Right, so I bust my ass in school, non-paid internships, contracting as much as possible, and 50 hour work weeks on my startup... and the reason I'm making money is b/c I'm more "fortunate" than the slob who is still playing video games in college after 6 years and the idiot who chooses to have kids he can't afford?
OK, got it... making wise choices makes you "fortunate"... and it's "unfortunate" when idiots who make poor decisions just don't make quite enough money to afford cigarettes, bling for his car, and health insurance.
Another serious flaw in this article, besides his inept philosophy: money stolen from us by the government is not "helping to support millions of americans"... it's being completely wasted by GovCo, for the most part, or at minimum used very inefficiently.
I don't know you, but I consider myself fortunate to be making more money than most because I was given, through no merit of my own, the ability and environment in which I could become educated and work towards goals that ended in lucrative work. As the child of educated, middle-class, white-collar people in a modern industrialized country, I have had thousands of opportunities denied most others in the world. If any of those things changed, for example if I happened to be born 300 years ago or if my community never taught me the importance of education and hard work or if I was born in a place where subsistence-level living is the norm, I would be in a completely different boat. If you have the ability to make wise choices that effect change in your life, then yes, you are fortunate.
On a side note, this sort of disdain for the poor is disturbing to me. Do people really think poor people choose to be so? Nobody wants to be poor.
That no one wants to be poor is obvious enough, but it's hardly the same as whether or not they choose to be. The poorest person I know has an IQ of 186 and a PhD in chemistry. He chooses to live on government disability and not work, even though he's quite capable of doing so. But he he shares a quality I've noticed in all of the poor people I know personally: a belief the world owes him a living. Everything in his screwed-up life is someone else's fault, never his, no matter how much damage he inflicts on others.
That isn't all poor people, but it's a lot of them.
You also work more hours than workers in other developed nations and yet still can't stop going on and on about lazy people.
There's really very little sense of proportion in this country.
There's more to success than making wise choices. It's also have the ability to even have that choice because of your surrounding environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY...
65% of taxpayer's money went to defense/social security/medicare-medicaid. Think about it for a moment. 65% of the money spent had nothing to do with infrastructure. Also, do you think that government is spending all the taxpayer's money carefully OR you think that government wastes tremendous waste amount of money? There are 3 ways to spend money:
1. Your own money on yourself. [You are very careful about getting your money's worth and you do spend generously] 2. Your own money on someone else. [You are very careful about getting your money's worth but you spend as little as you can] 3. Someone else's money on someone else. [Let's burn some money to heat up the place!]
Government falls in 3rd category and it's no surprise that there is tremendous waste.
That's why libertarians are advocating 'limited government', 'minimal taxes' so that people (you and me) can keep their hard earned money for themselves and spend as they see fit.
It's a bit ugly that you can loop everyone that can't afford healthcare, mental health issues or drug addiction into a single bucket and dispose of them.
Those who can afford to spend 6 years in college playing video games, rarely are the ones who are doing it on the gov't dime. Its the kids that grow up in crappy underprivileged neighborhoods with poor school systems and no guidance are the ones that need help. But hey its their parents fault right?
You sir, compassion less, and cold spirited and are the one I can do without.
Let me give you an example. NY State auditors recovered around 270 million dollars in Medicare fraud/waste between Oct 07 to Mar 08 (6 months). This is only one state, think about the amount of fraud/waste happening in other states. In fact, they plan to spend 90 million dollars to prevent this fraud/waste! Why give government money so that they can waste it and then let them spend more money so that they can prevent the waste?
Link: http://www.nysun.com/new-york/state-recovers-269m-in-medicai...
I bet you'd love to tell us how socialism would work if we "just gave it a chance." Let me guess... it "hasn't been implemented properly" yet right?
Mark Cuban said that we need to make a boatload of money, but does not say how exactly to do that. At this point, you cant go by the Mark Cuban book. Dont try to duplicate what he did. Aside from the rare occassion of the German based ebay copycats whom later became reviered VCs, The European Founders (http://www.europeanfounders.com/index.html), you have to create your own path. What do you enjoy? Where is there a void in the market? Etc.
But, hopefully, you are not trying to "Get Rich Quick". Create your entrepreneurial venture off of passion and a genuine interest in what you are creating. Dont need it to blow up and produce millions over night, because you have to pay your electric bill. Thats not the way.
I'm pretty sure that if this country was "built on" a concept, it was intellectual freedom. Entrepreneurship is perhaps a nice consequence of that legacy, but let's not confuse which end wags the dog.
Allow me to rephrase. Entrepreneurship is what our economy is built upon. Not intellectual freedom. Granted, intellectual freedom created peanut butter, the lightbulb and more. But no one was attempting to create these items for sales purposes initially. Peanut butter was invented by George Washington Carver, not Jiff.
