Michael Dell, the billionaire, was asked what he thought of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to increase the marginal tax rate to 70%. He didn’t like that at all. His reasoning was mostly skewered by a competent economist on the panel, who pointed out that the US had that rate for quite a long while during a period of strong growth.
But I was amused by another point. He claimed he donated more to his charitable foundation than the increased rate would take from him.
My wife and I set up a foundation about 20 years ago, and we would have contributed quite a bit more than a 70 per cent tax rate on my annual income.
That seemed unlikely. So I had to look it up; my source is Forbes, which is going to be biased in favor of billionaires. I am aware that the 70% would be taken from his earnings for a year, and this number is apparently as a fraction of his lifetime earnings, so there’s a bit of apples/oranges comparison going on here, but as I suspected, he’s not giving away as much money as he implies.
I’m pretty sure 5% is a lot less than 70%.
Not covered in just the bare numbers is the way billionaires use philanthropy as a tax dodge, and to manipulate the target population in a way that benefits them personally. For that, I’m going to recommend this podcast, “The Neoliberal Optimism Industry”, which explains the game these arch-capitalists are playing.
We’re told the world is getting better all the time. In January, The New York Times’ Nick Kristof explained “Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History.” The same month, Harvard professor and Bill Gates’ favorite optimist Steven Pinker lamented (in a special edition of Time magazine guest edited by – who else? – Bill Gates) the “bad habits of media… bring out the worst in human cognition”. By focusing so much on negative things, the theory goes, we are tricked into thinking things are getting worse when, in reality, it’s actually the opposite.
For the TEDtalk set, that the world is awesome and still improving is self-evidently true – just look at the data. But how true is this popular axiom? How accurate is the portrayal that the world is improving we so often seen in sexy, hockey stick graphs of upward growth and rapidly declining poverty? And how, exactly, are the powers that be “measuring” improvements in society?
On this episode, we take a look at the ideological project of telling us everything’s going swimmingly, how those in power cook the books and spin data to make their case for maintaining the status quo, and how The Neoliberal Optimism Industry is, at its core, an anti-intellectual enterprise designed to lull us into complacency and political impotence.
All those names really do have to be among the first lined up against the wall when the Revolution comes.
“when the Revolution comes”
pretty sure it’s well past due.
I’ll settle for a tax on the top 10% of billionaires.
Extracted in the French manner.
@1 All we be doing is swapping deck chairs. Someones in the new regime will quickly start gathering everything that isn’t nailed down.
The discussions about this on Fox are staggeringly stupid. They talk about it ad a 90% tax on total income.
It’s a 70% tax on each dollar of income above the first 10 million! That means if your income is 10 mill and 1 dollars this is going to cost you 70c in tax. But it’s not 70c totally new. It’s whatever the difference is with the lower tax bracket. I f the lower bracket is 40% then you are actually only paying 30c more on that one dollar.
@4 And to add, if you google Michael Dell income you see he made “only” 2 million in salary in 2017. So he wouldn’t even be affected by this.
My mom opposes raising taxes on the rich because “rich people just use accountants to avoid paying extra taxes.”
She also thinks it’s a good thing that they do so.
I liked how Rex Stout’s protagonist Nero Wolfe handled his fees. Once he hit the top income tax bracket (>90% when the books were written), NW retired to his orchids and books for the rest of the year. Something the rich should do.
Watching Pharyngula morph into Chapo Trap House. This should be cool.
Subtle Pinker bash duly noted. Is he entirely wrong that the typical situation has improved? I’m glad per capita violence has waned and that I can choose to go down to my health department and opt in for Hep A and B shots. Not pre-emptive but Hep C is now treatable. Smallpox is a thing of the past. Polio isn’t as much of a fear. Techno gadgetry goes down in price. Things we take for granted were rare luxuries in my lifetime. I think he pushes the argument way too far, but things have gotten better and we should acknowledge that. Yet there is so much more that needs to be done, such as undoing regressive Reaganomics and adopting a healthcare approach that the rest of the affluent world has already embraced. We need to turn the clock back on implicitly racist mores that gave us law and order mass incarceration. But as much as people scaremonger about fluoridated water that prevents childhood cavities, potable water is more common except for Flint Michigan and other places of concern. Paternalists want to progress into banning sodas above 16 oz. Yet I can enjoy a meal free of second hand cig smoke. Progress right?
We live in a posttruth Infektion FSB operative world with a growing abundance of fact-checking sites that hold BSers feet to the fire. Pinker wasn’t entirely wrong even though his whacked take on Tuskegee and rice paddies to sweatshops are enough to cause an apoplectic aneurysm.
