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Non-Tech : Kirk's Market Thoughts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (12232)	10/26/2021 1:04:13 PM
From: Kirk ©	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 26769

I think it is the courts, the ability to levy fines and jail those who don't pay or ... I disagree that the courts are the main service the government provides to the US companies. I think the primary service that the government provides is the military that cajols other countries into favoring American companies. The other service is the USD. Bill Gates got rich because I could not copy his software, Word and Excel, onto floppy disks then sell them at the DeAnza College flea market in Cupertino (Apple's original HQ) for a tenth the price I had to pay to buy them at Fry's in Palo Alto. In fact I recall clearly standing on a river boat on the Columbia River in the early 1990s discussing this with the boss of a guy I worked with in Colorado Springs. We were in Portland for an inhouse conference and networking with people we don't see every day. His employee, Martin G, and I had pretty much all the resources of HP to prototype things that we thought were useful.. We built an optical oscilloscope probe for $200 in singles manufacturing cost to help me and others in our division do our jobs better but we couldn't get HP to sell it because they had a $2,000 model in the pipeline that they'd invested heavily in.... hence why startups usually do so well when good engineers leave with good ideas.... Anyway, the point then was we had this HUGE manufacturing cost to build hardware but software anyone could replicate with a PC and a floppy disk. Bill Gates had the patent protection and the US government plus US jails protecting his software that made him a billionaire years later. I saw this and bought his stock back then... 11/23/93 at $2.43 and still hold a lot of those shares.

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (12232)	10/26/2021 1:15:49 PM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 26769

Finally, a wealth tax is essentially armed robbery. It says that "you have money that I want. Give it to me or I will send people with guns after you The federal government has to tax something to pay their bills. The population elects the governments that create the taxes, so the taxes are set by society. Someone who is so upset about the tax situation in their country can go live elsewhere. Pop stars often do that. So can anyone. It does seem wrong that Bill Gates can make $100 billion in his life through ownership of MSFT, and then rather than ever pay taxes on that holding he gifts it to a foundation that he then runs. Why is it OK that every MSFT employee pays taxes on their salaried income each paycheck, while Bill Gates pays zero on the ever appreciating value of his stock holdings? If my salary is $150,000/year I pay taxes on that, but if my stock holdings appreciate by $1.5 million in a given year, and I don't sell them, I pay zero? Why? The investor has made 10x the worker in the same year, and the investor pays zero while the worker pays whatever his rate is for ..... working? It's likely the worker is being more helpful to society than the asset holder, so why punish the worker rather than the asset holder? If we are going to tax capital gains, why tax them only when sold? If two people hold the same equity position for 10 years and each makes $1 million in capital gains, why punish the investor who wants to sell and buy something else (good for the economy) and reward the holder who doesn't sell, and, well, doesn't do anything at all (doesn't seem too good for the economy)? Taxes gotta come from somewhere. I'm open to the idea of taxing ownership of assets (like property tax) rather than taxing transactions (sales tax, salaried income tax, capital gains tax, etc etc).

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (12232)	10/26/2021 3:08:59 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 26769

In what way would the wealth tax improve the court system? Money is fungible. It's not that new revenue would go directly into the court system, it's just that the court system is second only to the military as a federal expense. The civil courts primarily benefit the investor class while the working stiffs are more aware of the criminal court system. This is just an example of where the federal revenue goes, and it goes here because this is the top priority for the wealthy. The court system should be financed with wealthy money, but it's primarily financed by W2 income tax money from working class people. The mental exercise would show that wealth is mostly a skimming operation on people who do the most work . I should know because I'm rolling in the dough and I don't currently do anything but collect stamps and chat on the internet.