Fish fingers?Amateur, I used to pop out of school at lunchtime across to Manchester High School for Girls and get a pick and mix you could really feel going down in the cinema
Billionaires pay "0% - 0.5% tax" report finds - Suggests 2% minimum tax.
- Thread starter VincentHanna
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I'm hanging on to life, by a thread, but I'm still here...
Saw this on the BBC, and can't say I was surprised to find that billionaires don't pay anywhere near the same percentage of tax as most people. I think I was surprised at how little they do pay - Some literally pay nothing
Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says
A 2% rate on the world's wealthy could raise as much as $250bn a year, a report suggests.www.bbc.co.uk
You can argue that even 0.5% of billions is still a lot of money, but as the report opens with a statement that if people keep seeing the mega wealthy getting away with very little taxation as a percentage of their income then they too might start to not pay taxes and thus democracy will then ultimately be at stake:
Thoughts on this? Should the World attempt to come together to agree on this, or will there always be a "tax-neutral" country out their like Cayman Island and Bahamas' willing to let the mega-rich pay nothing?
My company is paying 25p to the government for every £1 I make, and then I also get taxed 33.75% on any income I take out of the business above 50k.
I'd love to pay 0.5% tax, but I also know countries would collapse if everyone did it.
Why are you surprised the unber-rich don't pay any tax?
Bezos doesn’t employ all of these people out of the goodness of his heart. Without all of these workers, he would still be running Amazon out of his parents’ garage.
Amazon has been a wrecking-ball to warehouse jobs. Amazon pays about 25% less than the industry average but there’s fewer and fewer other warehouse jobs these days due to Amazon’s dominance.
None of these billionaires got where they were without the labour of others. The NHS keeps their workers in good health, this country’s schools and universities educate their workers and the roads keep their goods moving.
No-one becomes a billionaire in a vacuum.
Whether or not he’s done it out of the goodness of his heart is irrelevant. His enterprise has resulted in 1.6million people having jobs.
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Soldato
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The worst part is when said landlords or wealthy people criticise and talk down to people who effectively pay more tax than they do.
Calling them scroungers or lazy and such.
Amazon has added a lot of convenience for consumers but we bought books and games and all sorts before Amazon came along. These aren’t new jobs and are often replacing better paid jobs.
This article from The Economist is five years old but still rings true.
It’s created plenty of jobs. Booksellers and game shops are outdated. Consumers vote with their feet and want convenience, see butchers, bakers etc vs supermarkets.
It would be interesting (albeit likely impossible) to find out how many jobs Amazon has created as well as how many it has removed by the more traditional shops closing due to Amazon being so dominant.
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Soldato
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It creates jobs by destroying jobs primarily.
Most new business does.
Over time what happens is (should) we become more efficient and as such we free up labour to do something else.
Take food, over years less and less people are employed to produce more and more food. You can trace it back to the start of the industrial revolution.
Amazon are just applying the same model. Supermarkets, department stores etc all the same.
You consolidate into larger and larger groups, they are more efficient and as such employ LESS people than would have been employed had they have remained fragmented.
However those people then can do something else in theory creating more elsewhere.
Its basically capitalism.
Its basically impossible to say there are any specific amazon created jobs that would not exist without Amazon unless there is something (I cannot think of anything) that does not have a substitution available from elsewhere.
It would also be interesting to know how much those retailers collectively paid in UK tax versus Amazon.
Amazon has won by being more efficient than its competition. Part of that has been achieved through superior and novel technology - but part has been achieved through creative tax arrangements and through using its dominance to drive down wages.
Wonder if we are approaching a tipping point where automation and AI etc are going to replace more jobs than created.
Let's face it, if all the menial jobs go there won't be enough jobs for everyone.
Some people will never be techy/creative and just want to do a robotic job, get paid and exist.
Amazon has certainly destroyed more jobs than it has created. No numbers.. But if it didn't, it wouldn't be more efficient.