Safe spaces and hypersensitive helicopter parenting are but an extension of Pinker’s thesis though the IDW decry such societal ratcheting as snowflakery, nanny statism, and regressive leftism. The tide has begun to overtake Dr. Frankenstein Pinker as the societal improvements keep rolling in as a cultural tsunami. The youth have translated overwhelming progress into even higher expectations? The horror.
The woman who said USA only had a marginal rate of 70%+ “briefly, in the 80s” is the economics correspondent of the Washington Post. Can you goddamn believe it.
The thing is, the super-rich have accumulated a great deal of power in the last 40 years and they’re going to be loath to give up any of it. They won’t play nice. This is going to get extremely ugly.
My favorite is “extreme poverty is down” If 50% of the world ate cat food and 5% were reduced to licking empty cans, we’d heard “extreme poverty is only 5%!” Meanwhile the life expectancy in the US is down from 2014.
Most billionaires don’t make money as income but from capital gains. Capital gains are not taxed on the regular tax table. Instead they have a 15% and a 20% rate. People making only $39,000 are taxed a higher rate.
Redefine capital gains as regular income and we probably don’t even need the 70% bracket (but add it too, what the hell)
He also says that he trusts his own ability to spend that money over that of the government.
So, let’s think about this. Say we actually needed to fight a war (war seems to be the only collective action our dumb fucking country can understand), does anyone seriously believe the voluntary contribution of a couple of billionaires would be better than taxing the public?
Now apply that to any real issue: education, health care, FUCKING CLIMATE CHANGE, criminal justice…
The real issues require collective action and the pooling of our resources. That guy is a greedy doofus.
It’s extremely likely that Dell’s income is tiny fraction of his net worth — so if he’s paid 5% of his net worth, that might well be more than 70% of his income.
I don’t see why it matters though.
Given tax rules, if he doesn’t want to pay tax, for the most part he can make charitable donations instead.
doubtthat; my understanding (cue cartomancer to set us straight) is that Rome largely won the Punic wars by having its rich families give voluntary contributions to the war effort, whereas Carthage’s rich families weren’t giving as freely.
So the model of voluntary contribution of rich people to a major societal issue has been tested, and found that it works if your opponent also tries it but fails.
pilgham: the US is not the entire world.
Extreme poverty is very rare in the US, but was not uncommon in India, China, South America, and Africa at the turn of the century. It’s been drastically reduced in those four regions.
Life expectancy has stagnated or even receded in the US lately. But where most people live, it’s been growing quite quickly since the turn of the century as various diseases have been pushed back, or treated much more effectively than in the 1990s or earlier, while in the developed world it’s been creeping up slowly.
This is not to deny that if someone says we shouldn’t worry about the opioid epidemic in North America because kids in Nigeria have a lot lower risk of dying of malaria, they’re making a bullshit argument.
Rich people decoded: “THE MONEY IS OURS, GODDAMNIT. GIVE US THE FUCKING MONEY.”
@ 11 Holms
The woman who said USA only had a marginal rate of 70%+ “briefly, in the 80s” is the economics correspondent of the Washington Post. Can you goddamn believe it.
Sure. She may not have checked anything and is going by something on Fox News or, in the these days of downsized newsrooms she may have been the baseball expert until last week.
I follow some of the history fantasys that we hear such as Christopher Columbus proving the world was round or Copernicus not publishing until he was on his deathbed for for fear of the Church or Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. All three fables are complete nonsense. People just repeat what they have heard or read. She likely did the same.
the other attitude I hear from the rich is that they made the money themselves as if they were the only one involved and were not a small part of all of us together.
I remember way back in high school having to read “No man Is an Island” John Donne it is still valid I think . those who benefit more should pay more out of gratitude and not begrudgingly out of resentment.
or they can go a live on some small island and forgo all contact with the rest of us.
uncle frogy
An over-rich white dude trying to blow smoke up my ass with the old percentages trick.
Color me shocked.
jrkrideau @20,
You’re not too far off. The Washington Post’s Nationals beat writer, Chelsea Janes, is moving to news to cover the 2020 presidential election. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/01/04/after-four-years-covering-nats-goodbye-now/
It might seem odd to some, but who better than a sportswriter to cover a beat rife with cheating, sex scandals, and rules that arbitrarily favor the South?
The business about the rich “giving to charity” instead of paying taxes is one of those memes about the rich that drive me to apoplexy (another is the claim of “class warfare” at the merest hint that wealth inequality has grown completely out of control). Leaving aside the question of how MUCH the rich deign to pass on to the peasants (rather like the baron scattering a handful of pennies to his serfs as he rides past), the equally important issue is WHAT they choose to contribute funds to. Society would function at the whim of the rich, popular issues being funded, less popular (but important) ones not. I think Bill Gates means well, but what are his qualifications for deciding where money is needed, and who elected him to decide?
That’s exactly the point of her being there, to throw softball questions and to be on their side. The rich are the enemy and they like buying the media and to do propaganda.
