"in United States practice, conviction means a finding of guilt (i.e., a jury verdict or finding of fact by the judge) and imposition of sentence. If the defendant fled after the verdict but before sentencing, he or she has not been convicted,"
Not true in New York, where this particular trial took place. From your own link:
S 380.30 Time for pronouncing sentence.
In general. Sentence must be pronounced without unreasonable delay.
Court to fix time. Upon entering a conviction the court must:
(a) Fix a date for pronouncing sentence; or
(b) Fix a date for one of the pre-sentence proceedings specified in article four hundred; or
(c) Pronounce sentence on the date the conviction is entered in accordance with the provisions of subdivision three.
So not only is sentencing distinct from conviction semantically, it's also distinct legally in the state of New York.
This is an instance where semantics are nothing more than, well, semantics.
The people who say that Trump has been ”convicted but not sentenced” actually mean that he’s been ”found guilty but not sentenced”, they just aren’t intimately familiar with legal terms of art.
If they simply say ”Donald Trump was found guilty but not sentenced” instead, they’ve silenced the nitpickers while still conveying the exact same message they intended to in the first place.
Sometimes when people complain ”you’re just arguing semantics!”, the semantics do in fact need to be cleared up, because the words being used are confusing, or wrong in a way that’s preventing participants in the discussion from getting on the same page.
Here, no one is actually confused. Everyone knows and agrees that Trump was found guilty, but that he hasn’t been sentenced. The only sticking point is whether you can use the word ”convicted” to describe someone who is in that situation, and whether or not that’s the case doesn’t have any material effect on people’s understanding of reality. It’s just a matter of arguing over which words should be used, i.e. it’s just semantics.
No? We aren't a communist country, so bringing up communist revolutions is irrelevant here.
We used to tax the rich much more than we do now, and government bureaucrats were not obscenely wealthy then as you seem to be implying.
Also, the US government spends more money than it accrues every year, so there isn't any consolidation of money happening in the government (nor will there be if taxes go up).
> We used to tax the rich much more than we do now, and government bureaucrats were not obscenely wealthy then as you seem to be implying.
This is inaccurate. We used to have higher tax rates on paper but nobody actually paid them because the tax code of the time had many enormous loopholes that have since been closed, which happened at the same time as the rates were lowered. Real government revenue per capita has been increasing over time.
It's not inaccurate. While it is true that they didn't pay the rates on paper, their effective rate was still significantly higher than it is today (even with all the loopholes).
GDP is the aggregate of everyone's income, but the highest income earners have a disproportionate share by definition. The lowest tax brackets have never represented a large proportion of government revenue; they both pay lower effective rates and have less income. It's a decent proxy unless you expect that the tax rates paid by the upper middle class (e.g. the top 50% as opposed to the top 1%) have gotten dramatically out of proportion from what they used to be, but that isn't what happened.
You can find the raw data here though (Tables II: distributional series, you're looking for tab TG2b): http://gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/
And then you can see that the highest effective income tax rate ever paid by the top 1% was 23.4% in 2001. The most current number from that table was 2019 when it was 20.3%. Whereas the highest rate from the mid-20th century period when they were alleged to have been paying such high income tax rates was 21% in 1945. In 1953, when the US had its highest marginal tax rates (92%), the effective income tax rate on the top 1% was 14%. Which is more typical for the period; 1945 was an outlier, it being the height of WWII.
The thing that has actually come down is not effective income tax rates on the top 1%, it's corporate income tax, which is a consequence of globalization. "Corporate income tax" is not a good fit for an international supply chain because tax avoidance and jurisdiction shopping is too easy if you're trying to tax something that only exists in a spreadsheet ("corporate profit") instead of something that has a definable physical location (goods, workers, real estate, etc.) So corporate tax avoidance is higher (because of transfer pricing etc.) and corporate rates are lower because it's easier for corporations to set up shop somewhere else if the somewhere else is taxing them less, which puts tax jurisdictions in competition with each other. But that's not an easy one to fix without abandoning globalization, so other taxes got raised to compensate (which brings us back to, government receipts as a percent of GDP haven't really changed).
Thank you for clarifying and providing that source, it's very informative.
