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It helped employ the land surveyors.
It helped the architects who designed the building.
It helped the structural engineers who designed the structural details.
It helped the mechanical engineers who designed the HVAC systems to adhere or exceed energy efficiency standards.
It helped employ the building department who checked all the building plans.
It helped the operating engineers who cleared the land.
It helped the employees at Caterpillar who built the earthmoving equipment.
It helped the concrete workers who formed & poured the foundation and driveway.
It helped the truss company engineers and employees who designed & built the trusses.
It helped the carpenters who framed the structure.
It helped the masons who laid brick.
It helped the plumbers who plumbed the structure.
It helped the electricians who wired the structure.
It helped the HVAC techs who installed ducts in the structure.
It helped the sheetrockers who installed drywall.
It helped the carpet installers.
It helped the tile installers.
It helped the cabinetry makers.
It helped the painters.
It helped the home automation installers.
It helped the garage door installers.
It helped the landscape architect.
It helped the landscape contractors.
I could go on for another page or two, but you should get the idea...
Well done. Reminds me of back in the recession when everyone was up in arms about corporate aircraft and sales and other corporate "meetings" in resort towns. Then when the companies cut back on these outlandish expenses, everyone was complaining about the loss of jobs building planes, pilots and flight attendants, waitresses, bartenders, etc at the resorts.
It helped employ the land surveyors.
It helped the architects who designed the building.
It helped the structural engineers who designed the structural details.
It helped the mechanical engineers who designed the HVAC systems to adhere or exceed energy efficiency standards.
It helped employ the building department who checked all the building plans.
It helped the operating engineers who cleared the land.
It helped the employees at Caterpillar who built the earthmoving equipment.
It helped the concrete workers who formed & poured the foundation and driveway.
It helped the truss company engineers and employees who designed & built the trusses.
It helped the carpenters who framed the structure.
It helped the masons who laid brick.
It helped the plumbers who plumbed the structure.
It helped the electricians who wired the structure.
It helped the HVAC techs who installed ducts in the structure.
It helped the sheetrockers who installed drywall.
It helped the carpet installers.
It helped the tile installers.
It helped the cabinetry makers.
It helped the painters.
It helped the home automation installers.
It helped the garage door installers.
It helped the landscape architect.
It helped the landscape contractors.
I could go on for another page or two, but you should get the idea...
Wait wait wait, I thought the rich just held their money in gold dabloons in a swimming pool.
It helped employ the land surveyors.
It helped the architects who designed the building.
It helped the structural engineers who designed the structural details.
It helped the mechanical engineers who designed the HVAC systems to adhere or exceed energy efficiency standards.
It helped employ the building department who checked all the building plans.
It helped the operating engineers who cleared the land.
It helped the employees at Caterpillar who built the earthmoving equipment.
It helped the concrete workers who formed & poured the foundation and driveway.
It helped the truss company engineers and employees who designed & built the trusses.
It helped the carpenters who framed the structure.
It helped the masons who laid brick.
It helped the plumbers who plumbed the structure.
It helped the electricians who wired the structure.
It helped the HVAC techs who installed ducts in the structure.
It helped the sheetrockers who installed drywall.
It helped the carpet installers.
It helped the tile installers.
It helped the cabinetry makers.
It helped the painters.
It helped the home automation installers.
It helped the garage door installers.
It helped the landscape architect.
It helped the landscape contractors.
I could go on for another page or two, but you should get the idea...
Do they ever finish building or are they perpetually working on it till the end of time?
And what does that have to do with a huge excess footprint of a house for two people?
Wait wait wait, I thought the rich just held their money in gold dabloons in a swimming pool.
egads...are we done with that now?!? I have guests tonight!!
Ricky, go to the store and buy the entire stock of Fiji water, we need to take the doubloons out and fill it with water...of perhaps we should have a milk party. Buy both. Make sure to get the non-lactose.
Back to point, the article is spot on with the danger of income equality, but I think it's too light. There's the decision to work or straight up bum off the government. I think the growing issue I'm seeing is, of the workers actually in a company, there's so many are essentially on corporate welfare. I've never seen so few people care or even attempt to care about the big picture of the employer, likely as a response to how the last recession went. People establish a bare minimum, and it's not ambitious, and do that. They bury how it's done to keep it a secret and then that's all they do and they do it only when their leader says to proceed. It escalates because people in other departments dependent on said action suddenly have to do the same thing in order to force the other leader to force their people to do work.
Not sure if that's an SV only thing or if it's more widespread, but half the people's jobs could be eliminated tomorrow if it wasn't for this office Game of Thrones thing.
I think absolutely taxes are a disincentive to work hard because they make it incrementally more difficult to amass wealth. I mean when my passive income gets taxed, somehow I still feel better about it than when I'm losing money on hours of work I put into actually working. There's a difference, one of the revenue streams I sat on my butt and money flowed in, yay, and if I pay some taxes, well that stinks still, but it's less soul-crushing. When you actually work hard and at the end of the day there's a bunch of money gone from your paycheck, it's not exactly motivating. Especially because I don't think the average person can see the value of their tax dollars. There are WAY too many programs and bureaus for absolutely everything. Imagine the smallest little thing and someone created a government organization to deal with it.
