Damned Billionaires

[AFTT47]

Billionaires never pay anything close to what amounts to a ‘fair share’. When you’ve got that kind of money, it’s easy to game the system.

Boru

It's a question of structuring incentives.  Because big business drives GDP, government allocates the lion's share of tax incentives to them.  I'm not sure that's wrong.

Me either. It seems hypocritical to cheer on a robust economy at the same you lament the success of the people driving it. I think most of us would agree that there needs to be a happy medium and that right now, it is skewed too far in favor of the billionaires.

[Fake Messiah]

If you don't want him to pay taxes, then what about directly investing in global talent that already exists but lacks opportunity? Would that make more sense in his desire to get smart people, instead of a brute force method to produce a genius?

Space colonization is a biophysical impossibility? Where did you get that idea? Spinning cylinders generating centrifugal gravity could indeed house a trillion humans. It's been studied extensively since the 1970s, most notably by Dr. Gerrard K O'Neil.

It's been studied since the 1970s and yet no one has built it yet. Gee, I wonder why?

Jeff Bezos (nor any other billionaire) gets to assess his own tax burden. Tax burden is figured out in accordance with tax law. You want him to pay more taxes than he legally owes?

Thanks to loopholes, he pays $0 in federal income taxes.

I don't think anyone who would do that would ever get to be a billionaire in the first place.

Under Bernie Sanders' proposed 5% wealth tax, Bezos would pay $12 billion annually, and would still retain hundreds of billions.

[Ravenshire]

Space colonization is a biophysical impossibility? Where did you get that idea? Spinning cylinders generating centrifugal gravity could indeed house a trillion humans. It's been studied extensively since the 1970s, most notably by Dr. Gerrard K O'Neil.

It's been studied since the 1970s and yet no one has built it yet. Gee, I wonder why?

Because the cost far outweighs the potential for profits, not because it's impossible.

[Fake Messiah]

Because the cost far outweighs the potential for profits, not because it's impossible.

That's one way of being impossible: when it costs far more than global economies can afford.

That is his scam: people colonizing space. That will not be possible in a foreseeable future. If he or any other supposedly space-loving billionaire really wanted to explore space, he could easily take over NASA by infusing it with money and sending robot on the surface of Venus, getting rocks from Mars, sending robots around Neptune and Uranus (that never had probes of their own) etc. One of these missions costs around $2 billion, so you can imagine how many missions you could create with, let's say, $100 billion and how much you could revolutionize human knowledge. History would hail them as heroes. But they are not interested in that. They are interested only in making more money.

So what they are doing is selling a pipe dream that people can colonize Mars and live in space stations but only if you give Bezos and Musk more of your money.

[AFTT47]

If you don't want him to pay taxes, then what about directly investing in global talent that already exists but lacks opportunity? Would that make more sense in his desire to get smart people, instead of a brute force method to produce a genius?

Under Bernie Sanders' proposed 5% wealth tax, Bezos would pay $12 billion annually, and would still retain hundreds of billions.

Where in the world did I say I don't want Bezos or any other billionaire to pay taxes? What I said was that they are currently paying little to no taxes because of the system that is in place and that it is silly to expect any of them to pay more taxes than they legally owe. I am in favor of changing the system so that they pay more. I definitely do not favor taxing them out of existence but Bernie Sanders' proposed wealth tax is plenty reasonable IMO.

[AFTT47]

It's been studied since the 1970s and yet no one has built it yet. Gee, I wonder why?

Because the cost far outweighs the potential for profits, not because it's impossible.

Only in the short term. No, we could not build an O'Neil type space habitat today without bankrupting the entire world economy. That's because all the material for it would need to be lifted from Earth at great cost. The point of building a space-based infrastructure is that it allows you to make use of lunar materials which can be lifted to space for a tiny fraction of the cost. But to build such an infrastructure itself requires a substantial investment which was the whole point of reusable rockets. Falcon 9 dropped costs to boost material to Earth orbit by multiples but Starship will reduce it a thousand times. That's the whole point of it. Make it possible to build the tools which will make it possible to build the dream.

Building an O'Neil habitat today would be like building the Pan America building in the 1830s. The Oregon Trail would need to come first, followed by establishment of settlements on the west coast. Later, the highway system and advances in engineering. The Pan America building opened for business 130 years after the Oregon Trail.

That's what today's space entrepreneurs are building - the equivalent of the Oregon Trail. Bezos certainly understands that. Musk is more ambitious and perhaps he's going straight for building Interstate 80 in Starship. Large-scale space settlements are decades away but they will come - If today's visionaries build the foundations now which will make it possible.