiste.
bUt iTs aLL tHe!R OWn fuA1T!
@derekbd Well... If that made you to write a comment here, It positively confirms the fact that "More Matters" !!!
Thanks anyway! and good use of the red emoji!!
:-) :-0 ;-)
If time was money... a second would be a dollar... so, a million dollars would be 11 days... a billion dollars would be 31 years... a trillion dollars would be over 30,000 years. The oldest known pottery is 20-30 thousand years old. It can be tough to wrap your head around. Bit like imaging three dinensional space. My point is that you probably have no concept of someone worth 250 billion dollars... it ain't your fault... it's just a ridiculous amount.
There is a Million Million in a Billion, hence the name, Bi-illion. But you didn't learn that in school did you. For some reason, you stoped counting to a billion at 1000 million...why didn't you do the same counting to a Million, for every $1000 you've got in your pocket, you could class yourself a millionaire, just like billionaires do 😂😂
I was raised not to be envious of others' smarts, good fortune or whatever. But that was a long time ago before stupid me got on to the reality that money talks even though that talk is mostly BS. Things need to change. No redistribution just pay your fair share. What's a fair share? Let the people that drive the economy-you and me- decide we've had enough. No loopholes!
The farce of the meritocracy is also to blame. If you tell people they need to have the work ethic, smarts, and common sense to be a success, when they fail, they're to blame! It's perfect!
What we THOUGHT would promote fairness, is simply used to separate the haves from the have-nots.
The UN calculates the price tag for world hunger at $32 billion. A few of these guys pulled that in in a single week during the pandemic.
It's disgusting this.
It's not really as simple as throwing money at the problem. You can't produce food from dollar bills. Hunger is more of a logistics or a systemic problem. In a lot of cases its the inability to get food too remote places or grow food in remote places or high levels of poverty. Poverty is often a systemic issue in the countries economy or government. Donating billions of dollars to North Korea where many people are starving for example is probably not a good idea and also won't change anything.
@@5893MrWilson, true. But throwing money at the World's problems is a better approach for sustaining ALL of humanity, rather than allowing a few thousand people the vanity of where they place in private citizens' exiting the Earth's atmosphere.
@@stephenroberts2526 also considers that billionaires don't actually have money to solve all world problems. They own buisness that investors find valuable. If Elon, for example sold all his Tesla stock, he would only get maybe get 20-30B dollars before crashing the value by more than 90%. Elon would also pay enormous taxes because it becomes income when you sell. All of that to feed people for a short period of time before the money dries up and these places in the world revert to how they were before. Tesla is arguably doing a better service to the world (and world hunger) by slowing climate change. Climate change makes it harder to grow crops where food is needed the most. Technology has brought many people and places out of poverty so they can import food or the tools to grow their own food.
@@5893MrWilson Exactly. Hopefully these people begin to understand.
A good way to look a how much even $1 billion is: If you made $5000 a day with paid vacation that would be an enormous amount of money to live off for the year. If you worked that job for that pay since the day Columbus landed in the Americas you still wouldn't be a billionaire.
I like to think of millionaire (just with an m, never mind b) like this:
Lets say you make $50k/year. Not great, but quite a bit above average in the US.
Lets say you don't spend a single penny - no taxes, no rent, no clothes, no food, nothing.
It will take you 20 years to become a millionaire. Approximately half of the average person's working life.
It would take you 20,000 years to become a billionaire at that rate - twice as long as "modern" civilization has existed. And it would be 2 million years to become a centibillionaire - about 10 times longer than humans have existed as a species based on our oldest fossil evidence.
Greed transforms what was once a human being into a soulless creature. Paying their fair share of taxes like the rest of us is the LEAST they can do!
Well said Tom.
It is argued that the ultra rich pay 50 percent of all the taxes. How do they make that argument?✌️
Totally agree. However, just to open a possible can of worms, what prevents these guys from dropping their nationality? How do we enforce it? Unlike most people, these super billionaires can jump from nation to nation in a heartbeat.
@@NL-ws5fv Cut them off from American markets if they wanna leave. Make them pay an exit fee if they ever want to come back on good terms. Also, where tf are they gonna go? Most other developed countries already have higher taxes on the rich. Are they gonna set up shop in a 3rd world country with no infrastructure?
No...money, power, and anything else in the same ballpark, just expose the corruption and ignorance that was already there. An idiot with hundreds of billions of dollars is still an idiot.
Need to go after the system AND all those enabling it ! Ridiculous
The 535 entrenched people Congress are the problem, many of whom have been there for 30-40+ years
@@id10t98 not all of them. Senators Bernie sanders and Elizabeth Warren are speaking up about it
The U.S. undeniably has the most billionaires, but that hasn't helped the middle and bottom like it's supposed to. At those levels the U.S. routinely gets beaten by other developed countries on human development, living standards, life expectancy, health care, vacation time and a long list of other things. Benefits have not trickled down. Too many have just worked too hard at great sacrifice to family life and not been rewarded. No wonder the political party that enables it most is always trying to get peoples' attention on other things.
But isn't theirs still that high
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." _Albert A. Bartlett. They think that going from a million to a billion to a trillion is like adding zeroes so, it's like adding nothing. It goes like this, counting at a second per number: Counting to a hundred takes just under two minutes. Counting to a thousand takes two hours and forty minutes. Counting to a billion would take 33 years, 8 months, and life-ending sleep deprivation. Now, you do the math on counting to a hundred billion and then a trillion because I'm already tired just thinking about it!