Capital gains tax rates need an e^x term.
numerobis, #17,
Well… not quite. The idea that it was the generosity and public-spiritedness of the great noble houses in Rome (greater than that of Carthage) that won the Punic Wars is a typical piece of Livian moralising. It confuses one dramatic episode during the Second Punic War (the frantic aftermath of the Roman defeats at Trebia, the Trasimene Lakes and especially Cannae in 216BC) with the ebb and flow of military jostling and ascendancy across many decades. Our main source – Livy – uses the tight straits Rome was in after its armies had been roundly thrashed and Hannibal was on the doorstep to make a rousing case for the superiority of the Roman spirit – no other people in the world is more tenacious, more unwilling to give up, more selfless in its commitment to common safety. Why, even the ladies of the noble houses gave up their jewellery and submitted to harsh taxes on their wealth to fund the frantic scramble to scrape a new army together while Fabius Cunctator was delaying the Carthaginians with all his guile and skill! This is, of course, in stark contrast to how Romans of Livy’s own day behave – mired in softness and luxury, and unwilling to lift a finger if it damages their comfortable lifestyle. Livy was very big on comparing the great courage and frugality of earlier times with the corruption of today. It’s massively overdone.
There is also a codicil in his treatment of a speech by Cato the Censor once the crisis has passed, chastising the women for wanting the sumptuary laws lifted now Rome is no longer in peril. So there’s a bit of a putting uppity women in their place message here too.
What actually won the Romans the Punic Wars? It’s not a straightforward question – luck and a bit of military skill, yes. But really it’s more to do with how the two empires recruited and dealt with subject populations. Carthage’s empire was much looser – more a kind of preferential trading network – where Rome’s imposed regular, exacting and substantial military obligations on its subject peoples, meaning it had a much more reliable and substantial body of troops at its beck and call when it needed to.
This is not only about riches but also about ego and power. By donating to their own charities, the billionaires can feel good about themselves and decide how the money is being spent. Paying taxes deducts their influence and does not make them feel good.
People are even starting to question the philanthrocapitalist foundations these billionaires are funding. When the Gates Foundation lobbies to get private schools government funded and spreads propaganda to diminish teacher’s unions, should we really be forgiving to them if their other contributions are apparently positive? These foundations are profoundly anti-democratic and often seem to be a way to ensure they can be seen by effectively changing nothing at all. Worse still, the halo around these foundations tends to further reinforce the idea that government can do nothing right, and that the best way to fix the world is to deregulate everything so that private enterprise can fix it.
I first heard of this from interviews given by Linsey McGoey, so her book No Such Thing as a Free Gift is probably a good start (I hope to get around to reading it sooner or later). I’ve also enjoyed Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World which goes over the mentality of the people involved in this industry. It’s all pretty disturbing.
pilgham wrote:
Extreme poverty is defined as earning US$1.90/day. I’ve heard that if you were to redefine it to slightly higher at $3/day or so, then extreme poverty would’ve gone up in the period mentioned.
@nomdeplume #24
No he doesn’t https://twitter.com/bcmerchant/status/1088106877156679680
@F.O. Last time I give Mr Gates the benefit of the doubt…
F.O., the only thing your link shows is that some person using the handle “Brian Merchant” claimed that “Bill Gates scoffed at notion the system was broken, hinted critics were communists”. I saw no cited source in that tweet.
(Care to be more specific?)
#14
Yes, pile them on please.
[heh]
“Hello, individual who has googled ‘brian merchant’ for one reason or another. I’m the author of a bestselling book about the iPhone, the One Device. I’m currently at work on a second book, about the first rebellion against automation—the deeply misunderstood Luddite uprisings of the early 1800s—and what might cause the next one.”
That was quite funny.
“…..the first lined up against the wall when the Revolution comes….”
Now that’s a Wall I’d happily contribute to.
@John Morales:
I think the link you are looking for is this: https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1087749307380523008
@numerobis
Cool bit of history.
I don’t want to sound like I’m very pedantically contradicting you, and I take your comment in the spirit it’s intended. Modern warfare, of course, is a much different thing (like modern health care systems, modern education, modern criminal justice systems…). Just consider the relative costs of our roads.
A single wealthy person in Rome could outfit a sizable percentage of the military. Now, the wealthiest person in the nation, devoting their entire net worth – not just a fraction – couldn’t pay for what we spend on one encounter.
The Iraq shitshow, which was cheap since, you know, Iraq didn’t actually have a military to fight back, cost $2.4 trillion. Imagine what fighting Russia or China or some coalition would cost.
nomdeplum
Charity is power. It’s no wonder the rich love it so much. All of us who have the means to give to charity (and to make it clear, most ordinary people give a higher percentage of their money to charity than filthy rich people and they feel it more) exercise that power, whether we want it or not. Every time you walk past a panhandler you exercise that power, regardless of whether you give them nothing, your copper change or 100 bucks. There’s probably 20 go fund mes on my Twitter timeline a day, I’ll respond to only very few and of course I allocate my funds according to how I judge the needs of that person.