And I wouldnt say that intellectual freedom is what built this county. As so many whom actually put in the man hours, hard work and physical suffering to build this country, did not have any intellectual freedom, and died in the process.
High-income earners, on the other hand, often have negative net worth (school and housing debt). The rich want high taxes on the high-income earners because they don't want the upstarts competing with them for control of assets...they want to make it harder for the next wave of entrepreneurs to build disruptive or competitive businesses.
It is ironic, but taxes on new capital formation directly benefit those who already have capital.
With that said, I agree with Mark Cuban's philosophy here, and do not get personally upset with paying taxes.
I don't think the solution is to complain about taxes on high income earners. Rather, there just needs to be more pressure on instituting equivalent taxes for other forms of wealth generation (i.e. get rid of tax-free bonds).
So, if you set everything else equal (purchase of goods and services, payment of taxes, etc.) the self-made rich are doing a lot more for others than the rich-by-inheritance.
Don't most wealthy people hire lawyers and lobbyists to help them not pay taxes? Don't they also move jobs overseas to reduce how much they pay to their own economy?
Cuban seems to be living in a dreamworld.
Sure, most wealthy pay more on an absolute scale. Not always so on a relative scale.
Cuban's core rational is that rich people make things move, shape change. I agree somewhat. So it follows that if they make less efficient things more efficient, then removing all tax loopholes and aggressively going after illegal tax behavior would force these wonderful, really smart rich people to make the tax system and government spending of it more efficient. As long as they have a way around paying, they have no incentive to make the tax usage more efficient.
I'm pretty sure Warren Buffet proved otherwise:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ec...
For one, he's not saying you can't go through hoops to avoid paying taxes, he's saying don't do it. Of course, if we wanted to we could legislate to prevent this exploitation of tax law, although I'm not sure how far that would get without a considerable social realignment.
I have never seen a law that says such a thing. Shareholders get to vote respective to the rights of their share class...That's about it. Other than embezzlement and other forms of fraud, a company can do as they like.
So just to clarify-- if you become successful, it was a combination of hard work and good fortune but if don't become successful, it was just poor fortune?
Consciousness is a gift through fortune. Through consciousness, you eventually come to a realization that you should work hard and endeavor to become successful. The less fortunate never reach such a level of consciousness.
It's like some bizarre fear that by admitting that some people are simply feckless and/or unmotivated you risk marginalizing everyone hasn't "made it" whereas in reality incentives are a huge part of the productivity equation (as anyone with a knowledge of basic economics can attest).
And, essentially the choice is whether to think or not to think.
The results of that choice are not a random twist of reality that's foisted on an individual... the results are the real and logical outcomes that can be expected using the application of probability.
It seems like the most beneficial thing would be to "Hire people. Train people. Pay people. Spend money on rent, equipment, services." but not skim a bunch off the top for yourself.
"The most patriotic thing you can do is get rich." -- Mark Cuban
Sounds about right.
Asimov's "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent." has a similar trap for those who don't read critically.
Just because someone posts something on their blog, does not mean it is what they truly believe. It is only what they want to appear on their blog.
Isn't there a limited monetary supply at any given time? So the richer I get, the less rich other people become. Even after I pay rents and salaries and everything else, if I'm richer than I was before, then there is less wealth available for everyone else.
he presents a great example of a couple of friends with beat up cars....
If 4 guys all have old beaters worth 1000 each. in total they have $4000 split evenly. Each has 25% of the wealth. If one guy goes, and decides to fix up his car, and his car is suddenly worth $3000, then suddenly he has 50% of the wealth, and the other three guys only have 16%. But the face value of the other three cars did not change.
That's what screws up the old 80-20 rule... you think it's unfair until you realize that the 20% created most of the wealth they control.
PG touches on this: "The Pie Fallacy" in http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
My 2 cents on it: Wealth is created. Currency is a limited resource that represents that wealth. The value of a single unit of currency is increased every time more real wealth is created. Wealth is created when goods or services that people actually want are produced.
Completely unnecessary partisan drivel. The man asked a question and you made a useless generalization that shows, more than anything else, that you don't understand your opposition's socioeconomic philosophy.
However, you are correct, currency is simply a tangible representation of value. Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Consider a screwdriver. Physically, this screwdriver is simply its raw materials. However, by organizing the materials in the right way, this screwdriver becomes more than the some of its parts and increases its value accordingly. Thus, by selling this screwdriver for its perceived value, one can create wealth in the difference of costs vs. revenue. Of course, a simplistic example, but one that answers the question fairly well.
Edit: Maybe I should cite pg and get on the bandwagon...
Don't confuse wealth with money.