Yes. It's what people want. But the amazon's and bezos' should pay more for it.
Let's face it, if all the menial jobs go there won't be enough jobs for everyone.
Some people will never be techy/creative and just want to do a robotic job, get paid and exist.
Amazon has certainly destroyed more jobs than it has created. No numbers.. But if it didn't, it wouldn't be more efficient.
Yes. It's what people want. But the amazon's and bezos' should pay more for it.
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But that's been the position throughout history. The loom meant you needed less people to create the same amount of clothing, assembly lines reducing need for factory workers etc.
This is the thing about Amazon, its not even an innovative concept, its just the concept of supermarkets given steroids by the internet.
Bezos is not really a genius for using the "pile 'em high, sell them cheap" model used for centuries, he just managed to be the first to get critical mass as the world changed. And in my opinion for the worse, whereas before there would be many reasonably wealthy business owners servicing the market, now there's one guy who has super yachts while people who work for him have to put up with terrible conditions.
Soldato
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They use equity lines of credit backed by their assets, shares, houses, artworks etc.. If you start taxing these though, then you're also going to be taxing the average home owner who just wants to release some equity in their home. There would need to be some kind kind of balancing act if a tax was introduced.
It is a fallacy to think that just because historic automation was met with an eal increase in demand for labor that this is always the case. There is no hard economic reason for this, and indeed there are plenty of counter examples
Look at all the areas where high demands for manual labor was suddenly stopped - ex-coal mining towns, detroit after the exodus of car manufacturing.
Previously automation reduced demand for specific unskilled manual activity that had minimal training requirements. Workers could easily adapt from making a widget at one factory to stacking selves at another etc. With AI, it is mostly skilled white collar jobs that are at risk and these workers cannot easily retrain. A lawyer wont suddenly change careers.
There is also a digitisation aspect. Automating manuel labour required maintaining and operating physical machines which itself required hugh labour rates. But replacing 1000 lawyers with an AI lawyer running on AWS cloud has much the same labor requirements as replacing 1 lawyer. Due to the scalability of software, there is no where near the same labor conversation rates
Agreed that re-training isn't as easy now as it might've been in the past. I am a lawyer and completely changing tack would be a big struggle given that's all I know. Though arguably that people in these sorts of jobs also have core skills, that would be transferable to other areas (e.g. - digesting large amounts of information quickly would be valuable, regardless of specific job line) but still certainly not easy.
Not sure we disagree on your first point - my point was that demands for labour will almost certainly decrease, but that's not something new and has historically been the case with plenty of automation/technology (like the examples you mentioned). Scale of it is a good point, but we aren't at the point where it can actually replace the person/job either. By the time it gets there, it'll be interesting to see what other new things come about that haven't existed before.
Soldato
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yeah.
Throughout history those wrapped up in the change always see no way out. In reality we have always used the automation to produce more, so in effect everyone wins.*
There will be a point where we are consuming way too much per individual potentially really easily with loads of AI and automation.
I think its very difficult to see how it will play out. Certainly many of the roles that required expert knowledge will end up far less numerous, with those performing the roles validating AI decisions rather than relying on memory and loads of books of for example caselaw for solicitors.
*Overall, but can be very different for individuals.
Throughout history those wrapped up in the change always see no way out. In reality we have always used the automation to produce more, so in effect everyone wins.*
There will be a point where we are consuming way too much per individual potentially really easily with loads of AI and automation.
I think its very difficult to see how it will play out. Certainly many of the roles that required expert knowledge will end up far less numerous, with those performing the roles validating AI decisions rather than relying on memory and loads of books of for example caselaw for solicitors.
*Overall, but can be very different for individuals.
Yeah I cant forsee where it will end. And just as importantly... How. Quickly. It will happen.
The impact is small so far.. But potential does seem significant. If people are able to retire and thier role isnt replaced that's very different to massive layoffs worldwide.
Or it might not be too bad. It's very much early days at the moment.