The difference between me and those rich assholes is that I don’t enjoy this and wished that those people’s needs would be taken care of by taxpayer funded programs.
doubtthat wrote:
It might not cost much more. It’s probably reasonable to think that the Iraq war was expensive because the point was to use the old weapons so that new ones could be commissioned and manufactured. To paraphrase Madeleine Albright,
” individual who has googled ‘brian merchant’ for one reason or another.” The person might have been looking to replace his brain as the current one suffers from dyslexia?
Another thing about long term capital gains. The first 38K have a tax rate of 0. Much better than the tax on income earned at Mcdonalds.
lotharloo @36,
I do appreciate your effort, and your link indeed seems to be the one F.O. intended.
That said, I did not seek it out (I merely checked the adduced link and noted its lack of substance). I’m not that invested that I will listen to the audio and make a determination; but I do know Bill Gates is one smart cookie and very much doubt he’d be so sloppy.
In passing, I did notice nomdeplume’s concession to F.O.’s original comment.
That was informative about nomdeplume.
What I do know is that he has literally given billions to charities that don’t ostensibly mainly benefit him or his; whatever proportion of his wealth that may be, he is indeed a philanthropist.
In passing, seems to me that a good proportion of people weighing in just don’t grok the concept of ‘marginal tax rate’, on the basis that they keep talking of it as if it were not a marginal tax rate, but rather a flat tax rate.
Even PZ’s OP is written as if that were the case, though I’m confident he is not thus mistaken.
Philanthropist. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.
Ambrose Bierce.
Rob, for the beneficiaries, what matters most is the fact, not its why.
And, face it. Should he care to do so, he need not dispose of those $$$.
(Easy enough to research the facts… and dare I invoke “intent ain’t magic”?)
Anyway, what I see there regarding Bill Gates is what us Ozzies call “tall poppy syndrome”.
John, for the observers, it’s a thief parting with some of his ill-gotten gains.
Oh how fucking tiresome. Distinction might be something to be envied, in its positive sense. But obscene wealth is a sickness.
Rob, wave your hands all you want but, clearly, you can’t dispute me.
Therefore giving billions of dollars of one’s obscene wealth means nothing to you, on the basis that it’s there to give. Nevermind that such giving is only possible because it can be given, that it can be given is enough to condemn the giver.
(Perhaps stick to physics)
In passing, Rob, I invoke Sorites and ask you whether you can quantify at what point one’s wealth becomes obscene rather than acceptable. I very much suspect that, whatever your answer, it will exclude your own circumstances.
Rob Grigjanis vs John Morales
damn
I picked the wrong night to actually take the pain meds
[Hey, chigau. Sorry to hear that. Shame you need those meds, and that it ain’t serious. Noticed your recent scarcity around the place.]
Well, in this case, it really is a matter of opinion. Still, I like to give credit where credit is due, unlike some.
[grr… → and hope that it ain’t serious]
@42 Hmmm, last time I give John Morales the benefit of the doubt…
nomdeplume, I did not and do not ask for that, nor has it ever been a need.
(Also, that’s yet another indication of your personality, that you somehow imagined I either needed or merited it; you’d have done better keeping mum rather than proclaiming your decision)
I knew the Gates Foundation was shadier than people claimed when I noticed that every time they gave money to schools and libraries back around 2000 or so, it was as targeted non-fungible grants to buy computers which were required to use Windows. Which is to say: Gates was using his tax exempt funds to boost his profits.
The Vicar, citation?
(Also, did they pay for the operating system, or was it included in the grant?)
@53 Gosh John, you give free personality assessments based on a couple of comments, the second frivolous, the first semi-serious, on a single thread. I’m impressed. Although you seem to have missed my sense of humour – perhaps one or two extra comments were needed to include that?
@#55, John Morales:
Personal experience. I worked for 2 institutions which qualified for grants from the Gates Foundation in that general time frame, and had several friends (and a family member) working in others, and the list of available grants was hardly a secret.
And no, you were not permitted to use it on a PC without an OS, and if you knew anything about how the market was running at that time, Microsoft was getting far more out of Windows licenses included with PCs than the cost of producing Windows. (Although admittedly they made much less off of bulk licenses to manufacturers than they did from individual copies sold to people who upgraded from one version to another… the cost of even an OEM license — which technically you weren’t supposed to use to upgrade a computer which you bought — without any bulk discounts was ludicrous. I haven’t been buying Windows lately, but last I checked it was still ludicrous.
