I'm convinced some of you guys make it a goal in life to try to be as miserable as possible.
Even during a pandemic, where everyone feels awful, there's someone pissing on a good story. Do you have to go out of your way to be this miserable? Isn't there already enough reasons to be?
Which is what? Donate all their money to the government? What happens after that? We expect the next generation of billionaires to do that also?
Fuck that. Structural issues require structural solutions, overhaul the tax code, close the loopholes to ensure the wealth gap is never this bad again.
And besides, just saying "pay your taxes" doesn't mean anything on it's own, unless you're implying that Ballmer is engaged in tax fraud or evasion.
Agreed. No way should he have so much wealth due to owning large stakes in a company he himself helped start up into a worldwide multi billion dollar company. You know, Microsoft?
You should just be taking people money? By right? Lol.
On what basis do you get to just decide when and where to reach out and take possession of someone else's money?
Also in what world is $25m a flimsy amount? Is he supposed to give up half or maybe a quarter of his worth?
Okay, now next time we have a problem does he give up the other half? Maybe another quarter or so?
It's crazy to read this thread and find posts reacting negatively. The man didn't have to donate anything, but he did. It's a kind gesture and good on him for doing so.
I understand your concern and see the source of your argument, but I beg you to not lose perspective.
A billionaire person possesses such a incredibly, incredibly immense kind of privilege, that it takes almost every measurement unneeded except for the privilege itself. These people are, more often than not, a systematic failure, because there's one point the system glitches itself and starts creating infinite, unending, unlimited amounts of money at a rate you couldn't even fathom
while being said billionaire.
If you take that to the point of 54
billions, the most interesting question is not how much privileged billionaires are, but how these people aren't driven mad. Not to mention how their concentrated capitals with few retribution avenues hinder economic (and power) flow and such the basis in which the neoliberal institutionalism is built on seems flawed.
Seeing it under a not-radical view (which would include hard redistribution of their wealth), at the very least, billionaires shouldn't be avoiding paying fair taxes. It's well known billionaires and the companies they build their fortune from avoid paying their share under using grey tax evasion (location tax etc), avoiding a healtier social flow of capital that would ensure subsidies for the system's inherent failures, in which (most) other people suffer on, but are, however, almost inevitable in any human construct.
These types of charity gestures are, of course, thanked, but they ought not being "celebrated", as any kind of sincere humanitarian intent on the billionaires' part would had manifested in many other, less
actively unempathetic ways.
