French taxi drivers pulled out the throttle in an all-out confrontation with the ultra-cheap Uber car service Thursday, smashing livery cars, setting tires ablaze and blocking traffic during a nationwide strike that caught tourists and celebrities alike in the mayhem. — washingtonpost.com
Parisian taxi drivers have taken to the streets, smashing cars and burning tires to protest UberPop, a budget iteration of the car-sharing service akin to UberX in the States. Traffic came to a stop in the French capital, with reports of stranded travelers walking along the highway with luggage in tow, attempting to catch flights out of Charles de Gaulle airport. So far, 70 vehicles have been reported damaged around France and ten people arrested, according to the AP report.
One passenger caught in Thursday's melee was the singer Courtney Love, who tweeted throughout the experience. Love was able to escape via two men passing by on a motorcycle.
Over the past few weeks, taxi drivers have turned increasingly violent in their opposition to the car-sharing service, which they contend unfairly undercuts their business. Unlike Uber drivers, taxi drivers have to pay tens of thousands of euros for certification each year. Drivers are also frustrated by passenger complaints over a lack of tech-integration.
The French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve met with taxi unions and called for an immediate shutdown to UberPop services in France. Despite court rulings earlier this year and last banning the service, UberPop has continued to operate. The head of UberFrance, Thibaud Simphal went on the radio telling drivers "to continue," asserting that French law "has not demanded that UberPop be forbidden."
This is not the first time that Uber has drawn the ire of taxi drivers and government officials. The tech company is known for flouting laws and has been temporarily suspended from operating in Spain, while a Dutch judge ordered UberPop to stop in the Netherlands.
171 Comments
My point is, curt, that investing and finance are types of work, regardless of the difference in federal income tax treatment. You do realize that interest earned on Treasury Bonds is taxed as income, not capital gains, right? Does earning interest on a Treasury bond involve any sort of work?
It's clear that you can't even follow your own tortured argument, and your attempt to impose a dichotomy based on tax treatment utterly misses the point.
Finance is work. Do you like living in a house? Finance made that possible. Do you like eating food? Finance made that possible. Do you like wearing clothes? Finance made that possible.
Finance is basically the practice of moving money around to the profitable endeavors. People who decide to invest need to research and PERFORM WORK to decide where to place capital in the most productive endeavors. If something creates value (and not all employees create value—see many architects), money will flow to it. Without finance, people wouldn't have the same incentive to be productive.
Anyway, feel free to lecture me more on how the economy works!
i brought up the irs's outlook on earned v. unearned income with the hopes that would help simplify and explain what work means in the context of monetary policy as we were discussing in this thread. that obviously didn't work because you still seem to think that not going to work is just as much working as working is.
i never said we should end 'finance.' in fact, that doesn't even mean anything. your assertion that finance makes clothes possible is ridiculous and has absolutely nothing to do with any point that i made, or any point you were previously trying to make. my point was, and continues to be, that monetary policy should be focused on rewarding income that comes from labor over investments. also, monetary policy is more than just tax rates.
if your job is to move capital from one place to another, then that's a job. because it's a job. if you drag your ass out of bed in the morning to go to work moving capital around, then good for you, you have a job. if you spend money you already have by putting in the stock market or hiring a financial adviser (who is working) to put it in the stock market for you, you're not working. if you think real hard about what stock you want to spend your money on, you're not working, you're thinking about spending money.
here's the context that i see this conversation, which is obviously quite different than how you see it. i was watching a huckabee town hall type thing when some young person asked him about wealth inequality and student loan debt the general bad financial situation a lot of people are facing now. huckabee went on to talk about investment and how we need more investing. my point is that's the wrong outlook to fix the economic problems we're facing. there is enough investing. as you already pointed out, new industries have grown in our economy dedicated to different ways for people invest, including new ways to avoid regulatory oversight.