The Vicar, ok. Your citation is your personal impression from days of yore, and the list of available grants was hardly a secret at the time. I think you are mistaken in your assessment.
Singularly uninformative and muddled. What is the “it” which was not permitted to use without an OS? Windows is an operating system, and without one, you just have a box.
—
nomdeplume:
You think so? I wrote that those comments were “informative” and “indicative”, but no more.
Care to attempt to paraphrase the “free personality assessment” you imagine I provided?
Well, that’s one extra right there. Still missing it.
But fine, I get that you think those institutions were cheated by Gates, and that those grants were costly and to the benefit of Microsoft.
—
If you cared to indicate in what manner F.O.’s comment — the one to which I initially referred and which caused your withdrawal of the benefit of the doubt towards me — it would be even more informative. I note you’ve studiously avoided the subject hitherto.
[ack — I desist. Bad editing, pointless disputation]
John @47: Shall we all stick to what we studied intensely for years? What subject(s) would that leave you with? But anyway, thanks for the suggestion!
@48: Of course, when wealth becomes obscene is highly subjective. To many people on the planet (including the poor in the West), my circumstances would seem obscenely comfortable. I don’t have to work any more, I have shelter and food pretty much guaranteed until I snuff it, and my only responsibility is taking care of my mum. But I don’t have much more than those things require, and I won’t be leaving much at all if I live to 85.
So, if you like, take my circumstances at the bottom end of obscene.
Any road, I have to go out and shovel a fuckton of snow now. I doubt Billy has to do that.
John Morales:
That’s the real tragedy, isn’t it? If our society had made it necessary to put that money to some useful purpose (i.e., making him pay it in taxes), then it would be inappropriate to think he deserves to be credited for his personal decision to not hoard it. That would be our decision, a political one, if that were how things worked in the case of the very wealthy. But, alas, politics in the US is too fucked up at the moment for that to be true.
Imagine a situation when you might say “should a kidnapper care to do so, he need not release his captive.” And the thought is supposed to be that you believe it’s important to give credit where it’s due. Well, okay, you definitely shouldn’t credit a society that lets kidnappers run amok (one that even praises their grit and ingenuity, etc.), as it’s up to the kidnapper whether or not they free any of their victims, when and how that happens, the terms of their release and possible recapture, and so forth. There are no doubt beneficiaries whenever somebody is freed, and I can understand a feeling like relief (but not so much gratitude for the kidnapper’s benevolence). But is there no sense of urgency here? Should we feel comfortable with a situation like that?
For an instructive trip down memory lane there’s always Gates’ “Open Letter to Hobbyists”.
…And the browser wars. The GUI thing with Apple was more complex because Xerox PARC. Thankfully Torvalds freed us from the Windows tyranny, though not his own.
But: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apologizes-for-years-of-being-a-jerk-takes-time-off-to-learn-empathy/
BSD Unix can be run on a PC. A distant variant of BDS is iOS which is another can of worms with Apple controlling the hardware it runs on, unlike Windows or Android for that matter. Insert favorite Google bash here…
John Morales
I’m no worse than usual. Just age-related chronic aches and pains that I usually ignore.
I appreciate your concern.
John
It matters to the people he does not deem worthy of help. So far none of these “philanthropists” have lifted a fucking finger to fix the water pipes in Flint. As cr says, taxing him would do more good to the rest of us but not tickle Gates’ feel good bone. Also see my comment on charity as an exercise of power.
While the possession of billions isn’t necessarily damning evidence all on its own, in the current world it’s probably quite indicative.
It’s certainly better than the assumption that the nominal owner of said obscene wealth has “created it”, has a right to dispose of it, and that without them there would be less to give.
Which is a very convenient myth the obscenely wealthy would like us to tell each other, but very much facts not in evidence.
In fact, an awful lot of that obscene wealth, at least in our current oligopolist-friendly political economy, consists of various kinds of non-productive monopoly rent and similarly cozy and profitable arrangements. If not outright cheating and theft. Such takings are almost by definition exploitative and socially un-/counter-productive.
I don’t think we need to look at wealth from those channels with any particular admiration. It’s probably more correct to view it a little as we would the questionably legitimate fortunes of a mob boss or a drug lord. We should probably just repossess those ill-gotten anti-social gains, but, in the mean time we don’t need to give the possessor a cookie if they give away a tiny fraction to charity in an attempt to launder their own reputation.
Taxing such “obscene wealth” at nigh-confiscatory rates isn’t necessarily going to solve the root problems on its own either, of course — we also need to start talking more about strengthening policy measures that strike directly at problems of monopoly, industry collusion, mergers, consumer protection, etc. — but it certainly won’t hurt. Taxes will discourage harmful accumulation a little, inhibit further entrenchment, and provide some revenue to tackle those and other problems.
