All I'm mad about is I don't have access to the same sorts of instruments. I pay an _excessive_ amount of taxes that return at like a 0.0001% for society. I could make 12% on them and give 5% directly at a much better rate.
Charity is not a replacement for a functioning government. Assuming you're in the US, it's hard to argue that you're not paying far less than you should be, given how quickly we're running up the deficit.
I'm of the opinion that we should have a constitutional amendment which limits debt to gdp to 80%. If the CBO indicates we will breach that, congress has 8 years to get it back under control before the CBO has the authority to ban officials from public office if it's determined they voted in favor of the legislation responsible for the breach. No doubt there are problems around that. Someone smarter than me can fill in the holes.
There’s a big problem with that. The “deficit” is just the liquid financial savings of the private sector.
The correct approach is to require all those people worried about the “Debt” to hand over any liquid savings they have in bank accounts or retirement funds. Since that is what is causing it by accounting identity.
After all if they consider it to be such a problem they should put their money where their mouth is.
Read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton to understand how the system actually works.
Amusingly a larger deficit means government has more space to spend, not less. People saving means they are not spending which means resources are left underemployed.
Debt to GDP is not a relevant concern in a free floating currency has Japan has demonstrated for decades.
My charitable budget mostly goes to $50k or so of annual healthcare spending, between premiums, copays, and whatnot. I've yet to find a charity willing to cover it, which is part of why I'm pretty skeptical about scaling that approach up even further.
If you're giving 11% to genuinely charitable causes, good for you! But you're very, very much an outlier.
I don’t see maintaining a church and staff as the same as maintaining a charitable clinic and its staff. As such, I don’t count a tithed dollar as necessarily equivalent as a dollar given to a high quality secular charity.
There is no risk free investment that will return you 12%. In a year where you are down 30% are you still contributing 5% on initial capital?
If not, you are just constructing an instrument where you only pass through downside risk
For all practical purposes you can - and the world broadly does - consider e.g. TBills to be risk free (or take your favourite interbank lending rate etc etc).
The US government has confiscated value from T Bills before.
The government used to sell two bond types - dollar bonds that paid off in dollars, and gold bonds that paid off in gold. The gold bonds were safer and hence paid a lower interest rate.
Enter FDR. FDR decided to pay off the gold bond holders in dollars, not gold, and since the value of gold vs dollars had diverged substantially, FDR confiscated the difference.
That was the end of the phrase "sound as a dollar". Gee, I wonder why nobody says that anymore!
The largest risk of TBills is that inflation will shrink their value, and with catastrophic deficits that is a very, very real risk. That's why I don't invest in bonds or any investment that is denoted in dollars.
>>That's why I don't invest in bonds or any investment that is denoted in dollars.
Most investments seem to eventually (?) denominate into USD equivalents, especially if you live in the US. Do you mean hard(er) assets like real estate or commodities (which also leaves me puzzled because they’re still typically denoted in an underlying fiat currency and especially USD if they’re domestic assets).
Being "denoted in dollars" means the returns are a specified number of dollars. Stocks, on the other hand, are "denoted in shares of the company" and the returns are the change in value of the company.
The share value is price x shares, so there’s an effective dollar numeraire.
It’s easy to imagine a well performing stock that neverless loses due to a currency shock. Indeed this is why one would typically hedge currency risk if trading a name outside of accounting currency
This is heterodox opinion to modern financial theory. You’re welcome to hold it, I’m not interested in trying to convince you otherwise — I think it undermines the larger point I’m trying to make in an unhelpful way.
That sucks, sounds like you might have to try to improve the system that you live in. It’s a shame that most people that live in a society have to concern themselves with making things better instead of gambling and promising some of the proceeds to their pet causes
If you're making that 12% exploitatively (which most ludicrously-high-interest "investments" are), that's a net harm for society. (A smaller-scale example, to aid with intuition: there once was a lung cancer charity which funded the promotion of cigarettes, to increase the dividends of cigarette stocks, so they had more resources with which to help lung cancer victims.)
Money isn't real: it's an abstraction. What it's an abstraction for, on the other hand, is very real. Don't confuse the map and the territory.
Higher returns always come with higher risk. This is not exploitation, nor do high risk investments harm society.
Musk, for example, invested hundreds of millions into Tesla, his entire fortune. Soon afterwards, he was within hours of personal and business bankruptcy.
SpaceX also was one explosion away from total bankruptcy.
Say what you will about Musk, the man has a lot of guts. Without those guts, there'd be no Tesla and no SpaceX and no Starlink.
How is 'exploitatively' defined? I have seen it used as 'literally anything that makes a profit is exploitation by definition' crap used unironically often enough that 'exploitation' itself has become a major red flag (no pun intended). Those users of such definitions just love those sorts of tautologies disguised as logic as it makes for a nice and orderly world view to be able to make baseless and frankly, batshit insane assumptions. Like 12% returns being only possible through net harm to society. It is perfectly normal for a successful small business to have a ROI of 25% to 40%.
Right: a successful small business where people are doing actual work can have a potentially-unbounded ROI. "Money makes money" schemes, on the other hand… the situations where access to money is genuinely worth 12% returns to someone are slim. (If it's a high-risk venture, then that's not 12% returns in expectation: "loan that we'll write off if your venture fails" is providing actual value, under certain circumstances.)
Scams, cons, grifts, and destructive exploitation of common resources, on the other hand? Those can get massive numbers of monies out for every single number of money in. So that's where my mind goes, when someone talks about "make 12% on [a pile of cash]".