The numbers I was looking at before were referring to the overall tax rate, which included both income tax and corporate taxes. With that said, the overall tax rate for the top 1% has gone down significantly since 1950 (from 45ish percent down to 32ish percent). As you mentioned, that is mainly due to the lower corporate income tax rate.
Given that drop in the overall tax rate (along with rising income inequality and increasing debt spending), it seems clear to me that the income tax rate was not raised enough to compensate for that loss but that's a separate discussion.
All this to say that - my original point that the rich were effectively taxed higher back then still stands, and government bureaucrats were not getting rich off of the higher tax rates either (that was a response to the person I originally replied to, not you)
> The numbers I was looking at before were referring to the overall tax rate, which included both income tax and corporate taxes.
Including corporate taxes in the overall rate doesn't make a lot of sense to do. Corporate taxes are on a different entity and who really pays them depends on the nature of the business.
For example, there are a lot of businesses that are simply capital intensive. You need to make a large investment in order to operate. Nobody is going to invest in them unless the returns can beat alternative investments like bonds, but that will be the after tax returns in both cases. Bond interest and dividends are both taxed, but corporate income tax is an additional tax, so with higher corporate taxes every company in that industry would have to generate higher profits to attract investors. So higher corporate taxes drive mergers/dissolutions, the market consolidates to give incumbents more market power and the tax mostly ends up getting paid by customers or employees rather than investors.
Conversely, if the market is already consolidated, it might mostly get paid by investors. But it also acts as a force to keep the market consolidated for the same reasons, which is not super great.
The point being, you can't just assume corporate taxes are always paid by the rich or the owners of the company.
> Given that drop in the overall tax rate (along with rising income inequality and increasing debt spending), it seems clear to me that the income tax rate was not raised enough to compensate for that loss but that's a separate discussion.
Income inequality has very little to do with tax rates -- it's often measured on the basis of pre-tax income, and has increased significantly even using that metric, largely as a result of market consolidation and regulatory capture. Incumbents that capture government regulators and exclude competitors become megacorps and then their executives and owners extract disproportionate income. Taxes rates have little to do with it.
The increased deficit spending is because the government is spending more money. Federal receipts as a percent of GDP are around the same, federal spending as a percent of GDP has gone up.
> government bureaucrats were not getting rich off of the higher tax rates either
But there weren't higher tax rates -- and the real measure of what there is to get rich off of would be government receipts, if not expenditures. Receipts are flat as a percent of GDP, but up quite a lot in real dollars and real dollars per capita as a result of growth in population and real GDP per capita. Spending is up even on top of that because of deficit spending. So the time they'd be getting rich isn't back then, it's right now.
Which they are. Of course, "they" are Lockheed and healthcare companies and members of Congress, but there's little doubt that it's happening.
> The point being, you can't just assume corporate taxes are always paid by the rich or the owners of the company.
I was just pulling the numbers off of the source you gave. I'm not sure what methodology they used to compute those numbers.
> Income inequality has very little to do with tax rates
Sorry, I meant wealth inequality. I agree with you that the wealth/income inequality we're seeing is mostly driven by the actual incomes of the rich vastly outpacing the middle/lower classes - what I meant is that a higher progressive tax rate should be deployed in order to help correct that problem.
> The increased deficit spending is because the government is spending more money
Yes, I'm aware. Again what I meant is that if we're going to continue to spend at the levels we are, and wealth inequality continues to grow at the rate it has, then it makes sense to increase the tax rate on the highest brackets.
> But there weren't higher tax rates --
There were though - according to your source.
> So the time they'd be getting rich isn't back then, it's right now
No argument there - but again my point is that they aren't getting rich from increased government taxes, they are getting rich by lobbying/regulatory capture.
> I was just pulling the numbers off of the source you gave. I'm not sure what methodology they used to compute those numbers.
It's Piketty/Saez/Zucman. They did a lot of work to compile the data but they have a particular conclusion they're trying to support, so the data is probably accurate but they're organizing it in a way that supports their position.
> I agree with you that the wealth/income inequality we're seeing is mostly driven by the actual incomes of the rich vastly outpacing the middle/lower classes - what I meant is that a higher progressive tax rate should be deployed in order to help correct that problem.