farmland is valued based on it's worth as an investment instead of land that grows crops. buildings are valued as investments rather places to conduct business. the current situation is not good and huckabee's goal of influencing monetary policy in a way that encourages more investing will make it worse and it will make wealth disparity worse because when wealth is created by capital rather than labor, then you need to start with capital. everyone can work hard, but not everyone can be born with money.
i assume this statement is where you started falling off track:
Why shouldn't we be rewarding investors? They bear the risk of the enterprise.
i've explained that, and it has nothing to do with clothes costing money. before that the thread was about uber, but i'm pretty sure you're not talking about that either.
you certainly haven't explained how there is a benefit to the sort of monetary policy that huckabee favors over policy that favors income from working for a living. if anything, you've just shown that you have trouble telling the difference.
as a side note, i don't know what you mean by saying interest from a treasury bond is taxed as income. of course it is, it's income. interest from a savings account is also taxed as income. income from capital gains is also taxed as income. capital gains comes from selling property. interest income comes from earning interest. if you sell a stock, you're selling property. you don't sell a treasury bond, you earn interest on a treasury bond. earned income comes from working for a business (including owning a business). interest and capital gains are both unearned income.
Incomprehensible analysis.
vs. no analysis. it's easier to understand if you try to understand.
Miles: America's "rich" (i.e. the top 25%) pay 86% of income taxes. Are they not contributing their fair share?
Not to derail the conversation, but why does Courtney Love look like my grandmother wearing a helmet?
curt, every business requires investment of capital. not following your point. what if you invest in realeastate to fix up and resell. how is that not work? what if you work as an employee for someone who does that? either way, you are still contributing to the same end product...and still being paid from investment capital regardless if you are the primary investor or an employee of the primary investor...the profit on the investment is the source of pay...
I didnt read this entire thread yet so may have already been covered...
Jla, he's not even sure of the point he's trying to make. If you can discern one through his posts, I'd love to hear your take.
As for stock markets...that is different...that is essentially like playing at the casino...More like Gambling because there is no direct control over the success or failure of the investment.
Depends on the number of shares held, jla.
jla, i'm saying monetary policy should favor income that's earned from work rather than income from not working.
your example of fixing up a house makes more sense than alternative's rambling about clothes. the goal in your example is to buy a house, do work to make it worth more, and sell it for a higher price that you started with. that, of course, would be considered capital gains rather than earned income.
if you're flipping houses, a lot of what you do isn't working for money, but rather spending money. whether you're spending money you have or spending borrowed money is kind of irrelevant; if you really can't afford to be making money off investment properties, you should probably do something different right?
if your acting as both investor and general contractor, then you would say you're actually working due to the fact that being a general contractor is a job, and you're dragging your ass out of bed in the morning to go to work. investor you could actually pay contractor you, in which case you would be making earned income. otherwise, contractor you is working for free, and getting no income (earned or unearned).
it wasn't that long ago that we had a big recession based in large part on the value of housing getting thrown too far out of whack, and the greater economy couldn't handle it. the value of a house was based on it's investment potential rather than it's use as a house. people were using the artificially inflated value of their houses as investments rather than simply as houses. so the problem isn't that you're making a reasonable living off investment income, it's that there is this very big pool of investment income that is moving the economy in a very bad direction for people who want to improve their livelihoods by working for a living.
ultimately, that means if we fix the economy in such a way that working becomes more valuable that investing, or if wealth could come from labor rather than capital, your business of making a profit off capital gains would suffer, possibly to a point of not being viable. that would be bad for you, but overall it would probably be better for the economy. housing renovations would be done by actual homeowners, and said homeowners would have hire contractors to fix up their own properties rather than the speculative system we have now.
i expect you know a lot more about the housing market in the example you gave then alternative knows about pretty much anything, so if you have any other insights as to how investment properties effect the overall economy i would actually like to hear about it and consider your perspective.
