The capital being invested has already been taxed at the source.
Capital gains shouldn’t even be taxed. I earned it, paid taxes on it; what I do with it beyond that is no one’s business. I’m the one taking the risk yet the government benefits if that risk pays off but doesn’t compensate me if it doesn’t.
> The capital being invested has already been taxed at the source.
So? A worker has already paid all kinds of taxes in their life, but they still get taxed on their income.
> Capital gains shouldn’t even be taxed. I earned it, paid taxes on it; what I do with it beyond that is no one’s business.
Your original capital is yours, but if you get income from it, you should be taxed the same as any other income. My time is and should be my own to do with as I see fit, but I still get taxed if I get income from it.
> Your original capital is yours, but if you get income from it, you should be taxed the same as any other income.
capital is what makes future productivity improvements possible. If you took a risk investing your capital, but that return is taxed the same as wage income (which has zero risk associated with it), you would be discouraged from investing that capital, and instead consume more of it (ala, why invest in your business buying plant and equipment, when you could just go on a lavish vacation!).
The low capital tax is to encourage more capital investment, because those with capital has the choice to not invest (and thus society as a whole loses the potential benefits of such investment). People with wage income don't tend to have the option of _not _ working, so lowering their tax won't encourage _more_ wage income.
> capital is what makes future productivity improvements possible. If you took a risk investing your capital, but that return is taxed the same as wage income (which has zero risk associated with it), you would be discouraged from investing that capital, and instead consume more of it (ala, why invest in your business buying plant and equipment, when you could just go on a lavish vacation!).
The fairy tale that no one would invest if, instead of 100%, they were only allowed to keep, say, 50% of the profits is far-fetched. The game would go on, only with more (in the optimal case) redistribution and less accumulation among the already well-off. The issue here is the relative inequality caused by capital gains, which in the long run tears societies apart, because the middle class can no longer afford apartments/houses and vacations, and the lower class can no longer afford basic needs (food, health care, mobility).
Think the point they are making is the repeated taxation is semi-ridiculous.
1. Work a job and pay income tax
2. Invest remaining income, capital gains are taxes when liquidated.
3. Buy a car with the remaining gains, pay sales and property tax
4. Sell car, pay sales tax again
5. Reinvest money, earn gains, pay taxes on them
6. Repeat
The same money just keeps getting taxes. His point is that the money should be taxed once and only once.
This isn’t about the billionaires. What is an immense amount of money for individuals (100 billions) really isn’t that significant for a Western government like the United States.
Seizing Bezos/Gates wealth would have very little impact on the overall health of the country, the government is working with trillions already
At some point during the 20th century financial success became the primary mechanism of measuring achievement. This isn't necessarily the natural state of things - see counterexamples like Jonas Salk or Grigori Perelman. So my question to you would be: why do we only count innovation that results in someone getting fabulously rich as valuable? Why are we worried about losing the next Tesla or SpaceX to taxation instead of worrying about losing the next Hawking to a fatally flawed healthcare and education system?
I think we’re ignoring scale here. Is there a country with similar population levels that provides all that?
I’m Canadian and I am thankful for our benefits but our public services have been stretched for decades and I’m skeptical that our systems could handle 10x the population.
It's ignored because it hardly seems relevant. Is providing healthcare to ~80m people (France, Germany—numbers off the top of my head but I think that's close for both) or, what, 150m or so (Japan, again, IIRC) really that different from 350m? What part of the difference in scale makes it impossible for the country of 350m with a higher GDP-per-capita than those other examples? Some parts of our country are sparsely populated, yes, but it's not like passing that off to a mix of highly-funded public ventures and market forces (i.e. our current very, very expensive system) magically solves that problem, so how's that relevant to preventing us from having universal healthcare? Plus, Canada's got that problem nearly as bad as we do, no? I know most of the population's down near the border, but you've got the same issues with large areas that are still lightly populated, but you manage. So that can't be the reason.
Isn't the theory that 10x the population would mean 10x the tax revenue, and 10x the infrastructure? The same reason a lot of people like to look at per capita measurements over absolute figures?
Or looking at it another way: with the assumption that a country of 30M people can have good infrastructure, and is not an outlier, and there can exists more than one of such country, what is different between 10 countries of 30M people each with good infrastructure and 1 country of 300M having bad?
Governments are big, so it's difficult to just point a finger at a specific cause of an issue, but it would seem to me the issue is not continuously building out infrastructure. That, and poorly written, but possibly well meaning, legislation that leads to regulations massively increasing administration costs on every and all areas of our infrastructure (healthcare, general construction, transport, housing).
In the specific case of the US, it is the scale of the populated geography more than the number of people. This has created problems even in boring and non-controversial policy areas. For example, prior attempts to regulate highway speed limits nationally, which has since been devolved back to local control. At the scale of individual States, it works much more like it does in other countries.
Any national-scale policy will be poorly adapted for some major region of the US because it is simply too diverse geographically, culturally, historically, and economically.
The bigger you are the harder it is to do things properly or react fast enough to changing conditions. This is why most companies get huge and then end up failing...they can't change fast enough to stay competitive.
It's one thing to be a Scandinavian country that has a homogenous culture and smaller population (and land mass)...and another to mix large amounts of different cultures across a giant nation of states and have everyone agree upon the same thing or be able to institute the same infrastructure.
Scandinavian countries also have diverse and differing cultures depending on where you live. Just because everyone calls themselves "Swedish" doesn't mean they all agree.
I suspect the answer is somewhat different. Just look at their parliaments: they almost always have majority coalitions made up of multiple parties, and a diverse group of opposition parties.
