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there's a fuckin *ocean* of money sloshing around at the top of society. one reason why we see so much investment into AI or crypto magic beans, it has nowhere sane to go (because the masses haven't had the spending power to justify investment in regular business until very recently)

The Massachusetts "millionaires tax" has vastly surpassed projections, bringing in more than $1.8 billion in revenue so far this fiscal year — with the prospect of a surplus of hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on transportation and education

State’s ‘millionaires tax’ has already generated $1.8 billion this year, blowing past state projections - The Boston Globewww.bostonglobe.com The estimated haul is already $800 million more than what Governor Maura Healey and state lawmakers planned to spend from its revenue in fiscal year 2024.

one aspect of the Biden admin has been an enormous redirection of capital away from tech bullshit and into Building Stuff, and I think this explains a lot of the hysteria among VCs bsky.app/profile/lolg...

A Quiet New Deal is going on, and Biden is doing all the things Trump pretended he would do and will immediately steal credit for.

Wish we could have “built stuff” with interest rates at zero!

we could have, but Obungler and Larry Summers saw to that

Don’t worry we’d have bungled the construction if we’d tried.

not to mention the FTC saying for the first time in four decades “maybe monopolies are sometimes bad, actually?”

Not only building stuff, but building stuff in non-major-metro areas, especially in red states.

You can’t “move fast and break things” when those things are or require manufacturing plants. Also, the Valley and its attitude have never been good at making actual stuff. See: Theranos, Juicero, Tesla. When you make stuff, launching with an MVP gets you *on the outside edge* Tesla’s safety record.

I wish this also included a conclusion of the Musk company contracts.

Fed cut out free borrowing, so it's much harder to pump up your dividends with fraudulent shit like layoffs and buybacks. People actually expect to get things for their money but value no longer matters.

To be fair really no one in the VC funded world was paying dividends. They were (stereotypically) getting new equity investments at higher and higher valuations and spending the money as fast as it came in on R and D, CAC or in some cases total nonsense.

the reason stuff objectively stupid ideas like WeWork or Juicero is because the sheer volume of liquid capital sloshing around has to go somewhere, thus creating the tech bubble we've been stuck in and out of for decades.

Tech guys are happy to keep buying cobalt and nickel on the cheap from China because they don’t care about Congolese kids wriggling through muddy tunnels to get cobalt first case, or the environmental devastation of High Pressure Acid Leaching used to recover nickel from ore in the second case

#InfrastructureDecade

As an alumnus of and counselor to a lot of tech stuff I can’t disagree with this statement.

Yup

My pessimistic take is that this investment will start to show big returns in a couple of years, just in time for President Trump to take credit.

Making and building things will save our butts!

Is HE doing it or is it just a thing that is happening?

I know in my industry stuff is being built because of the CHIPS act, dunno about others.

A lot of that is tech related. State & local investment in structures for example is barely above 2019 levels and still below pre-GFC levels. It's better than nothing but "a new new deal" it's not...

So much of the distortions of modern life are just downstream effects of tax policy changes it’s really wild

yes! private equity swindlers are just doing bankruptcy fraud!! we can fix this problem!!!

But if not what was the point of laissez-faire in the first place? It’s right there in the name people

well tbf the point was to open up the grain market in pre-Revolutionary France

someone told me recently that once you have nine-figure wealth it is quite difficult to get back to "normal people" money without actively trying. like you can live handsomely off the interest

I know some scions of the Jay Gould fortune. nice folks! but, yes

Andrew Mellon’s grandson is one of the biggest Republican donors!

you can even live pretty darn well that way in the mid-seven figures of wealth - like, if you assume about 5% real return from the S&P 500, having $5M in investment is good for about $250k a year without touching the principal. (that's the ballpark early-retirement types tend to aim for)

MacKenzie Scott has given away like 15 billion dollars and her net worth has gone up

It's why vampires are always rich as balls

It takes a Donald Trump-level brain genius to blow that much that badly

Literally the premise of Brewster’s Millions

Large individual fortunes are malinvestment and a significant externality, to use capitalism's own language, and we need to make them illegal.

credit to wikipedia

They called it the laffer curve becaus the were LMAO the while time while.they scammed us with it

totally. I mean the MA experience is proof.

tangentially my livelihood is based off these rich folk's investments, and I'm still shocked at how much they rake in literally doing nothing more than paying someone to make them even more money. So good! Take a big chunk of their $$. They won't miss what they can barely count. They'll be fine.

People really underestimate how much enforced saving billionaires and millionaires are holding that needs to be spent on behalf of the American people. I'm voting for fighting the climate crisis and universal Pre-K and community college.

Yes, and this tax is only about *income*. When you get to wealth, well, words fail me.

We could go out for beers and get really drunk just bringing up our most egregious examples of bootless wealth inequality....

I worked out that the compensation that that represents 4% of amounts to about $12K for every member of the workforce in Massachusetts (the vast majority of whom are working stiffs making more like a twentieth of a million in taxable income).

sadly a lot of it goes into REITs and that's why no one can afford rent anymore

I was about 37 years old before I learned of the existence of "family wealth management", i.e. a profession dedicated to making sure that no descendant of an insanely wealthy person ever needs to work a day in their lives, until the end of time. I hate this so, so much.

Yup. Taxing these guys is for their own good; they've created a world where there ltrl are NO good investment opportunities. Taxing it away at least insures it isn't going to actively harmful nonsense just to "put it to work".

The top of the society has money sloshing about while the world is falling apart. 😔

In my opinion, all this "venture capital" is treated no more seriously than Monopoly money by its holders. Therefore, it shouldn't matter if these "fun-bucks" were fairly taxed and, you know, actually put to constructive use?

As I recall, California's experience was that the first year had massive windfalls, but the 2nd or 3rd year resulted in a significant drop as people moved, or moved their income sources. I'm curious to see if MA has the same results.

(And also ISTR that CA is seeing numbers going up not-quickly, but also not-slowly, as people and businesses move back from TX to someplace where half their employees aren't treated as things.)

“Magic beans” LOL

Yes.