by followed up you mean: “Ok after I die, I will donate half of my money to my tax-exempt family-owned-and-operated charity, that just happened to only pay salaries and donations to causes that serve the interests of our family-owned-and-operated shell companies”… :D
it’s like sequeezing your late’s father dry-drenched cumsocket which he used his entire life, then drinking it, and brag about it… to which I say thanks but no fucking thanks.
Lmao fuck them my taxesare higher then half
On an unrelated note, Bill Gates is in the epstein list.
And the reason Melinda divorced him.
Serious or joke?
We can only speculate, but his infidelity with staffers was known, and him being on the Epstein list may have been the final straw.
A decent person would have gone to the press with it, but she’s wealthy so she didn’t.
They broke their arms patting themselves on their backs and can’t write checks anymore. 😢
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
I really like that as a term, never come across it before.
You don’t understand, they’re making money so much faster than they can reasonably give away.
making money
I think you mean stealing money.
Not true.
They’re also using imaginary methods to make money grow out of other money.
Which then needs someone in the real economy to make goods and services to back up the value of that money.
They are basically printing UOM instead of IOU vouchers.
Isn’t that basically just stolen money from stolen money?
If you say things with enough confidence, maybe toss in the phrase “AI” somewhere…yeah you kinda can just create money from nothing.
In entirely unrelated news grocery prices go up.
This is kind of the actual problem though. It’s hard to actually have effective charities. Even some of the most ethical, and well run charities, end up with surplus funds (Dolly Parton’s charity for example). The government is setup to spend that much money helping people though. But paying taxes is somehow bad and wrong. I don’t know if I had a real point other than maybe we should actually tax these rich folks so they can achieve their dream of giving away at least half their wealth.
Please do not compare Dolly Parton to Bill Gates.
There was a post a while ago where a German person posted that they were confused by the US nonprofit systems, they basically said I pay my taxes and the government makes sure it’s spent feeding the needy and foreign aid and all that. Why should I go through the trouble of researching all these charities trying to find a good one to donate to.
Not that Germany doesn’t have non profits, but they really should be for special interest type cases where you explicitly want to send money to a cause, not general global well being.
It is a bit more complicated than that.
First of all the social security system in Germany should not be tax funded. It is a mandatory insurance which should finance its activities through the insurance rate collected on income. However with demographic shifts and the like it is notoriously unstable, in particular the pension fund. So what happens is the social securities being cross financed from tax money.
Like with climate change, we are talking about the issue since more than 30 years, the problematic effects are becoming ever more apparent, but no government is willing to address the fundamental issues, instead kicking the can down the road, until the system will collapse.
Then another issue is that the government activities are far from sufficient and it is en vogue to attack social security further. Especially in the last years we saw an unprecedented rise in people relying on food banks as unemployment checks and the equivalent for refugees, who are prohibited from working, are insufficient. But rather than adjust the payments to reflect the rising costs of living, we see a distraction debate about people “refusing to work” which make up only a tiny minority of people receiving benefits, but the goal is to abolish unemployment insurance.
Then another issue is that nonprofits are often used by rich families to circumvent inheritance tax. This year there will be an unexpected windfall of 4 billion Euros to the inheritance tax, as a rich family failed to set up their construct in time. Furthermore “nonprofits” by industrialists are often used for lobbying for more capitalism. In particularly infamous is the “Stiftung Familienunternehmen” (family run businesses trust). You would think this represents your local bakery run in the fourth generation. Instead it is run by “family businesses” such as Henkel (washing ingredients, chemicals) whose owners are billionaires.
Finally, Germany has the whole range of non profits which follow purposes that genuinely follow causes that benefit humanity and the environment and they also receive billions in donations in Germany every year. Overall the donations to nonprofits in Germany amounted to 12.5 billion € last year, or about 150 € on average. This includes a wide range of purposes. For instance sports clubs are usually nonprofits and donations to them are usually tax deductible. So it might be the father of one of the kids in the football club donating a new set of jerseys.
Sounds a bit like the US. I live in New York City, there are a lot of bloated non profits that are just used as slush funds for rich people and networking. I’ve met a few people on occasion who work in non profits that do things like provide hiring metrics for other non profits instead of actually doing direct good, so you really need to be careful who you donate to.