You're on the right track...
Yup. 1 000 000 seconds is 11,56 days. 1 000 000 000 seconds is almost 31,7 years. Nice that there is a calc for everything on the internet.
Counting to a thousand takes around 17 minutes, not 2 hours and 40 minutes, which counting to 10 thousand seconds is. Apart from that your maths is correct.
This statement puts things in perspective. Now CT, I'm exhausted too.
Great example CT JJ!
I had an economics professor in college (early 80's) who always posed a question at the start of each quarter, (paraphrasing here) What's the difference between 1 $B and 2 $B? He asserted that the correct answer was $0, because he view money in terms of utility, and there's essentially no additional utility beyond a certain point.
This is what happens when wealth is being hoarded.
I think comically like Daffy Duck when he and Bugs discover the Sultan's treasure room; it quickly devolved into Daffy hoarding every speck of gold, save for the lamp in the corner containing the genie. ✨ Apparently these lessons are lost on our modern day robber barrons..
just because someone gets rich doesnt mean someone gets poor
Hoarded? Video uses Elon as an example so lets use him.
Did Elon increase the price of Teslas shares? No.
Tell me why has Tesla's shared increased so much the past few years?
Imagine what a nice life a person could have as a centimillionaire. 100 million dollars could make a very nice life for a person. Interesting that a trillionaire (projecting into the future as it might happen) would be TEN THOUSAND TIMES RICHER than a centimillionaire. From a standpoint of multiplication I am closer to being a centimillionaire than a centimillionaire is to being a trillionaire. A trillionaire would barely have more respect for a centimillionaire than they would have for a homeless person.
Elon lives in a small hut in Texas. As far as consumption I would say he lives a fairly modest life outside of flying between tesla locations as you would expect for the person running the company. He is valued as a billionaire solely based on his ownership in Tesla which has no intention of selling. We should tax based on excessive consumption otherwise what is Elon really taking from anyone? Its only a number if you don't spend it.
Imagine a cardboard box, two feet wide, three feet long, one foot tall, filled with stacks of $100 bills, that's a million dollars. Now fill a train boxcar with one Thousand of these boxes. That's a Billion dollar train car. Elon Musk's wealth would be a train that is 289 boxcars long!! That's a three mile long train!!!
jfc 😣
@@Zach-ju5vi you say that like you're under the impression that the national debt is the same thing as a private debt.
My man Elon is not like the other billionaires just do some simple research. It always surprises me how these educated people have no clue to what’s going on. Keep this up democrats and you’ll loose my vote.
You're right, he's worse than the other ones.
@@ratulxy well explain
Your "man" Elon is no better than any other billionaire. Honestly, you people who get a hard on over billionaires who don't give a shit about you, really make my head spin.
You are a genius of this issue and deserve a full time on all radios, TV, and any other medium that has ability to get to all persons!
Bob, lets get down to it. Whats it gonna take to remove all private monies from our political system?
Repealing Citizens' United for one the day that passed is the day we became an Oligarchy
We’ll all be speaking Chinese and starving long before then, and we’ll deserve it. Rich, powerful oligarchs don’t go backwards. The American experiment has failed.
@@The_sinner_Jim_Whitney Nah, if Republicans steal back Congress we'll be speaking Russian, they want to have CPAC over in Europe so one of Putin's thugs can speak at it.
@@bulkvanderhuge9006 You think China doesn’t own Russia, too?
The CONCEPT *Americans should BE PAID BACK* for their investments seems to be lost on People. *TAXES PAID FOR* _Shouldn't we get some of that Billionaire Wealth too._
*1. Virtually all of Computer Technology was PAID WITH U.S. TAXES, but we get nothing*
*2. Virtually all of the Advances in Medicine was PAID WITH U.S. TAXES, but we get nothing*
What, you don't enjoy having the privilege of paying $300 for an Epipen or Insulin after these were developed with tax Dollars?
It's the golden age of no taxes for the 1%.
Not to mention the .0001%.
@@Zach-ju5vi So you think the rich pay taxes? Oh how cute.
Elon paid more tax last year than any person in history, while creating thousands of quality jobs, oh and saving the planet. But yeah he's bad.
@@sdpryce What was his percentage and also try and find how much is hidden overseas and then calculate that BS percentage he pays while trying to distract by using an overall number bigger than the average person but substantially lower percentage. I don't fall for the BS numbers games people like to play! Can't tell if we call them the 1% because they have more money than 99% of people or because that's the percentage in taxes they pay!
You should have also mentioned how little money the peasants with only a million dollars have.
They seem to be the most disgusting humans on the planet. It is hard to see photos of them without feeling nauseous.
Or off the planet, please see penis shaped spaceships.
Everyone who earns over 10,000,000 should pay the remainder of their income in Taxes. How much is too much ?
We used to have a 91% marginal tax rate - we need this again
#BillionairesShouldNotExist
@@RobinHerzig correction: 94%
And there was a push to make it 100%.
What's it like having more money than you can ever meaningfully use, and insisting that it's all for you? Just ask Bezos or Musk.
I don't talk to them much...
Philanthropy at that level is simply another form of antidemocratic government.
Criminals against humanity plain and simple.
@@user-gz4ve8mw9l that's not actually how it works though. Their wealth is tied up in the stock of their companies.
They couldn't do any of the things he's saying, as they don't HAVE that money.