I don't think that really fixes it because it isn't the underlying cause. The problem here is market consolidation, e.g. Facebook is too big. So Zuckerberg has "billions of dollars" but in fact the vast majority of that money is in shares of that one company and what he really has is control over an enormous and disproportionately powerful corporation. Which is a problem, but taxes don't solve it, because the corporation is still just as big even if nobody has a controlling interest. Wall St would still put someone in charge of it and that person would still have massively disproportionate influence.
Whereas if you do something about the market consolidation then individual corporations don't come to be that size and their owners/executives don't come to have that much influence or money. So higher tax rates neither solve the problem nor are necessary if you do solve it.
> Again what I meant is that if we're going to continue to spend at the levels we are, and wealth inequality continues to grow at the rate it has, then it makes sense to increase the tax rate on the highest brackets.
The current level of spending is pretty useless. Indeed, it's actually one of the causes of the problem -- a lot of the money is going to the megacorps. It's probably better to stop giving it to them to begin with.
> There were though - according to your source.
On corporations, not rich people.
> No argument there - but again my point is that they aren't getting rich from increased government taxes, they are getting rich by lobbying/regulatory capture.
The thing they're lobbying for is the tax dollars. Lockheed and healthcare companies are getting rich from tax money. And the same for Congress, though the mechanism there is less direct. They allocate tax dollars to corporations that then funnel a portion of it back to the legislators in various ways.
> It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy.
As someone who thinks wealth inequality is a huge problem in the US - I'm genuinely curious as to what you would propose to address this problem "directly". Because to me, this tax proposal is addressing it directly.
Wealth inequality doesn't have any direct effects - merely having more money than someone else doesn't do anything. It's only after the money gets spent that you see negative effects, and the magnitude and type of spending determine the effects. It's more accurate to call this "spending inequality".
This proposal doesn't address the problem because it doesn't affect spending - only wealth. (a capital gains tax is actually a deceitfully name wealth tax) Wealth doesn't do anything until it's spent. That's the main problem with this proposal - it doesn't even try to address the problem it pretends to address.
As to how to actually address the problem: there's two types of wealth inequality that most people are concerned about - that between the super-rich and everyone else (discussed here), and that between the poor and everyone else (not discussed).
Thank you for engaging honestly, it's a breath of fresh air in this thread.
The ~wealth~ spending inequality problems of the super-rich seem to be mainly manifested in corruption - donating large amounts to political groups, and lobbying. You want to regulate/outlaw those specific things.
However, aside from corruption (which is a huge problem) most of the spending inequality problems seem to come from the middle and lower class. For instance, cost of housing and living - I think that that's being driven by the middle class having more access to capital in a supply-constrained environment (which is partially caused by big hedge funds buying up housing to rent it out - which again is a separate problem that can be addressed separately and isn't fixed by the capital gains tax). People like Zuckerberg aren't personally buying up housing all over the US on their own - this problem isn't at their level and this tax wouldn't help.
You can't outlaw the exercise of power, so the extreme power imbalance itself is the core problem for humanity; and the only way to fix that is to take some of their power away.
> donating large amounts to political groups, and lobbying
Those are indeed ways of exercising power that can be outlawed, but there are other ways of exercising power that are impossible to outlaw. For example, the ultra-rich can spend far more money on lawyers than anyone else. How are you going to outlaw that? And even the charitable contributions of the ultra-rich are controversial and probably wouldn't happen in a true democracy. E.g., the Bill Gates foundation has a lot of influence on global health spending[1]:
>
If you look across global health, they’re funding everybody. Nobody is more than one degree removed from the Gates Foundation. So it’s really difficult to avoid the foundation’s money.
Basically they wield so much power that even their charitable contributions to society are inherently political, unlike say if I volunteer at my local rescue mission.
Prologue: To be clear, I absolutely agree that rich people have disproportionate power in our economic system due to their wealth, but taking away that wealth is simultaneously (1) evil (according to every self-consistent non-arbitrary moral system I've seen - if you have another, I'd love to hear it) and authoritarian and (2) completely unnecessary - you don't need to tax people in order to get rid of these behaviors, and it completely misses the underlying problems that are present for all economic strata.
> You can't outlaw the exercise of power, so the extreme power imbalance itself is the core problem for humanity; and the only way to fix that is to take some of their power away.
This is not the only fix. It is possible to outlaw specific exercises of power that actually harm people, such as lobbying and bribery, without taking any money away at all, and it's possible to level the playing field in other areas such that money is much less of an advantage.
