this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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You can literally see the donation of $48B. The pledge itself isn't legally binding, but he has been consistently donating. He's 94, so I don't think it'll take long to see the proof in the pudding.
Here are some notes from his Wikipedia page:
I will note that the last figure probably includes the money given to his kids' organizations (not directly to his kids).
And a quote about inheritance for his kids:
He has a pretty consistent track record of philanthropy and statements about philanthropy, so I would be really surprised if he changed that in the last few years of his life. I guess we'll see though.
Where did I say I was worshipping him? I'm merely saying I think what he's doing is admirable and that he doesn't qualify as a "nepo baby." If you look into his history, he worked hard throughout his early life to save and invest, and I see no indications that his parents gave him a huge inheritance or kickstarted his career in any meaningful way. Yeah, his dad was a House Rep for 8 years (6 of those consecutive), and here's a quote about him on his father's Wikipedia page:
That doesn't sound like the kind of man to give his son an unfair advantage...
It's not charity to give money to an organization you (or friends or relatives) control, it's a way to keep your assets under your control without having to pay taxes that would otherwise be required.
It is if that charity uses the money to help people. So any accusation needs to actually look at the financials of those orgs to see where the money is going.
That would be true if he were secretly using those charities to enrich himself but there's no evidence of that at all.
I think you're missing the point - it's not that he's enriching himself - he's already done that. It's that the charity carries out his will, not necessarily the will of people who need charities.
Charity is about who benefits, not about who decides how to provide that benefit.
The idea of choosing a charity based on the donor's will of how it will get spent describes almost all types of charity. If someone donates to any charity at all, they have made a choice on how to allocate their resources and they just take it on faith that that's the people who need it the most.
Furthermore, any given dollar of his can only be spent once. The money he spent on himself enriches himself. It's a considerable amount of money but it's a tiny fraction of the money he controls. Any dollar he gives away can't be spent to enrich himself.
Finally, Buffet has donated over $57 billion. How is he supposed to distribute that? Fly a plane around the country and dump cash out the window? Send a huge check to the IRS? Give it all to your favorite charity? The obvious answer is that he sets up an organization that will analyze existing charities for need and effectiveness and then distributes his assets accordingly.
You are poorly educated on the issue and you are citing propaganda he paid for.
Please do some proper researcher on topic of oligarch charity and what that's all about.
I can't believe in 2024 we still have adults larping this shite. No wonder we got shit sociology-economic conditions and only getting worse...
If you have better sources, I'm happy to review them.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/07/how-bill-gates-makes-the-world-worse-off
https://inequality.org/great-divide/true-cost-of-billionaire-philanthropy/
https://apnews.com/article/business-philanthropy-b8acb10f529ac2dbaff7631021d823c9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVpCbHKqqKI
I haven't watched the YouTube video (I generally distrust what Reich says), but here's what I see from the other sources:
Mentions Buffett once, and only when mentioning the pledge to Gates' foundation. The article seems to mostly be about the Gates' foundation taking credit for things they didn't do. I'll certainly read through the rest of the article, but it definitely seems to be a criticism of that org, not Warren Buffett.
Talks about The Giving Pledge (created by Buffett) and how those who have pledged aren't donating their money fast enough (i.e. their money is growing faster than their donations). I don't really see this as an issue, since the problem should correct itself when they die.
The article also complains about most donations going to foundations or DAFs, but honestly, when you need to move that much money, that's probably the most efficient way to do it. So I guess I don't understand the criticism.
This one is about wealthy people avoiding taxes generally. I don't know how this applies to Warren Buffett, whose wealth is in the US and AFAIK isn't being hidden in tax shelters like offshore banks or trusts. His tax bill is relatively low (this article claims 0.1% from 2014 to 2018), but I think that's countered by his statements about increasing taxes on the rich (he is registered Democrat, if that matters to you at all).
So I don't think the issue here has anything to do with Buffett himself, the issue is the tax law doesn't account for unrealized gains. Or in other words, don't blame the player, blame the game. The closest Buffett gets to tax shelters is his stock donations to his kids' foundations, but my understanding is that those are charitable orgs, so I don't see a ton of difference there vs donating to other orgs like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he has donated way more to vs his kids' orgs.
My personal view here is that any compensation above some amount (say, $400k) regardless of source should be taxed at the current rates, and those assets stepped up in basis appropriately. I don't like Harris' proposal though because it's based on wealth instead of income, but I think Buffet himself would approve a change here. If we handled it that way, the income from stock grants and whatnot for extremely highly compensated employees (like a CEO) would end up being taxed as income (short term gains), and therefore would be functionally equivalent to a cash salary, which is what it's intending to be.
If you're not being purposefully obtuse I'll save you the time from what the argument is. Wealth of his magnitude is a detriment to society, doesn't matter if he's saint Joseph or the pope. You're saying "he's the best kind", deflecting from all of them being bad. If you don't see that, then it's fine. Just an economical opinion on where to go with society from the stalemate we seem to be in regarding workers and compensation.
I do feel like you're being blind about the nepotism definitions though, you don't need 200 billion from a family slush fund to qualify. The very act of what their parent's profession is changes networking and exposure opportunities. Doesn't matter if Daddy has ethical values, the name recognition and reputation you're proclaiming gives an advantage.
Mental gymnastic here are supurb.
Politicians son turned oligarch = he earned it
I see two arguments here:
For the first, I and Warren Buffett somewhat agree, and I'll quote him here:
That said, I likely disagree with his specific solutions, though I haven't bothered researching to figure out what those are, because he's clearly not particularly interested in crafting policy.
For the second, I largely hold to this definition of nepotism:
Someone giving their kids the best education they can isn't nepotism, that's normal parenting.
Someone giving their child an job they're not qualified for absolutely is. If you want to see examples of that, look no further than Trump and his kids.
When I look at the top billionaires, most of them are largely self-made. For example:
I don't really consider any of them to be "nepo babies" because their parents didn't give them an undeserved job or anything like that. And honestly, none of their parents were particularly rich, except maybe Musks. Each of them had incredible luck and capitalized on the early days of consumer computing, but that doesn't cheapen the work they put in.
Do they deserve hundreds of billions? Probably not. But I don't think they really benefited from nepotism like Trump's kids, Kim Kardashian, and others did. There's a huge difference between someone who had a good start and builds something great through their hard work and someone who is handed a pile of cash or a prominent position and rides that.
If you show evidence that their success is largely dependent on their parents, I'll believe you. But if they largely built their wealth themselves, that's a harder sell. I think each of those I mentioned earned their wealth, I just think our tax system dramatically increases wealth accumulation past a certain amount, and that's what needs to be changed here.