@@Scubadooper I'm well aware the majority of their money isn't liquid or is tied up in stock shares etc. Go ahead do tell how being a billionaire isn't a criminal against humanity. So far all I've seen is an excuse for an explanation. Not a very good one either as the same lines are spoken by sympathizers everywhere. Which also presume or rely on their opposition being ignorant too bad for you.
The reality is a billionaires existence itself is the crime against humanity. A sign of a failed system when the majority are forced to sell themselves for not even enough to live on. While the oligarchs and their crony pals feast off the labors off the working class. What you offered was an explanation stating the obvious. It doesn't function as an excuse for no excuse is a valid one to my knowledge.
If you invested in Tesla or amazon you've done quite well. Lets not forget that millions of small time investors are benefiting from the success of these centibillionaires as well.
This attitude is what's the real problem in my opinion. The people that are ok with the system being corrupt so long as they get a few crumbs. I'm not saying that's you, but we need a paradigm shift in thinking or things will only get worse.
@@barrymak421 The billionaires didn't got rich and throw crumbs at the public. The billionaires got rich because they made a good business and small time investors invest their money into their companies to buy shares, they both got rich TOGETHER as the shares rose in value.
Get your facts straight, billionaires got rich because the public CHOOSE them to invest their money
@@hkchan1339 And the fact that they have used that wealth to tip the scales in their favor means nothing right? Hey tell yourself what ever you need to. It's you that's getting the short end of the stick. Keep that anger flowing, but just like others like you make sure you direct it towards those with less power than you and punch down. That way you can brag about always winning.
It's mind-boggling to think that many folks still believe trickle-down economics helps the poor.🤦
Most of the folks you are refering to have no clue what trickle down even is
Its amazing how many people don't understand Economics. Nancy, did you notice in the Video Robert does not go into how these rich people got that kind of wealth?
@@TheRottenapples Yes he shouldve explained that there money comes from not paying their workers enough
@@joevlogs4473 You don't read, do you? It has nothing to do with money.
I'm sure Elon's workers make more then you do, Joe Vlogs
@@joevlogs4473 This video is Propaganda to install hatred of people who succeeded in life. It doesn't explain how any of these rich people got there. Doesn't show that their wealth is generated in the Stock Market. Not because they own the most shares of their Company. But because every Retirment Fund, every Mutual Fund, Social Security Funds (All those Social Security Taxes you pay each payday) are funneled into the Stock Market. This system keeps pushing prices of Shares up and up and up.
Just think for a second. Every Working American pays Social Security Taxes. A lot of Workers contribute to 401k plans and other Retirement plans. All of this money is funneled into the Stock Market. What do you think its going to do? Just earn you an interest on these funds?
Its kinda like a protections racket. "We'll protect you from your mistakes in life. Give us some of your money every month and we'll save it for you and return it when ya get old.'
Otherwords....Its us who are making these people epically Rich.
Just look at the other Comments to the Video. Their angry for they see these Rich People as hording for themselves at the cost to their own lives.
Robert here uses Elon Musk as an example. So when Elon donates a Billion Dollars to something he's not giving a Billion Dollars away. He's giving Shares he owns away that are valued at a Billion Dollars. He's not going to tank Tesla by dumping a bunch of shares to donate. Oh no. These Billions don't have Billions just sitting away in the Bank. They have lines of Credit.
So Robert is uttering utter bull here in the Video. Just poking everyones emotions .
I was actually thinking about this today while I was biking around. I'm a math teacher. I don't make $100k per year. I would fucking love to. Pretty sure my job is harder and more important than whatever Bezos spends his time doing. But what I was thinking about is how much a single billion really is. If somehow Bezos or Musk came up to me and said, I'm going to pay you $100,000 per year, they could do that for 10,000 years and only use up $1 billion! It's morally monstrous that we allow individuals to have that much money, instead of taxing them at 99.75% and ending homelessness and providing universal healthcare and maybe even UBI. Even just straight up taking 99.75% of the wealth of a centibillionaire would leave them with at least $250 million, which I think is still far more money than any single human should have while others are homeless and going bankrupt from medical debt.
The super wealthy get super wealthy by innovating and changing the human way of life. I am not saying your job is unimportant, but you are training the worker bees. The amount they work isn’t relative to their wealth, but it is probably at least 2-4x the amount of the average person and their impact of society is much larger. Without compensation, there is no innovation. Without innovation their is no progress of the human race. Would you like to hunt and gather your own food, poop in a hole, die at a young age due unsanitary conditions and lack of medical care? Didn’t think so. That is what life would have been without innovators. Life is not fair and whoever told you it is, lied.
@@zacharywissinger3996 i don't think so, most inventors and innovators are not super rich, those who already have capital are the ones who invest in their idea and make billions off their ideas. Think about it, you wanna tell me jeff bezos is responsible for all amazon's inventions and progress? its the workers that do all the work and paid peanuts. If most companies considered paying a living wage to their employees then maybe there will be less hatred towards billionaires
Hey math teacher, if your service to people was really that valuable as you like to think, people would pay you big money for your service, instead of spending money on useless iphones and shiny cars.
Your math lessons brings almost no benefits to people, except making them feel smarter.
@@MrDennis5912 I didn’t say inventors, I said Innovators. Innovators revolutionize the world. Ideas are cheap, but gaining traction, figuring out to successfully run a business, manufacturing on large scale, distributing it to the masses, knowing where to focus effort, how to allocate money, and doing things that weren’t done before are the hard parts.
Cry and throw yourself a pity party all you want. If you want to be successful you have to go out and do it. Everyone who wants a steady paycheck to live their lives on payment plans are the reason why they are poor. Life isn’t easy or fair. Deal with it.
