2019-2020 NBA Season Thread Basketball • Page 914

It is though.... the tax bracket above a certain threshold would ideally be between 70% and 90% so in a sense yeah, you do kind of bottleneck their income above one billion from a pipeline to a sieve.

It’s ridiculous how much that tax income would aid society without inflation bringing us back to square one, because we’d be using money that isn’t even in circulation to begin with. It really is the best solution but the conservatives in this country will never be down for it.

 

Ahhh yes the Jets effect, I know that feeling intimately

I will check them out! Are they your team?

Any specific reasons for teams that are up high and down low on your list? And why the frown faces?

 

And also how much of a proportion of their money they’re actually giving.

A couple million dollars of philanthropy is a penny in a Salvation Army bucket for Jeff Bezos, and does not offset hundreds billions of dollars in added value hoarded from his workforce. That’s just appeasing people with a gesture, to distract them from how much MORE labor value he is siphoning from the workforce’s ever increasing efficiency.

It’s way too easy for Bezos to give 0.0001% of his money to selective charities and try to smell clean - it’s so little money for him that he can do that willy nilly, strictly for damage control and to protect his reputation. But it’s not nearly enough in comparison to how much Amazon disrupts and inflates local economies, to the point where the “middle class” no longer exists in certain cities.

A top marginal tax rate to fix parts of America with poor education and infrastructure, and to create housing subsidies and reform.... that is really the only fair way to ensure that working class people also benefit from economies of scale and efficient new technology at their jobs. Considering these surging profits are never redistributed into their wages. This is also the only way to really create subsidies that counteract the economic damage / infrastructure OVERLOAD, that companies like Amazon cause in cities like DC and Seattle.

 

@Zach just dont pick the Lakers or Celtics.

 

Sad faces are for the current disfunction in those franchises and how much they suck, but I hold on do to nostalgia.

And otherwise not really, its pretty flexible. Outside of weird personal connections or players I like, its mostly teams I thought were fun when I first started watching the NBA as a kid. I'm biased towards underdog franchises, and I tend to root for whoever is left in the playoffs that has never won a championship, or hasn't won as recently (so I hate the historically great Lakers and Celtics).

I remember playing NBA 2k with the Grizzlies, Clippers, Raptors and Wolves a ton. I live in Chicago now but grew up in Indiana, hate the Knicks because of that mostly, and the rest is pretty flexible. I liked the Mavs a lot with Dirk, but shithead Mark Cuban and the sexual assault allegations from the franchise/Porzingis dropped them in my ratings. It all doesn't matter too much, I just watch games that look fun mostly.

 

If you tax Jeff Bezos 99% he's still a Billionaire.

 

Anyway Bill Gates is a huge piece of shit too and he's made billions while promising to give away his money, its basically an ad campaign for us not rising up against him as opposed to well-meaning charity that actually improves lives.

 

.... yes but, a billionaire who is contributing $180 billion other dollars to fix society without equilibrium prices skyrocketing.

It’s a lot easier to let his billion dollars slide, if most of his Amazon profits go back into fixing the problems caused by major corporations in the first place.

 

Guys it's not like I'm pro billionaire lol. I just believe that letting them get there is fine, just tax the fuck out of them when they get there.

 

The argument was how to we prevent Billionaires.

Taxing them after they become billionaires is what...I said I wanted to do.

 

That’s like exactly what everyone else is saying with the top marginal tax rate

Your idea of raising wages would be a nice intermediate solution for working class people, but those numbers still don’t match how much their efficiency has multiplied since the current wages were established.... and it also doesn’t exactly fix the infrastructural / commercial problems that Amazons and Microsoft’s tend to cause.

 

Randall what are you saying that I haven't already said lol.

The question I posed was how do we stop billionaires from existing?

 

I feel like that’s just a bad faith way to frame the discussion because excess wealth is relative and the number $1 billion is just a nice clean number that makes this easy to discuss. But if you want to make that the fulcrum point, then I’d simply say you make the top marginal tax apply to income over $100 million rather than $1 billion. Easy. It all depends where you set that threshold.

But that top marginal tax would start to affect famous entertainers and athletes too, not just business moguls, so then we start having a different discussion. Because it’s not uncommon for financially illiterate famous entertainers and athletes, to lose all their money on bad contracts and investments, even without a top marginal tax.

 

Randall I wasn't the one that said to prevent billionaires. @EntryLevelDave said just to prevent them, I asked how do we do that.

Even with what you're saying, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are billionaires if you tax them 99%.

Your argument is that there is no real way to prevent billionaires and our best option is just taxing the fuck out of them... which is exactly what I said we should do.

 

Yes they are! I’ve been going to games since ‘96 when I was 8 years old. The team has rarely been relevant since 04 but have had a few fun young teams that for one reason or another have never quite panned out. I’m very excited about the group they have at the moment. They should be great offensively next year, but Terrible defensively, which will ultimately be their downfall

 

Rockets made the top 10! I just always assume they are bottom 2 for everybody in this thread along with the Celtics.

 

Go Rockets doe.

 

Did not expect Randall to be in the nba thread, had to double take haha

 

Well he immediately started arguing with someone who made the same point he then argued so he carries that with him from place to place.

 

1. Bucks
2. Pelicans
3. Mavs
4. Thunder
5. Hornets
6. Magic
7. Hawks
8. Pistons
9. Pacers
10. Wizards
11. Heat
12. Nuggets
13. Raptors
14. Lakers
15. Grizzlies
16. Spurs
17. Wolves
18. Kings
19. Blazers
20. Clippers
21. Suns
22. Warriors
23. Bulls
24. Cavs
25. Nets
26. Knicks
27. Jazz
28. Rockets
29. Sixers
30. Celtics

 

It's not like i'm sitting here saying once someone earns 999,999,999.99 they can't earn any more money lol. I'm saying maybe if our system is set up so a recession and a pandemic can increase billionaire wealth by 450 billion dollars, maybe our system is broken.

 

Pat, plz tell me this is just a troll and not how you really feel

 

what did i do

 

1. Celtics
2- like 28. Who cares?
29. Lakers
30. Bucks.

 

i didn’t spend much time thinking about it. wolves should probably be higher. idk