What is exceptional about America is its calcification into a two party system, which I think is far more of an issue than the actual differences of opinion and culture in the American populace. In fact, polls regularly show that a majority of Americans generally agree on a number of issues, and broadly support a number of possible policies and programs. For instance, on abortion, a majority of Americans have long supported legalizing it some fashion up until recently. Through the 70's into the 90's, support even reached 60%. Only in the mid 90s did the discussion become wildly more combative and enter a stalemate.
Really, most of the extremely popular social safety net programs were created and institutionalized during the 40 years of continuous Democratic majority. What ended it, and brought about the modern Republican party and the current state of American politics, was the "Republican Revolution" in '94[0]. The 2 party system then ran into a brick wall as both parties froze into defensive turtling.
Sure, but why was Tesla able to start up and take a big portion of the EV market over the last few years? The big companies were too slow in reacting to changing demand. It took years to get something that was equivalent to what they are offering...and yet they still don't have anything close despite far more industry knowledge on how to mass manufacture cars.
They’re likely earning ~40-70k so the shift isn’t very significant
The real question is: are they changing the deadlines? Studio already suffer from crunch and all the meetings you had on Friday are now spread throughout the week
> They’re likely earning ~40-70k so the shift isn’t very significant
Exactly. I don't work in the video-game industry, but the local (Québec) programmer scene is pretty small and information travels fast.
I've been told by people that work there that the employer already pays the equivalent of a 4 day week and that many employees are quitting now that WFH has opened up the market.
My personal understanding is that instead of increasing the pay, they are betting that by cutting a day, people will stay and keep the same level of crunch time.
> My personal understanding is that instead of increasing the pay, they are betting that by cutting a day, people will stay and keep the same level of crunch time.
How's the option package?
A credible company will have most employees in the core business getting the majority of their revenue from the stock performance. Switching to 4 days a week should lower the number of release they can have per year...
In my time in that industry the only bonus/non-salary compensation I ever saw was a $20 Starbucks gift card for pulling a 90hr week before a major demo deadline.
1. Video games are really hard and costly to make and unless you're a big known company, nothing assures you'll get your money back
2. It's a dream job for a lot of young programmers, so they'll accept anything.
I’m sure they have very good reasons for exploiting people, whatever these reasons may be it doesn’t change the fact that video game companies are not good places to work at for the most part.
There’s a huge gap between the game industry and the rest
People do it out of passion, I guess. It’s funny too because the work is usually significantly harder than the much better paid start-up/SaaS jobs.
Everyone has college degrees, there’s no C++ bootcamp grads
I went to a school which was well-known for its game dev degree so I know dozens of people in the industry (mostly everyone works at Ubisoft) but opted out myself because the pay was way too low
Yup, pretty much. When I left industry it was almost a 100% salary bump. I tossed 2 months of PTO(because the company wouldn't pay it out, per state law and I could never take it) and I made up the difference in the first few paychecks.
Tons of fun problems and passionate people but the industry is an absolute meat grinder. Last I looked at the statistics median industry career length was ~3 years.
In Montreal I have no idea but in Sherbrooke the salaries are generally low, I make ~90k (plus a solid, well managed, pension plan) and work for one of the best employer in the city.
I could look into remote work but I am quite confortable where I am. I love the 35 hours workweek, the 21 days of paid time off, the week and a half around Christmas, my private office with a marble window sills (that I will use only 2 days a week when the telework plan is finally officialized) , the 7 minutes commute, the low cost of life and my beer aficionado colleagues.
In my experience, having an up to date LinkedIn profile is more than enough.
I have no presence online, I don't do open-source, I went to an absolute no-name regional school, my work experience is nothing more than "Company, title, date range" and I worked for unknown companies for the majority of my career. I constantly get contacted by recruiters and I got all my jobs through LinkedIn still
I am now in a leadership position at a very competitive public company with a market cap over 100b (to illustrate that this works in general)
Companies are desperate and will interview anyone half-decent. If anything, resume is a red flag. I interview more than 100 people a year and I haven't read a resume in years
Stock wouldn't make a lot of sense for Basecamp though, unless they started paying dividends or something. They aren't public and have no indication that they ever have any desire to be public, and the ownership of the company is small enough that I'd be very surprised if any ownership stake didn't come with a lot of conditions on how that ownership could be transfered. As a liquid asset, Basecamp stock probably isn't particularly valuable.
They said they'd split part of the sale proceeds, should it ever happen, with all the employees. There's no way the expected value from that would measure up to years of Amazon RSUs. But then, that's the case for almost every other company attempting to pay top of market.
"There are no plans to sell Basecamp or take the company public! But, in the slight chance of that happening, employees may be eligible to receive a portion of 10% of the value of the company if Basecamp is sold or made public. That 10% would be divided into shares, and shares distributed amongst employees based on their tenure at the time of the sale/offering."
Just because you run in circles with people who make super high salaries doesn’t mean they’re that common. Unsurprisingly, people who make 300k TC are more likely than the average to meet other people who make 300k TC.
That said all the numbers I’m finding online are more in in 80-100k Canadian dollars range for salary for the average, so 60k is definitely extremly low for TC.
Plenty do make 60k and 300k is pretty far from being "typical" in Montreal.
I agree though that 60k isn't typical, that would be close to the starting salary. I'm still new though, so couldn't say what's typical, but I think 80k would be a pretty good bet.
120-150k is closer to the average I would say if you work for a public company or a well funded start-up
Top of band for Senior at Shopify is low 200s (varies a bit depending on USD exchange rates) without stock appreciation and it's not particularly competitive
Capital gains shouldn’t even be taxed. I earned it, paid taxes on it; what I do with it beyond that is no one’s business. I’m the one taking the risk yet the government benefits if that risk pays off but doesn’t compensate me if it doesn’t.