@@zacharywissinger3996 math got us to the moon
I like Elon musk I do not like Jeff bezos, I do not support Amazon, I never buy shit from Amazon
I'm 70 years old and have been a union officer my whole adult life. I have seen what big money does to hold back the common workers. I'm refreshed to see the young moving to unionize.
Hooray, but a small one at this point. We need big unions and strong leadership.
The idea that ONE (1) person could have such an impact on America's healthcare, poverty problem, and wage inequalities, and they refuse to do anything to help anyone but themselves and their heirs, makes my blood boil.
There’s a lot of context missing from this video. This guy is incredibly untrustworthy.
So much that you couldn't site or reference any? 🙄
🤥👖🔥
#unearnedarrogance #dillusionalnarcissism
@@cassiusdhami9215 nope, just so much missing I’d have to make my own RUclips video to rebut this trash.
@@VikingSummer he's not lying. It's true. All you can do is sit down here in the comments and scream like a child that it's a lie. You sound like a 🤡
I think it depends who. I do not think you can compare elon musk with jeff besos.
The love of money is the root of all evil and many many people are guilty of it.
What do you call a man with a couple of hundred billion dollars?
A frustrated trillionaire.
Ladies and gentlemen: Tha Fayld St@ytz o'Merika!
I liked the first part where some of the billionaires could like help those less fortunate, but I know that's not gonna happen. 🙄
Seems so reading is in order for you. Hospitals, schools, food banks, scholarships, etc etc etc Robert makes money hocking hatred for the rich.
@@edwinamendelssohn5129 I guess you don’t understand the harm that billionaires cause by hoarding like that. Or maybe you don’t care. I’m GLAD we have Robert to educate us!
@@MsNickie1001 "Edwina Mendelssohn" is a fake name from a phrase in a book. It's foreign conservatroll account, possible based in Kazakhstan.
@@whiteknightcat thanks!
What a ridiculous way of comparing.
I have a doubt how much does an avg American politician earns and pay taxes and more over you high other benefits.
If they really that much care for people why can't they serve the people without any salary or the same salary of govt teachers.
You don't really understand that teachers are woefully underpaid. Also, I dare you to do all of the stuff a member of Congress, that is active for their constituents, chairs a few committees, passing some legislation while trying to function normally with people harassing you in public and protesting on your lawn and receiving death threats on your family. I don't think you could last a week.
@@JohnRay1969 I accept that teachers are underpaid
But I will never believe easily in politicians they only do good to society when they are cornered or if they get any benefit from that.
@@sunisith Do you live in U. S.? No disrespect, I'm just curious because it informs how I will respond to your comment. The quality of people involved in politics is a direct result of the participation of the people. The elections that matter the most are the elections to choose representatives. "Congress" the people that represent us in government. When people become disinterested in participating in our democracy, less savory characters are able to work their way into our system and taint it. With robust participation the representation more accurately matches the populous and also the less likely it is for corruption to run rampant. It is not the corrupt politicians that are the problem, it is voters thinking their votes don't matter and saying "all politicians are out for themselves" and thinking they can't do anything about it. Robust participation is how we keep corruption out.
@@sunisith I only ask where you live because it seems like I hear about how all politicians are so corrupt and evil from people that have experienced really corrupt government and they make it sound so hopeless and beyond our control. In this country we vote. And our circumstances change with participation.
No one needs that much money. It's obscene.
@@Zach-ju5vi It's a matter of greed.
@@Zach-ju5vi How is it not greedy.
@@Zach-ju5vi The 'that much money' OP was referring to is in the billions. A raise from your employer is NOTHING compared to that
@@Zach-ju5vi you and I may work for money, but billionaires leech off of workers like you and me. Do you see what's wrong with that?
@@Zach-ju5vi Nobody earns a billion dollars. You'd know that, if you could do math.
Being of age and how to manage the sequence of returns in those early periods is what seems quite scary in the current market. The market is never a loser in the twenty year cycle, but the 2000s decade scenario scares me and could really disrupt my retirement. When you're no longer accumulating but withdrawing, it's hard to be anything but cautious.
The pandemic really taught people the importance of multiple streams of income. Unfortunately, having a job doesn't guarantee 100% security, rather having different investments is the real deal.
Some investors look to their investments as a source of income while others use it as a means to grow or preserve their wealth.
I believe that the secret to financial stability is having the right investment ideas to enable you earn more money. But for now, investors getting started can feel overwhelming. Risk loom large and complicated, unfamiliar financial jargons can be intimidating.
@@steceymorgan814 Apparently that's true, I agree. It is mostly disastrous for newbies or anyone who doesn't adhere to a well thought-out strategy and over all, a professional broker.
@Richard Perkins Being trying to get started, but i end up loosing out. Do you have a professional broker???
Elon created many many great jobs in the US. How many did you create? Never understood this bashing of the only hope the US has.
Centibilllionaires becoming trillionairrs scary but true. There is only 100% of all the money in the economy. As the 1% gain 0.5% of all income per year that means 0.5% less income for everyone else year over year. Completely unsustainable. As we celebrate juneteenth let us not forget the lessons learned about the abuses of putting absolute power in the few over the many.
I have an idea, how about we never allow anyone to get to that point? What happen to anti-monopoly laws? What happen to paying taxes?
How about a flat tax over $100k… first $100k is tax free, pay $0.10 on every dollar after that. There are just too many corrupt scenarios with the rich and mega rich owning our political representatives.