I’m sorry that Germany also has long term issues with its social safety net, but it’s morbidly reassuring as an American to hear we’re not going to be the only ones on the sinking ship.
Then they’re not really trying. I get what @Hobo@Lemmy.World is saying, but I find it hard to believe. If their bar for “respectable charities” leads to them not being able to find charities, then just lower the bar. Or just give money to people.
Yep, pay for everyone’s university for a year, pay everyone’s healthcare debt, do something.
A pizza party would be cool also.
nah I get those at work instead of a raise
The fact that there are 256 billionaires is an absolute failure of our society.
256 billionaires that we know of!
Soon to be a few trillionaires and a thousand billionaires
If there were 3 billion would that be a failure?
It’s like a high score in a video games for them, nobody needs that much wealth
I don’t get why the countries don’t all join forces to push wealth taxes at the same time… Suddenly the loop holes close and either the countries get huge funding to fix their economies, or the wage thieves take their money back and pay it all back to the workers they stole it from.
There was a push for an international minimum tax rate from some guy. But that guy was old and so people decided to replace that old guy with an old guy that’s a billionaire, but because he’s crazy he doesn’t seem as old I guess. But anyway, it’s highly doubtful something like that will happen any time soon.
Because the countries are controlled by the ultrarich.
But they could detach and get their money back so easily…
I forget where I heard this story, but apparently Bill and Melinda were at a dinner party during the Obama Presidency. Bill said that he had “way more power than Obama” and Melinda kicked him under the table. TBF I think he was completely right: politicians in the US derive their power from their ability to raise money from rich donors, while rich donors derive their power directly from their money. And they continue to derive power from their money even when they deposit it into a “foundation” which doles it out tax-free to favored recipients.
In Gates’ case, a lot of his “charity” involves donating patent-protected drugs to third world countries to forestall their saying “fuck your patents” and producing life-saving drugs for themselves. Preserving intellectual property rights is the primary goal here, with actually helping people secondary. Anyone who thinks these ruthless multi-billionaires suddenly become benign, caring people in their advanced years is a rube.
politicians in the US derive their power from their ability to raise money from rich donors, while rich donors derive their power directly from their money
Technically they derive their power from the electoral mandate, but to achieve it requires a lot of money from said rich donors - so they don’t derive their power from it, it’s more a prerequisite to play at all. The second half is true. The rich are just rich, nobody voted them into wealth, that’s why they’re more powerful than the politicians.
giving half their wealth to what? charities that they control for pushing agendas (and possibly money laundering if we are talking about billionaires in third world countries with much less regulations)
I was about to say. There’s a girl on Youtube that’s documenting how Carnage Melon’s old trust fund is alive and kicking and authoring dystopian plans to censor and monitor the internet. They are the authors of England’s new Online Safety Act. Don’t trust billionaires, especially when they turn into philanthropists. You can’t say philanthropist without making the same sounds as full on rapist.
Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.
Oh well, guess we’re fucked.
Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.
Yes, some form of “giving pledge” where the amount was standardized and there was no option to back out. Radical thinking here.
BUT THAT WOULD BE COMMUNISM!!1!
why did they only use an 8-bit number to count billionaires , surely there are more of em
/dumbface
What are you, one-based or something? If it were an 8-bit integer there would have been 255.
it’s 255 for maximum index, but still 256 for maximum count though lol but agreed, 255 would be more obvious
Well still 255 for maximum count if you’re using an 8-bit number to COUNT billionaires like your initial comment said - but if you’re using an 8-bit number to index your collection of billionaires, then yes, you could get up to 256.
For counting we should always at least have the possibility of a 0 value, hence we count actual billionaires from 1-255. With indexing, 0 is already the first billionaire, so we get billionaires from 0-255, or a total of 256
Yes, 8 bit indexing. We should have Null billionaires.
The prospect of still being billionaires, but with less billions, was just too much to handle
I mean, you don’t become a billionaire by giving money away.
Uh, yeah you do. What do you think charities are for? Helping people?
Exactly why they need to be taxed more.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist to begin with and don’t assume tax money are used by governments for good.
Link to report instead of awful Fortune link: Giving Pledge