The debate is less about work vs investment, and more about tangible value vs intangible value. For instance, if you invest in 100 lbs of clay and turn it into 100 clay pots that are then sold to people who can use them, and you make a 10% gain, your investment created tangable value...you made something that some cannot make...On the other hand, if you invest in 100 pounds of gold and the value of gold increases 10%, and then you resell the gold, you gained wealth with out adding tangible value to the marketplace. you started with 100 pounds of gold and ended with 100 pounds of gold...In essence, you extracted wealth from society without adding anything of value to that society...Im not sure I can articulate the long term effect of this...but its not sustainable...
How did you "extract value" from society? In the latter scenario, society simply values gold more that it did previously.
jla, it would be fair to say that in the house renovation example you have 2 distinct roles, one as an investor and one as a designer/contractor. the designer/contractor adds value by improving the house. the investor doesn't. the designer contractor role is actually doing something of value, whereas the investor is just spending money in such a way as to enable the designer/contractor to be worthwhile and taking a cut of the value that entity adds. the contractor would be better off with work that doesn't involve an investor leeching money out of the process, though since the contractor and investor are the same person it doesn't seem as bad.
i think in that sense your view of tangible/intangible relates fairly directly to labor/investor. i use the terms labor/investor because i think those terms can relate more to how monetary policy is developed. you will hear certain politicians talk about improving investment, but not so much talking about intangible value.
artificially inflating the value of gold as a commodity through competitive investment has no value to society at all. any useful product tied to gold, like say a gold ring, ends up costing more because said product is less available to useful people trying to work for living - those who's income doesn't increase when commodity investors fuck up the value of useful things.
Alt, I mispoke...I meant extracting money not value...gaining wealth by investing and betting on increased demand is different than investing in a company that makes things or investing in raw goods and making things yourself...Not saying its morally wrong or should be banned, just that it doesn't add anything to the overall society/economy...just a numbers shuffling game...
Curt, absent corruption in commodities exchanges (which I concede does occur), the market inflates the value of gold—what is "artificial"?
Also, Curt, the designer would be nowhere without cash to facilitate the entire project. Your entire indictment of the role of investors is specious.
the designer needs someone with cash to pay for the project. that person does not have to be an investor. a homeowner who employs a designer/contractor to renovate their house is in a role other than investor. they're not spending money in order to get a financial return, they're spending money to improve their house. as noted above, once people started thinking of their houses as investments and themselves as investors in their houses with an intent to make a profit on capital gains, bad things happened in the economy and often they ended up with a house worth less than their mortgage.
my use of 'arificially inflated' may not be correct, or may not be what you're thinking of. i would say when the value of something becomes based on it's value as an investment instead of it's value as a product itself, that's artificial. when coffee is traded as a food item that people like to drink, then it's value moves based on it's value as a food item. when it's traded as a commodity, it's value is based on it's value as an investment, not it's value as a food item.
coffee can be traded as a commodity but still retain it's value as a food item, especially since it's perishable. when too much money is thrown into investing in coffee though, it skews the market.
for more information you can click this link from 2012 and scroll down to the part that says "Excessive Speculation and Limitlessness "
http://www.mondovisione.com/media-and-resources/news/address-of-cftc-commissioner-bart-chilton-to-the-g-20-amis-roundtable-on-public/
essentially less investing means more stable, right?
America's "rich" (i.e. the top 25%) pay 86% of income taxes. Are they not contributing their fair share?
Bogus question, but if you insist:
Nope.
A Peek at the Highest Earners’ Tax Returns
The IRS’s tables show that the top 400 taxpayers had an average tax rate of 18%. But more than half, or 221, had average effective tax rates between 10% and 20%, while 37 had an average rate of less than 10%.
That was 2010. Two years later their incomes were up nearly 30%. I wonder what they are now?
gold IS artificial.
How did you "extract value" from society?
From a financial perspective: slave labor, indentured servitude, monopolized markets, avoidance of taxes, extortion, bribery, etc.
Surprised no one brought up the news, that recently California Labor Commissioner’s Office ruled that a driver for the ride-hailing service Uber should be classified as an employee, not an independent contractor, in relation to discussion about disruption, skirting laws/regulations and employment precarity...
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