I think we should tax heavily for overconsumption/spending and not wealth itself because wealth is just a number unless you use it to make people do things for you. Elon is good example. He only has 250 million shares of Tesla not dollars. He didn't force people to value tesla for what it is and he has no intention of selling those shares because it keeps people from taking over the company if he is the primary shareholder. Saying he made money in 2020 is the same as saying you made money because your house went up in value. You may have no intention of selling your house so its not fair unless you sold to make a profit. When billionairs sell shares, they get taxed just lke everybody else and often far more than the average person.
@@5893MrWilson I agree, the term “make” must be defined as “realized” just as paying capital gains on realized profit from a home sale. Very valid point, Wilson. Of course, the devil is always in the details.
@@sstolarik I just hate how Elon often gets roped in to the same bucket as other billionaires like bezos. Here elon is working 80 hours a week and sleeping in the Tesla conference room while bezos is partying on a $500M yacht. Elon just owns 25% of Tesla and 50% of spaceX. His net worth is this abstract thing that people label him with as if Elon would sell out of his companies and people would actually pay him $300B without the stock crashing 90%. Frustrating to say the least
How about just a flat 20% on EVERYONE THERE IS, possible exception to the very poor? How can ANYONE find that unfair? And imagine how much better off we’d all be with all that tax revenue.
Even more so. This video proves you could ethically give them each a couple billion while the company is forcibly turned into a co-op, and they either take it, or refuse and get fully expropriated and kicked to the curve with nothing, so they can enjoy the "DayZ Live Roleplaying experience".
Ah i see it's called centibillionare
I send these to my conservative friends all the time. It has definitely changed some of their minds. I love these videos. Keep up the great work!
I'm a conservative and I watch Reich's drivel. It's done nothing to change my mind, and even further convinced me that liberals/socialists are economic illiterates.
Last year our government spent more than ever and result was more inequality than ever. 😖
Socialism/welfare always backfire. 😭
@@bbmw9029 so you think centibillionaires are good for society?
@@FreedomFighter1776 do you know that the Trump administration added 7.8 trillion to the national debt, and gave the central banks a .5% prime lending rate?
Endless free money for the richest?
Is that what you believe in?
@@Zach-ju5vi do you think that centibillionaires are good for society?
Imagine how much different the entire world would be if the Devil wasn't in charge..
there is a 3rd Choice; *Stop Obeying Criminals.*
You’ve probably talked about it already, but a video about how those loopholes would be great, and what resources we can use to confirm, just to debunk the trolls who haunt your comment section.
Hi Connor, thanks for watching and commenting. One egregious loophole is called the stepped up basis. You can learn more about it in our video ruclips.net/video/7onxDNmSLwA/видео.html
I would also recommend looking at some of ProPublica's reporting on how the richest are taking advantage of the tax code. www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files
@@Zach-ju5vi You intentionally using a double negative?????
@@RBReich Thanks!! 😁 I’ll look into it.
@@Zach-ju5vi he lives in a middle class neighborhood in what used to be middle class Berkeley. I see you're using the Tu quoque fallacy
@@Zach-ju5vi Tu quoque is a discussion technique that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by attacking the opponent's own personal behavior and actions as being inconsistent with their argument, therefore accusing hypocrisy.
They don't even do anything with all that damn money, they just horde it like a crazy person. Why can't they put the money to good use and digitally imagine how high their number can get, like an NFT for billionaires.
FFS we need real representatives that will actually *raise tax rate on the centi-billionares* asap!
Gee, all I have is 2,00,000, but it's all monopoly money. No one will take it.
It's a shame that our governments let this happen with such a huge gap between the wealthy and the poor.
And Reagan implemented trickle-down economics which the Republican party continues to push on Americans doesn't actually help Americans it just helps the rich and wealthy.
Reagan really was one of the biggest causes of ruin to the US.
Why does a wealth gap matter if everyone else is well-off?
@@chrisw9534 It doesn't if it were true. How many people work 2 to 3 jobs just to make ends meet? How many are homeless? How many are so crushed by a medical debt that the feel suicide is the only way out? If you think everyone in the US is well off, I suggest you get out of your bubble. There are a lot of people hurting out there.
@@barrymak421 I don't know, how many people is that?
I don't think everyone in the US is well off. Of course there are poor people in the US. There are poor people in every system in every country. But that doesn't mean that the wealth gap created that problem. Billionaires didn't invent poverty. They're just an easy strawman to attack so people don't have to address the real, more complex issues behind poverty.
@@chrisw9534 So how does this reconcile with your original comment?
I agree the wealth gap doesn't create poverty, but what it does do is give the people on the top of the pile a bigger stick to wave at the people pulling the levers of power.
I agree that there will always be haves and have nots in any society, but when the haves start to accumulate enough that they can star giving themselves an advantage that's when there is an issue. What I mean by that is, if I walk up to my congressperson with an issue, and someone else with a $100k check with an opposing view, walks up right behind me who is going to be listened to? That's why the wealth gap is a big deal.
Where does all the money spent lobbying going who is making all that money is it just the lobbyist themselves
I responded to this video and it was taken down. My answer laid the argument out. Here is the short version: Musk invented services and things we had not had before, Bezos provided a service we didn't have. The result was they became very wealthy, but how many people owe their careers and livelihood to them? Both men have created thousands of jobs. Secondly they didn't take anyone else's money to do this, they didn't take your piece of the pie - they enlarged the pie for everyone. Third, if you have insurance, a retirement plan, 401K, 403b, IRA/Roth them most likely you are reaping benefit from their efforts. Lastly, under what ethic do we subscribe to that says someone else has a lot of money therefor we deserve some of it? Stop groping for there's success and make your own. I have yet to see RR make a video that will make your life better, just money grubbing divisiveness. Take care!
