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A lot of the poor and middle classes don't understand how a billionaire earning millions of pounds per week in passive income is any problem for them - or where

by slifin 1mo ago

A lot of the poor and middle classes don't understand how a billionaire earning millions of pounds per week in passive income is any problem for them - or where it comes from 1, billion, 2 billion, 100 billion individuals makes no difference to the average person In fact there's a misguided sense that they earnt that money through work and not rent seeking But the sad truth of the matter is - the rich are on the other end of your mortgage or indirectly your rent - the other end of that business loan to your favourite coffee shop controls the price of your coffee - you pay them interest directly or indirectly through everything you pay for and they use that money to buy more of the assets you use - they are a massively increasing rent seeking class Their wealth growth is exponential it compounds on itself some particularly rich people are seeing 40% annual returns and the overall economies wealth growth is 1 or 2% It's analogous to a black hole things like capital gains tax and income tax mean nothing to these people because they don't sell and they don't have a "working" income because that's not how the ultra rich accumulate wealth The sad thing is for people on benefits the government look automatically into your personal bank account and track anything coming in - they have built a massively invasive infrastructure to track the poor so they can remove their benefits if they try to earn £5 selling music or selling IT services - but if you're rich the government don't even know how wealthy you are - the government doesn't know how many billionaires there are - let alone any talk of having to tax them - so they get to pay very close to - if not nothing - whilst software engineers (as an example relative to this forum) in the UK get to be the high rate tax payers where 50% or more is taken Everyone else has to fund their free ride and its absurd - they're the group that need the least support financially

CuriousSkeptic 1mo ago
> you pay them interest directly or indirectly through everything you pay for I wonder how feasible that would be to track as an economic index. Even on individual level its popular to workout which day of the year you start earn money you get to keep after income taxes and vat.
weavejester 1mo ago
There's a parallel between welfare and passive gains from diversified investments; yet as you point out, government welfare is tracked and very visible, while private investments are far more opaque. Part of the wealth that workers create is paid in taxes to the government; another part is paid to the shareholders of the company they work for, to the bank they get their mortgage from, and so forth. The latter is equivalent to an hidden tax, part of which goes toward a form of private welfare that's proportional to an individual's wealth. People get quite angry about government welfare, particularly if the recipient seems undeserving of it. Yet they have no problem with the passive income from billionaires, even if it ultimately amounts to the same thing.

by slifin 1mo ago

CuriousSkeptic 1mo ago

> you pay them interest directly or indirectly through everything you pay for I wonder how feasible that would be to track as an economic index. Even on individual level its popular to workout which day of the year you start earn money you get to keep after income taxes and vat.

weavejester 1mo ago

There's a parallel between welfare and passive gains from diversified investments; yet as you point out, government welfare is tracked and very visible, while private investments are far more opaque. Part of the wealth that workers create is paid in taxes to the government; another part is paid to the shareholders of the company they work for, to the bank they get their mortgage from, and so forth. The latter is equivalent to an hidden tax, part of which goes toward a form of private welfare that's proportional to an individual's wealth. People get quite angry about government welfare, particularly if the recipient seems undeserving of it. Yet they have no problem with the passive income from billionaires, even if it ultimately amounts to the same thing.