> For example, the ultra-rich can spend far more money on lawyers than anyone else.
By simplifying the legal system, and removing barriers to entry in the legal profession, such that people can effectively self-represent, both because they're legally allowed to, and because the legal system is simple enough that individuals can comprehend it and argue effectively. (this will also greatly reduce the effectiveness of high-powered lawyers, because the simpler the system is, the less advantage the best lawyers have over the worst ones)
The legal system is inherently flawed in that richer people have a massive advantage over poorer people - that is the problem, not that some people have more money and so can take advantage of it.
Please, seriously, think about that for a bit - our economy is filled with systems that are unfair or exploitative (e.g. legal, healthcare, non-compete agreements, the rent collusion that's currently happening), but the solution is not to start taxing the ultra-rich, because that still leaves those systems in an exploitative state, and they'll continue to take advantage of the middle and lower class even if you eliminate all of the rich people.
> E.g., the Bill Gates foundation has a lot of influence on global health spending
This is also very feasible to fix - make the status of being a tax-deductible charity contingent on not doing the bad things you want to disincentivize. This is similar to how Title IX is a huge lever over public institutions that prohibits them from doing some bad things.
The underlying problem is not "the owners of large companies have too much money", it's "large companies are too large". If you take ownership of the company away from Jeff Bezos and give it to Wall St, whoever they make the CEO can still ruin your life by denying service to you etc. It solves nothing and plausibly makes the problem worse because founders generally run companies less extractively than MBAs.
What you need is to remove barriers to competition and enforce antitrust laws.
> I spent too many years of my life on Java. It was okay until someone wrote a thing in php (!!) in a day that would be have taken at least a month in Java. Maybe two.
Really curious to hear what that was, because I'm having a hard time believing that is true.
Nationalised industries can be (and often are) structured as ordinary companies where the government owns all the shares.
The ability to sue thing also depends a lot on where you are. The Crown Proceedings Act 1947[0] waived most of the special protections government operations got, especially in "commercial" areas. So in practice it's not worse here than suing any other large organisation.
Isn't it more likely that you can catch yourself during the planning phase if the amount of work being estimated exceeds your budget? That seems much cheaper and easier to pivot from than if you were to make that realization halfway through your implementation.
I think it’s par for the course because you can only plan so far before you run into miscalculations once you start doing it. You break down tasks for stuff very close range
I think the point is that at some point, the "thought leaders" start to lose relevance when they're not day-to-day practitioners. I'm not saying it is or isn't true about Beck (I've always enjoyed listening to him speak), but is critical thinking we should apply to anyone.
That's not critical thinking though, it's fallacious thinking. Whether or not someone is a "thought leader" has no bearing on the quality of the article.
Would the article have gotten as much traction if it had been written anonymously? If there's an appeal to authority, then an evaluation is appropriate.
Why submit it like that, but to indicate to readers why this article is worth reading? HN guidelines say to submit the title as is, without additional qualifiers or commentary. (Fortunately, the mods updated it)
I can't speak for the person who posted it. Seems like it could have been an honest mistake to me.
An "appeal to authority" means something more specific (e.g. the logical fallacy "argument from authority") and this is not happening here.
The whole point I'm trying to make is that we should evaluate the writing based on its content. The person I originally responded to was dismissing it solely because of the person who wrote it (which ironically an ad hominem is a fallacy very similar to an appeal to authority but for the opposite reason).
look at any of the bullet points in the article. it's very hard to constructivly criticise any of them, they are all so vapid. typical of beck's writings.
Well if it's so hard to criticise them, that could be an indication that there is some truth in them.
> they are all so vapid
I like that he doesn't make sweeping statements. Because in software development, to quote another great author, there is no silver bullet.
That's not a popular story to tell when you're writing a book or speaking in a conference, people like to hear simple black and white statements. But the fact of the matter is, reality is much more nuanced.
I think it's more likely that if you can't find anything constructive to say about it, that maybe you don't have a valid argument (your original post was an ad hominem attack after all).
You are attacking the person's writing capability, implying that the article is not good because they wrote something before that you disagreed with. You're trying to argue semantics here, but it doesn't really matter because either way your argument is fallacious.
Given how Nintendo handled the situation with Ryujinx and Yuzu, they clearly thought it was an issue for them.
reply