I agree with you up to a point: if they pay individually and their companies pay their fair share of taxes then it's all well and good.
The problem is: "fair share" is a nebulous concept.
The reality is that anyone with that much money will not dress better, have a better car or eat better. They will have multiple mansions. Their money is unlikely to help the society that helped make them this rich, as their held assets are stagnant.
The prefix centi- mean 1/100th, Perhaps hecto-, which means x100, would make more sense.
Good point.
CENTI- (Latin origin) can mean 100 units OR 1/100th of 1 unit. Hecto- (Greek origin) only means 100 units.
Centigrade - 100 degrees
Centimeter - 1/100th of 1 meter.
@@whiteknightcat Centi- can mean 100 units OR 1/100th of 1 unit.
Centigrade - 100 degrees
Centimeter - 1/100th of 1 meter.
wait wait wait wait, 100 billion could solve homelessness? The US federal budget is $4.79 trillion dollars and it would cost only 100 billion to solve homelessness. Holy fuck why hasnt this been done?
bEcAuSe It IsN't PrOfItAbLe
Think “Pentagon”.
Fun Fact! You are closer to having as much money as Bill Gates (4th richest in world as of this comment) than Bill Gates is to having as much money as Elon Musk (1st richest in world as of this comment)
This is foolish, by any measure. You should be ashamed.
The people most engorged with the worlds resources have seen their control of wealth more than double during the pandemic. And yet, I have heard not a single person propose a Windfall Profits Tax.
Sen Sheldon Whitehouse has proposed exactly that 3/10/2022 + Bernie's been promoting it ever since 👏
@@RobinHerzig yeah, but it's relegated to the fringe. The tiny minority. The vast segment of the American population has been told to fear anything resembling this. They don't want THEIR wealth taken when THEY make it!
Nor a "second home tax" of some sort. I don't support more burden on the middle class that has a foothold on home ownership, but when Bay Area progressives who vote like they cry themselves to sleep every night over crime, poverty, homelessness and general injustice, then go out and buy a HUGE vacation home, I feel we should tax this.
Maybe an upfront tax. Maybe not.
Maybe a shared equity tax. Sell it and make $300k? Half goes to the homeless.
Again, it would be one thing if progressives weren't gobbling up wealth as fast as they can, but they are. But they sure avail themselves to NextDoor to complain about how the Mayor isn't fixing crime or homelessness!
@@RobinHerzig Very pleased to hear it. Thanks for letting me know
@@dudeonbike800 Yeah, because obviously there are no poor americans, only temporarily disadvantaged billionaires. The US has gone beyond being just a dystopian nightmare, it's now starting to look more like Bizarro World. Letting children starve and letting people die because they can't afford healthcare are examples of things that are considered normal, whereas the notion that billionaires should be slightly less rich - not poor or struggling - just less rich is considered extremely radical.
I’m ready for torches and pitch forks.
I say, bring a law,
20% of the company belongs to the employees.
Spread the wealth, without disincentivizing.
I was also thinking something similar :)
Bad name, makes it sound like they are sentient.
This doesn't make sense. The supposed centibillionaires don't actually have any money. It's just theoretical based on some shares they own.
If they tried to buy a dozen jets and offered to pay in shares, they would be laughed out of the store. If they sold shares to pay then they would be hit with a gigantic tax bill. If they tried to sell too many they would crash the share price and lose their wealth.
This seems a very ignorant video. Pretty basic high school level fail.
Phillip.
The billionaires are not responsible for the pandemic and unemployment in 2020.
Elon and Jeff are creating jobs and hiring Americans, it's the failure of the US govt that resulted in the lost of jobs and lives. Billionaires got richer because US govt printed money and the people decided to invest in Elon and Jeff that resulted in the growth of their wealth.
The rich a hundred years ago also didn't pay federal income taxes, Rockefeller is so rich that he controls the global oil supply and owns the Federal government, the past is not better than present.
Americans lost a lot of jobs in the 90s because people like you (Secretary of Labor) working for Bill Clinton failed to protect American jobs as enterprises ship their factories into China.
Stop blaming others for your failures, it's petty and weak
the pursuit of greed leaves humanity behind a few will have more than most will ever know and cause suffering they will never care about
Only a psycho defends this level of wealth and resource inequality
Saw a video of musk trying to reason not paying taxes, and people were actually commenting that he was genius....yeah, of course its smart for him to want to benefit off everyone else and not have to pay more back, it's also called selfish
just because someone gets rich doesnt mean someone gets poor
this guy roberts gives me the creeps!!
I cried when I saw some of the examples of what CENTI-BILLIONAIRES could do with their money versus what they are currently using their money for. When I remember how cavalierly Musk treated his workers at the start of the pandemic. Or how Bezos CONTINUES to treat his workers.
maybe it would be better to let these people decide how their lives are rather than you doing it for therm? There are a whole lot of Tesla assembly workers who have become millionaires. Is Amazon any worse employer than anyone else?