@ck, the Irate Lump
Agree with you 100% that Iraq cost more than it should have (and it should have cost $0 and never happened, but…), and contractor/military industrial gorging is among the top reasons for these conflicts.
But…fight a nation that can sink a $13 billion carrier laden with 50 $120 million planes and that bill would explode in unimaginable ways. The benefit of picking on countries with no military is that they can’t reach your most expensive shit. Just the disposable humans we tossed in there to wander around and get blown up.
I’m assuming we mean Iraq had no effective military, right? Not no military, period?
Because, IIRC, Iraq nominally had the better part of half a million troops at the time of the invasion. Which ain’t nothing. And lots of tanks and planes and AA installations and stuff too. On paper, that was on the same order of magnitude as the US invasion force.
Which I think is an interesting wrinkle on the point that a single strong man can’t really finance an army on their own, like they could have back in, say, Julius Caesar’s day. In some ways, the Iraqi army ca. 2002 was just such a private army.
It’s probably more like a rich enough guy probably could still field a nominally sizable private army, just not one that’s likely to be very effective against the kind of army a large, wealthy nation state with healthy tax and industrial base can put against them. (Of course, it also shows that most countries probably can’t stand up against such a state either. Unless someone comes up with a clever way to sink aircraft carriers on the cheap, anyway — which probably isn’t unpossible.)
PS: If that’s not enough “um actually” for you, I’d also quibble with the $2.4 trillion number, which isn’t so much the cost of equipping a military force that size, but rather the protracted cost of occupation/bungled reconstruction/guerrilla war, all of which were racked up after the invasion, and wouldn’t necessarily reflect the sorts of things a hypothetical “Bezos’ Battalion” or whatever would care about.
If you want to just count just the cost of going up against the organized Iraqi military, I think the appropriation for the initial attack was only $60 billion or so — which might well have more or less covered the actual operating costs (food, wages, bombs and ammunition, fuel, spare parts, etc.) of the invasion proper.
But of course that number wouldn’t represent the cost of having such a military in the first place. You can’t just rent them by the hour, so the actual cost of fielding such a force would need to include all the money spent building it up in the years and decades before the invasion. Given US military spending of several hundred billion per year, that’s trillions and trillions.
Rutger Bregman makes a case. White billionaire steps up. Winnie Byanyima teaches him a lesson. At Now This.
@jack lecou
Sure. They were poorly equipped. Their airforce and navy played no role in the invasion. They had no ability to fight back, and that was before the devastating air strikes.
What little they had in 1990 was destroyed in the Gulf War I, dismantled by future weapons inspections, and restricted from rebuilding by sanctions. They functionally had no military capability.
But that’s the point, though. In ancient Rome, they didn’t pay for the healthcare of the people who fought in the war.
Either we shouldn’t pay for the healthcare of the troops, and thereby remove the cost from the books, or it is an actual cost of going to war. If it’s a cost of going to war it has to be considered when raising funds for a potential conflict. Again, modern war, for many, many reasons, is infinitely more expensive than war was even just 150 years ago. The relative cost of a stealth bomber and a chariot being one factor; the advances of medicine and the cost of administering such being another.
Yes, this is my point. Consider the effort that goes into the invasion of a destabilized, defanged, poor country, and then consider whether this could be done via voluntary contribution from some billionaires. It’s absurd.
And as I said above, the same principle applies to every facet of modern life – health care, criminal justice systems, environmental preservation, battling climate change, infrastructure…
It simply is not true that the doofy asshole at Davos can more effectively allocate his relatively meager funds than our society can collectively allocate substantial sums. The accumulation of wealth in his income/wealth bracket and their tax avoidance weakens the nation in every possible way.
John Morales wrote:
I have no idea if Gates holds any stocks in private school corporations, but his foundation is a huge proponent of “charter schools” and breaking teacher’s unions through performance metrics. Right from the horses’ mouth: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2013/10/OPP1099267
Then there is the agricultural reform attempts which often amount to opening developing world markets to western seed/equipment/pesticide manufacturers rather than working with the community. This half-assed approach has cost African nations millions and caused lost crops which have worsened food shortages: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-46-the-not-so-benevolent-billionaire-part-ii-bill-gates-in-africa
There’s no reason to assume that he could not be profitting from the charity work his foundation does. The motto of philanthrocapitalism is “doing well by doing good,” not merely doing good. When your concept of philanthropy includes things like opening countries to global markets, doing well becomes much easier.
I guess if you mean “lifetime health insurance for veterans” that’s technically true, but nobody had that. Healthcare, to the extent it was available at all, simply wasn’t organized the same way.
But it’s not true that healthcare wasn’t a military expense. Wounded and disabled soldiers were taken care of as best as they could be, at least in the early empire. There were army surgeons, for example, and medically discharged troopers would receive their pensions early.