I want to know what ever happened to the Fair Tax that both republicans and democrats had talked about. I don't care if 200,000 IRS workers would lose their jobs, GOOD! The tax system is way too complex. Reduce taxes but close all of the loopholes so that everyone pays something who makes above X amount of money or whatever, I'm ok with losing loophole advantages if the rate goes down and you can just do the math on what you're going to make. Having a huge bureaucracy to deal with complex taxes is a huge headache. That's why sales taxes are so great overall, they are just collected and remitted pretty much electronically. Sure, you may need a couple of people to make sure businesses are sending in their taxes, I guess, but it's not that complicated.
This is one of the reasons I was pulling my hair out when Trump announced that he was abolishing the Death Tax and cutting income taxes on the surface when actually introducing new hidden taxes (like limiting deductions from Mortgages and state/local taxes.)
At least in theory, I see the fairest system of taxes would be a low income tax and a high death tax to compensate for the low income tax revenues. Low income taxes incentivize people to work harder and earn more since they get to keep more of it. Inheritance is what you receive because you got lucky and was born into a rich family.
Of course, in a perfect world, we would not have taxes period. But taxes are a necessary evil and I would target inheritance first before even touching income if I were president.
Well done. Reminds me of back in the recession when everyone was up in arms about corporate aircraft and sales and other corporate "meetings" in resort towns. Then when the companies cut back on these outlandish expenses, everyone was complaining about the loss of jobs building planes, pilots and flight attendants, waitresses, bartenders, etc at the resorts.
Las Vegas was ground zero for the Great Recession - not too surprising, given its the entertainment capital of the world, and during a recession people always cut back on entertainment.
At the same time, Las Vegas has the physical infrastructure needed for large conventions, sales conferences, business conferences, technical conferences, user group meetings, etc. For example, there are more hotel rooms at the intersection of Las Vegas Blvd ("The Strip") and Flamingo than exist inside the city limits of San Francisco. When a major corporation brings in 50,000 field sales and support people from around the world for an annual week-long education session, there are not that many cities that have the physical infrastructure to hold that meeting, cater the meeting, have sufficient meeting rooms and ballrooms, skilled meeting planners, electricians to rig the projectors & lighting, transportation infrastructure to efficiently move people around and ultimately back to a large airport, etc etc etc.
Then President Obama lambasted businesses holding conferences in Las Vegas -- not once, but twice -- and as a result corporations in America cancelled business conferences in Sin City, instead holding them elsewhere, because no business wants to be in the cross-hairs of the President or on the cover of the NY Times.
This is especially odd, because Las Vegas is (a) a union town, (b) a blue collar town, (c) a reliably Democratic voting town, and led at the time by Mayor Oscar Goodman, a Democrat.
Not once, but twice, Mayor Goodman called Obama a "Real Slow Learner" because of Obama's moral finger-wagging, singling out Las Vegas for scorn.
As an epilogue, it turns out the IRS held a medium-sized conference in Las Vegas in that era. They didn't have any qualms about it. They were criticized because one of the activities was a team-building event where IRS executives hand-built bicycles on the taxpayer's dime, but that's another story.
A couple of points come to mind; and I introduce these, without insidious intent to render a moral judgment, or to exhort for big changes.
The first is that qualification for material assistance, be it food or healthcare or outright cash, has much to do with one’s reproductive status. The child-free will be at severe disadvantage in qualifying. Moving up the income scale, the child-free will have considerably less opportunity for Earned Income Credit, and moving even higher up the income-scale, their federal tax deductions are much lower. Thus, a frugal and unambitious child-free person would be inclined to work only occasionally, to earn just enough to manage steady life, but to avoid assiduous exertions of labor, for two reasons: first, much of the income goes to taxes, and second, living-expenses (or desire to leave a legacy) are muted. An example of this is our very own Freemkt. This gentleman would presumably have qualified for much more generous public-assistance, were he to have had children.
The second is the “financially independent early retired”, or FIRE-type. A FIRE individual may have had a remunerative and rewarding career for say 20 years, retiring in middle-age, or downscoping to part-time work or consulting. Assuming that this person has a 7-figure taxable portfolio, he/she faces a curiously unpalatable situation with taxes. If having zero or nearly-zero earned income, taxes on the porfolio’s returns can be quite modest. If earning even a middle-class income, taxes escalate, especially if the person in question is self-employed (say as a consultant) and has to pay the 15% self-employment tax on all earned income. This is a strong disincentive to work, or at least to work more than an occasional modicum.
Some people just get tired of seeing two people living in an in-your-face mcmansion.
How does that footprint help the economy?
Why would you, or anyone else, care?
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But taxes are a necessary evil and I would target inheritance first before even touching income if I were president.