@@dangrass Society should get to choose where its resources are distributed. However, because the centibillionaire has the money, they own all the resources and what they don't own they can buy. So the centibillionaire gets to decide which medical labs get lab equipment to research what the centibillionaire wants them to research instead of the people. The centibillionaire gets to decide how housing is allocated (usually in a method to make them even more money) instead of the people. The centibillionaire gets to decide how farming is done and what is grown instead of the people. You get the point. It is wrong. We should have the people, informed and advised by trustworthy experts, make these decisions. Just like how the workplace should be run and owned by the workers in that workplace.
Not to mention the inherent power the centibillionaires have to dictate terms to municipalities and states because the centibillionaires own the business they suddenly need to attract to their area because that business drove the others out of business or absorbed them, or the power to influence politicians and education and job training and the media and so on...
At a certain point, inequalities in wealth and capital (which are also inequalities in power and influence), become a threat to democracy, liberty, and the people's very lives and quality of life (or in the case of climate change and other disasters human civilization and life itself).
Bezos is a diseased sick twisted depraved person and is as pathetic of an excuse for a human being as anyone I can think of
@@ArticBlueFox96 Communism has never worked in all of History. Its because people are not trustworthy. There is no such thing as a trustworthy expert to make all the decisions.
Capable people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos can make decisions for themselves and thus succeeded in life.
Just remember You don't trust me and I don't trust you. Why do you think it would be ok for me to tell what you can do?
There will be hell trying to force your communism onto me and most other people.
@@dangrass troll. But a good slave. Here's your cookie 🍪
Use the correct term. Oligarch.
If this wealth is "largely imaginary" then how do they pass tax-free wealth to their heirs and build space ships and luxurious, private ocean-going ships and fund the real-time functionality of the internet in a war-torn country (Ukraine, Musk) and bend laws to their favor?
If you knew that, you'd be one of them.
Because money is debt and a promise. Explains how the stock market crashes every few years. The system literally runs on everyone collectively believing everyone else is going to pay them back. Then due to random fluctuations in the market at some point enough people lose faith for the whole system to collapse for a bit.
You can't pass it tax free. You can pass about 25m tax free by putting it in a non-revokable trust (I.e. giving up control before you die). The money in the trust may grow because it is invested. So if you die in 20 years, that 25m may be 200m ( assuming market investments double every 7 years or so). But all you can put in is 25m per married couple total life time.
Beyond that all of it is very much taxed.
@@vessbakalov8958 "all you can put in is 25m"
really? That small pathetic amount. Poor people am I right?
@@the_algorithm well, it's one thing to claim they can pass 100 billion tax free, it's another thing to say 25m. It's only 4000x factor of difference.
nothing but bitterness and resentment...
Trickle down i believe started with Regan and just continued along after the Supreme Court ruled that a business is a legal campaign donating entity (like a person).
There is no real reason for inflation other than increased profits.
I personally believe that if a company is getting record profits in the multi billion dollar range then the employees should be getting record setting pay as well.
Why does a company need to have more billions in profits than they did last year? And where do all those billions go from last year?
they need to create more profits because that is capatalism. people invest in companies based on growth. if a company is growing the initial investment will increase in value over time. so in order for companies to gain investment they need to show that they grow and therefore will increase the value of any money invested. which then attracts more investors which can lead to more growth.
when the companies make mega-billions in profit that money goes into more growth of the company (new ideas, new offices, more employees, investments into new technology) as well as pay rises, however the payrises rarely reach to the bottom of the pay chain, this is dependant on the size of the company. there are usually more employees at the bottom, so if they see 10% of the profit but there are a million employees then its not to much of a bonus. Where as there is usually only 1 CEO, so if they see only 0.1% of the profit its still a large amount.
"There is no real reason for inflation other than increased profits. "
Uhhh what? Tell that to economists. Tell that to Venezuela or the old Soviet Union.
"Why does a company need to have more billions in profits than they did last year? And where do all those billions go from last year?"
They invest in new/better products. They expand the business and hire more workers. They payout shareholders.
Greed.... it's human nature. So is selfishness.
I finally paid my federal taxes today. This information is depressing. The government should consider the people that actually work to keep this country together and make taxes fair.
I was told 40 years ago by my tax lawyer, a former IRS agent, that the tax codes are written so they ONLY FIT/APPLY to the corporations that designed them!
Politics make me sad every time i always think what could be, even when i see the fruits of some accomplishments i want more and more off it.
Off or of?
Are the Waltons still just billionaires? ..
Put together, they are worth 238 billion dollars, but still obscenely wealthy.
Is their wealth realized or unrealized? Is their wealth tied to a valuation of a company's stock? It's not like Musk or Bezos have a Scrooge McDuck money bin full of billions of dollars. Their wealth is tied to the number of stocks they have in their own company and the market value of those stocks. If the company valuations were to fall. as too would their wealth.
Does one person having so much money mean less for everyone else?
Experts say our economy is not a zero-sum game it sure seems like one as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
The thing about extreme wealth is that it grows faster than you can reasonably spend. With $1 billion, it's trivial to get a 3-5% return which is $30-50 million per year, i.e. about twice my yearly income every single day. The solution is a wealth tax.
For decades the USA has tax rates on the highest earners of 70-90% above a certain threshold and there's no reason why we cant do it again today.
@@id10t98 there are plenty of reasons. They’re called republican politicians.
Interesting. Twice your yearly income. I think you've got too much yourself too. We should tax you much more too. Your making like 15 mill a year? Wow.
@@TheRottenapples that seems like a miscalculation. Too many zeroes?
@@TheRottenapples $30M per year = $82k per day = almost twice my yearly income per day
the 1st German billionaire supported high tax rates for billionaires because he stated that he would rather be rich in a wealthy country than rich in a POOR COUNTRY !!
love your videos very informative. however I must say until we vote out all the ones in senate and congress who take more than needed. nothing will ever happen. I just hope one day that all changes.
