The US intentionally created the ATC shortage. From Wikipedia:
The PATCO Strike of 1981 was a union-organized work stoppage by air traffic controllers (ATCs) in the United States. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) declared a strike on August 3, 1981, after years of tension between controllers and the federal government over long hours, chronic understaffing, outdated equipment, and rising workplace stress. Despite 13,000 ATCs striking, the strike ultimately failed, as the Reagan administration was able to replace the striking ATCs, resulting in PATCO's decertification.
The failure of the PATCO strike impacted the American labor movement, accelerating the decline in labor unions in the country, and initiating a much more aggressive anti-union policy by the federal government and private sector employers.
You should tax behaviours you want to disincentivise.
Taxing smoking, cars and sugar are great (but not always popular) ideas.
Taxing second homes, property ownership for companies, foreign owned property, and so on is much more important than taxing unrealised wealth, inheritance or capital gains and income.
Wealthy people find loopholes, and so you end up taxing the middle class and limiting social mobility with those initiatives.
We should figure out what they do with their wealth that makes it worthwhile amassing so much, then tax that.
EDIT: sorry, I should have echo’d the chamber instead of thinking about a situation critically.
The wealthy find loopholes because they are often the people having the legislation drafted. It’s actually not hard to pass clear solid tax laws. It’s only hard to get it passed.
Anything you can think of to make wealthy people cease to exist is easily bypassed, so the best way is to find ways to tax behaviour instead.
The point of money is how you use it, if you have a 50,000x tax on super yacts and private aircraft, then the ultra rich are forced to pay your tax or try skirting around it by using smaller boats or coalescing their private jets into a private airline.
But if you tax stocks, then people will invest in other ways. If you tax individuals owning large property then they’ll move their property ownership into a company, if you tax inheritance then they’ll put the money into a fund instead which has debts that will be written off in time. All kinds of fancy tricky accounting.
The other solution is to tax everyone on unrealised gains, which makes every home owner (including pensioners) suddenly liable for huge ongoing bills.
Elon himself for example is pretty cash poor, but owns a lot of stock in a “high value” company meaning his wealth on paper is pretty extreme. He takes on debt (which has no income tax) and then pays it off with stocks, where it also avoids being taxed as its never realised.
I think its a harder problem than you give it credit.
How would it work if we treated money obtained by borrowing against stock holdings as "realized gains"? That seems like a loophole that could be closed.
Well nothing, I think what is being proposed is to trigger existing capital gains taxes when an asset is borrowed against, the same as if it were sold. Most places exempt personal homes from capital gains taxes already, so it wouldn’t affect them. It would affect
- someone who bought an investment property, which then appreciated, and then they wanted to take out a larger mortgage against the appreciated value to leverage it into buying another property.
- Someone borrowing against stock to avoid realising gains by selling it
Thank you. Yes, that's precisely what I mean. I've floated the same idea a few times on this forum and others. I've asked, but have yet to see someone point out a systemic downside. (I'm not any kind of financial sophisticate, so I'm well aware that I might be missing something!) In fact, it seems to me that having people finance their lifestyles by borrowing against assets adds a degree of leverage risk to the system, and ought to be discouraged just on that basis.
Tax the rich all you want, you won't raise enough money to balance the budget, let alone pay for all the additional spending that Sanders et al. wants.
I was getting a haircut last week and chatting about our kids with the stylist, who said (basically): "I just started letting my 7 year old on Roblox. I know its full of pedophiles. I told him to come to me or his older brother if anyone tries to talk to him."
If the million reports of Mark Zuckerberg enabling pedophiles and scam artists haven't made it clear, the executives of these tech companies just don't care. They will sell children into sexual slavery if it improves next quarter's numbers.
The drip-feed of mindless brain-rot, micro-payments, and cyber-bullying should be much higher up the list of reasons for not letting a 7 year old use Roblox (and YouTube and FaceBook and…)
I inked the deal in 2023, but shortly after felt like the market was too dead for newbies. When I initially removed the website for the book, I got a small wave of complaints, so I guess some folks still found it helpful.
If it wasn't Big Tech, the people here would have us feeding them to Mastodon. I do not believe that's much of an improvement.
Edit: For the reply, about "Mastodon is not a company but many independent actors"...
Who on earth is making sure those independent actors don't do... any of that? If Mastodon gets large enough, don't be surprised when the largest instances start doing exactly that.
Going to prison would not be enough, he'd be pardoned very quickly and there'd be very little of a discouraging effect on other megacorps with similar ethics.
American markets have largely consolidated into oligopolies, where just a handful of very large companies operate. It's extremely easy for them to wink at each other and then raise prices/layoff workers, etc.
The PATCO Strike of 1981 was a union-organized work stoppage by air traffic controllers (ATCs) in the United States. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) declared a strike on August 3, 1981, after years of tension between controllers and the federal government over long hours, chronic understaffing, outdated equipment, and rising workplace stress. Despite 13,000 ATCs striking, the strike ultimately failed, as the Reagan administration was able to replace the striking ATCs, resulting in PATCO's decertification.
The failure of the PATCO strike impacted the American labor movement, accelerating the decline in labor unions in the country, and initiating a much more aggressive anti-union policy by the federal government and private sector employers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...
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