I’m not sure I was clear, but I was just trying to point out that the $2.4 trillion figure for the whole umpteen year long Iraq debacle isn’t necessarily a very good proxy for what kind of cash you’d need if you were, say, a supervillain/ambitious Senator thinking about putting together a private team to pillage New Zealand or something. Which I thought was the sort of hypothetical you were after.
The idea being that if we’re trying to figure out the cost of building a private army, things like bullets, and yes, health care, retirement benefits, etc. definitely make sense to include, but a lot of stuff in that specific 2.4 trillion figure are going to line-items like “dam rebuilding” and “diplomatic security”, which might not*. (Even if your long term strategy is conquest — not that you might not want to repair the stuff you broke in your newly acquired country, but you’d probably just loot the country itself to pay for it. Just as the emperors of old did.)
-—
* And at the same time, the 2.4 trillion doesn’t account for a lot of the fixed costs of building an army. Like military academies, or capital ships. It’s just a poor match in both directions.
Truth.
And I suspect it could be persuasively argued that this sort of thing is closer to the modern equivalent of literally raising a private army and conquering Gaul…
@jack lecou
Yeah, I said that poorly. They tried to patch them up, but the relevant dynamic is the change in technology. Just consider what a medical professional in the Punic Wars had in their pack and then consider what current military medicine constitutes. Bigus Checking Accountus could cover the cost of that healthcare pretty easily. Ain’t no way Bill Gates entire fortune covers probably even 6 months of an actual conflict.
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blockquote>I’m not sure I was clear…</blockquote.
Ah, gotcha. I was more focused on Dell’s assertion that he could use his money better than the government could. I used a war – the only sort of collective action Americans seem to respect – as an example to show how absolutely insane the proposition is. If Dell actually wants to accomplish something other than vanity and tax avoidance, he would deep six the charity and pay more taxes.
I think that’s probably fair. The extent that the $2.4 trillion helps the case I was making is just that (1) It is an insane amount of money that cannot be raised by voluntary contributions from billionaires and (2) because Iraq couldn’t really fight back, it’s not hard to imagine a contemporary war costing multiples of what we blew over there.
And, it should go without saying, no one on the left – or even these arrogant ass billionaires – would ever dream of suggesting our military should be funding via voluntary contribution. That cudgel is saved for things like food benefits and health care for kids.
Should say “no one on the right…”
No quibbles there.
If it’s something they think is actually important, they think government should pay for. (Although, interestingly, not necessarily that their taxes should be paid to government first…)
It’s also relevant that the number of causalities in ancient warfare was often staggering, especially if you were on the losing side of the battle (sometimes even if your side “won”). Fighting in melee is not pleasant. And dead soldiers/mercenaries don’t need to be paid, treated, or anything else.
And if they did survive long enough to be paid, it wouldn’t have to be gold that was somehow already in the general’s possession. By the end of a long (and non-disastrous/fatal) campaign, you had probably conquered some new land, and they may be promised a bit of that, as well as perhaps gaining certain rights or citizenship or what have you. And you were pillaging from towns/fields/etc. the whole time, whether or not you were in enemy territory. Those spoils of war didn’t need to be in the general’s bank account from the beginning. You just plain stole it, from anybody with something to steal. That’s what rich/powerful people tend to do. But then you make a big show about how honorable and illustrious you supposedly are.
The last part is true – the state/military wouldn’t even cough up for a funeral, so if you didn’t have an estate, and your buddies didn’t like you, you’d end up pushed into a pit. The idea of survivor benefits didn’t come along until quite recently.
But mortality probably wasn’t as high as you might think.
In the first place, combat casualty rates weren’t necessarily horrific. “Melee” as such would be rare – the battle proper would, whenever possible, be conducted in organized formations with only the front ranks engaged. And they’d be at least partially protected by shields — which would have been reasonably effective (we tend to forget that prior to gunpowder, there was generally much more parity between armor and weapons).
Most of the casualties in a given battle would be suffered not in the formation battle, but by the defeated side, if and when they routed. (And even then, most would survive. They’d be more valuable as slaves or ransom fodder, so outright massacre usually wasn’t profitable.)
There’s also evidence that many wounds in pre-gunpowder warfare – arrow punctures, sword cuts, etc. — were quite survivable. There are a surprising number of ancient and medieval skeletons with multiple layers of healed battle injuries. Many wounds weren’t instantly fatal, and when they weren’t, there was actually a pretty fair chance of healing up. (It helps that less manure on cultivated fields might mean that gangrene and tetanus infections were rarer than in the modern era.)
IIRC, there are estimates that ancient warfare was a fair bit more survivable overall than, say, the Napoleonic equivalent. Worse odds than a modern soldier from a wealthy, well-equipped army, perhaps, but not a death sentence either. (With some exceptions, obviously. Like when well-equipped Romans went against some lightly armored tribe in a one-sided bloodbath, or the unfortunates at disasters like Cannae.)