How would "voting them out" achieve anything? To get in office, you have to play the game! So when you replace the old, you get more of the same new!
Fundamental campaign finance reform is what's required. Make lobbying a treasonous offense. ALL elections funded by public monies. No more donations.
@@dudeonbike800 true but when you vote for the ones you hope will do a better job ahead. Then maybe something will get done. However look into the ones carefully before voting. The ones in office now however care nothing for the fellow person but just for themselves.
You won't solve this problem by voting because electoral politics is too corrupt. But there's more to politics than voting once every few years for which corrupt politicians will rule over you for the next few years. Join grassroots organizations that are pushing for meaningful change, and in the meantime look after ordinary people through union organising and participating in mutual aid. Politics is in every action that affects the material conditions of society.
@@atashikokoni well said
The word needs to be "centabillionaire". The prefix "centa" means times one hundred. The prefix "centi" means one tenth.
I think you have your words wrong. There's already a word for people who are worth 100 billion dollars or more, They're called Trash
Be careful what you say, Redditors might say mean things about you!!!
@@grzyruth9205 Oh man I'm so worried that reddit will stand up for trash when low tier trash like stock brokers have already made attempts to prevent reddit from doing things in stocks. Oh no I might lose my karma
The hazards of excessive wealth can lead to problems like what we're seeing in Russia;. It's a good idea to limit money, because the other side of the coin is power, the most dangerous drug known to mankind. Not one more cent to the centibillionaires! 🗽🗽🗽
just because someone gets rich doesnt mean someone gets poor
@@brennanmason1973 The facts of the current economy disagree.
Then you should tell people to stop buying Stocks and Bonds. Thats where all this money is coming from, correct? It surly isn't Elon Musk's yearly salary.
Have you really thought about how all this works?
@@whiteknightcat if I buy an Iphone, apple gets richer and I get richer
@@brennanmason1973 Then by all means, go out tomorrow and spend every last penny you have on everything you can think of. You'll own the world.
Call + email your congress members + demand that they #TaxTheRich
imho #BillionairesShouldNotExist 👏
also this gorgeous content belongs on the Gravel Institute channel
02:38 That is incorrect. Elon Musk pay $9 billion dollar in taxes which should decrease the homeless people, but nope, we still have a increase of homeless people. So Robert you are incorrect with a lot of your statement.
Homelessness is generally about the lack of the right to land at birth. We sell the right to land, but we aren't making any more of it. If people are to have jobs, they need to live near those jobs, but someone else already owns the land. As wages go up, so do the rents people can afford bidding against each other, so who wins... the landlord. The solution is to return to people an equal share of the rent on their land (not the houses and buildings.. just the location). That's the principle behind land (aka location) value taxes (LVT) and sharing them out as a Citizens Dividend.
That would probably be true IF ELON PAID HIS TAXES but I am not sure he actually paid. Did you see him do it?
@@JohnRay1969 It was all over CNN Business a left wing news that say Elon did. WTF are you smoking.
@@protennis365 I don't watch TV News. And I smoke indica, what are you smoking? Just because somebody on TV says it happened doesn't mean Elon actually did it. He also said if people on Twitter voted for it he would sell off a load of stock and end starvation around the world and I don't think he did that, he also didn't buy Twitter like he said he was going to, so he's 0 for 2. Strike 3 you're out. He talks a lot of shit. I'm gonna have to look for more information damn it.
At this rate they will add "trillionare" to the dictionary.
Centi? That means one divided by 100. For example a centimeter is 0.01 meters. And a meter is 100 cm.
So a centibillionaire has ten million dollars. Hecto is the metric prefix for 100. 100 billion is a hectobillion. And one who has that much is a hectobillionaire.
Or, one heckuva billionaire! (wink emoji)
His lemmings eat it up...
I throw my hands in the air! In NZ you now have to be a millionaire to buy a house. Rents are through the roof. This is insane. We are dooming an entire generation to abject poverty.
If anybody needs a title for a documentary, I'd like to suggest "The Inhuman Centibillionaire". The title lets you know that it'll be hard to watch, and horse-and-sparrow economics is comparable to the premise of the film from which it takes its name.
an American walks in to a Swiss bank with some cash.
At the teller he whispers, pst I do have a Million Dollars in cash with me which I do want to deposit at your bank.
The reply what he got was: why are you whispering? Poverty is not shameful.
Billionaires shouldn't exist... and _centibillionaires_ are a crime against humanity. Their very existence is impossible without countless other people being harmed.
Centi-millionaire needs to become a common term, for what used to be a millionaire back in the 1970's/80's.
That was very enlightening! Altruistic behavior is necessary and possible for the good of all mankind. Peace be with you.
The complaint that billionaires have a million times the amount of wealth of common workers but don't work a million times harder is flawed logic. I'm embarrassed that a professor uses this argument. The top 1% of actors receive most of the leading roles and earn most of the money. Is that because they are SO much better at acting? No. Success breeds success. When you achieve success, other people want to invest in your success. Russell Brand was asked about this one time. When he had his first big hit in movies, all of a sudden he received a lot more offers and a lot more money to make movies. This isn't a result of Capitalism, this is just human nature. There are no rules in Capitalism requiring this to happen. And, in order to stop this from happening, you will need massive government interference. Is that what people want?
I just realized, they're racing to see who gets to a Trillion first!