Yeah. That’s an important point. And one of the critical differences, I think. Wars of conquest were a potentially profitable enterprise, or at least seen to be so. Constant conquest was the fuel that empires like Rome ran on. At least for a while. It’s still all basically a pyramid scheme, of course, so when you inevitably run out of marks, or get tired of hustling, the whole thing collapses.
Nowadays we have private equity takeovers and real estate investment trusts. Progress!
Yes, but if you were in formation before this, fighting with a sword or spear or whatever, then you were not far from them when you started this little race. And you were on foot. If they have cavalry to chase you, archers and such to shoot you, and/or part of their force had flanked you (a typical reason why your side may have routed), then you are not winning this race.
If they want you dead at this point, you will be. If not, then sure, maybe you will survive your wounds, assuming you’re well-armored like Roman legionary or whatever. (However, I was speaking generally about the fate of people in all ancient armies, not only ones like the Roman army, which is a rather exceptional case.)
Well, of course that depends a lot on the circumstances of the fight, the attitudes of the people fighting and some cultural differences. You can say that in theory it seems like a good strategy, but in actual practice, people don’t always go with their best ideas.
I will just note that, if you were sold off as a slave, your former commander is still not paying you for your service in the military. So that point remains. (Is that how Bill Gates would run his own modern military operation? I don’t know.)
Assuming the general escaped and is somehow still in a position to pay a big ransom to get you back, I doubt most were inclined to do that for any old random peon under their command, who they considered their social inferior. Some might be tempted to execute you themselves, if given the opportunity. Many Romans were decimated for much less.
If they’re really looking for manpower, they may just make more empty promises to more mercenaries. Or maybe they’d join the other side, if that seems like a reasonable option. They’re not going out of their way to help you though.
[what a weird strange attractor!]
May I recommend – for the casual history buffs, as opposed to professional historians – Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, specifically the “King of Kings” series:
https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-56-kings-of-kings/
He presents a lot of excellent sources credibly. He is not a historian and doesn’t claim to be, but I find his history podcasts interesting.
I bring it up because that series includes an extended discussion of the nature of ancient battles (this mostly focuses on the Greek-Persian interactions, but a lot was still unknown in Roman days). What’s fascinating is that no one really knows what happened when the lines of fighters met – did they slam into each other? Did they slow down at the last moment and square off in individual confrontations?
He does mention that the vast majority of casualties occurred when one of the sides was fleeing, and also talks about the psychology behind those confrontations.
A bit off topic, but ’twas interesting to me.
Which is why casualties were a lot higher for that side, but it’s not necessarily 100%.
While obviously cavalry and/or flanking/enveloping units would be a problem, the enemy right in front of you is less so. When you decide to run away, you can also drop your own big heavy spear, and shield. Plus heavy armor bits and any other crap you have. You don’t need it anymore, but the guys chasing you still do. At that point, you’ll be able to run a lot faster than them. Or at least that’s the thinking. (Maybe not fast enough, of course, especially with cavalry, but hope springs eternal. If nobody ever thought they’d get away, there probably wouldn’t be routs.)
Sure. But taking prisoners in battle (and then keeping them alive, one way or another) was quite common for Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, etc. The profit from selling hostages as slaves was often one of the big payoffs from a successful campaign. And taking hostages (we might call them POWs – not the same as the high ranking hostages that might be exchanged to guarantee treaties and so forth) was to a degree, also prestige thing for Roman generals, as well as potentially useful for diplomatic leverage, or, if the erstwhile hostages were re-educated and Romanized, might play a role in assimilating client states into the empire.
Obviously not every time – as you say, there are a lot of factors, and massacres weren’t unheard of either. But captives were a thing. And that’s just part of the general point that ancient warfare was not, at least in general, a savage chaotic mess of flashing spears from which only a handful of bloody survivors ever manage to crawl away from at the end. A typical battle might have seen 90%+ of the combatants alive after, at least in some fashion. With even better odds on the winning side. (That’s Krentz’ number for 4th and 5th century hoplite battles, anyway.)
Unless you’re returned as part of a truce, say. Which happened.
Also, it’s the winning side’s survival statistics that you’d want to use to calculate your expected payroll. Obviously if you lose, you’re either dead or have a lot fewer guys to pay, but that doesn’t factor.
Doing that would be like starting a business and saying “well, payroll for N employees is going to be ~$100K a month. But there’s a 50% chance I’ll go bankrupt and have to lay everyone off – that means my expected payroll is just $50K a month!”
Not how it works…
“we would have contributed quite a bit more than a 70 per cent tax rate on my annual income.”
Operative words. Would have.
He didn’t say they did.