Bill Gates accuses Elon Musk of “killing” children with DOGE-led USAID cuts

"The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one."

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[SixDegrees]

Every tagline and caption mentioning Musk can now standardize their text as "Elon Musk, Baby Killer".

 

[SixDegrees]

Two million children will die unnecessarily over the next 5 years because of Trump/Musk's cuts to HIV reduction and vaccination programs.

That's US sanctioned Genocide. About a third of the number of people killed during the Holocaust.

Let those figures sink in as multi-millionaires and billionaires enjoy their next round of tax cuts.

I despised Gates in the 90s but there's no denying his philanthropy is peerless. Thank you Mr. Gates for distributing your wealth to those in need.

So, the aid cuts are definitely distressing and wrong, and will cause needless suffering. But you're making the same mistake Trump makes when it comes to economics and tariffs by assuming that the situation is static, that the loss or gain won't change behavior in any way. Economics - and pretty much all aspects of human society - are dynamic IRL. Changes, particularly big changes, will induce their own responses. Tariffs won't bring in as much money as Trump states, because among many other things people will shift their spending away from newly-increased prices. And the rest of the world won't sit by and ignore the sudden loss of foreign medical aid (or any other sort of aid) and other sources of funding will come forward. Neither response will keep things exactly as they've always been, but in both cases the results won't be as beneficent or dire as a static, never-changing interpretation would suggest.

Two million die if nothing else is done by anyone. But that isn't a likely outcome. In fact, for all the shit Trump is heaping on China, it would surprise me if China didn't step up and ameliorate this issue if only to broaden their growing hegemony over Asia and Africa.

 

[SixDegrees]

Will Gates Do Something about Trump? or will he let his hundreds of billions in philanthropy go to waste?

This isn't a zero-sum game. The good that Gates is doing isn't negated by the bad others do.

 

[SixDegrees]

Top tax rate in the 50s was 90%.

For income, anyway. The wealthy have moved well beyond things like tawdry income, though; they're much, much happier paying capital gains taxes at 15%.

Treating capital gains as ordinary income would solve a lot of problems. Fine with me if they want to carve out a smallish exemption - say, $2 million or so - for homeowners as a one-time deal. But without a severe cap it's extremely detrimental and destabilizing.

 

[SixDegrees]

why is there not a single good guy in his [Elmo] circle who will put an end to this madness?

Cult leaders are adept at selecting compliant followers to populate their bubbles with.

 

[SixDegrees]

He's rich enough to be surrounded by sycophants and narcissistic enough that he wouldn't listen to anyone who tells him no.

And bodyguards. Apparently, during his rare visits to Twitter headquarters, bathrooms were cordoned off and cleared when he had to pee, following a quick security sweep with guards posted at the door until he was finished. He knows very well he's at risk. It's unlikely anyone ever gets within 20 yards of him without getting stopped and frisked.

 

[SixDegrees]

Wealth tax doesn't make a lot of sense; for one, it means double/triple taxation (presumably you're not thinking of canceling income taxes & property taxes?), and it's quite difficult to calculate, since you need to assess the FMV of any property a person has (down to every object they own) every year.
As a result, very few countries still have wealth taxes (5 in the OECD).

An estate tax makes much more sense -- you only need to calculate it once, when a person dies, and it's when you need to assess the estate value's anyway in order to determine how to divvy up the estate among the heirs.
Of course, that needs to be combined with closing various loopholes and tightening exemptions, but is doable; the max US Federal estate tax used to be 70% as late as 1981 (40% today).

Meh. It's not hard to come up with a simple formula. We already do this for property taxes, which are wealth taxes. The formula usually doesn't reflect true market value, but it's simple and consistent, and property taxes are common. Deciding what to count as wealth might be a bit trickier, but also not that hard.

Estate taxes are OK but do need some fairly low level for exemptions so small family businesses don't get wipe out - say maybe $5 million before the tax kicks in or so.

 

[SixDegrees]

I think she's assuming Elon Musk has functional empathy, and is just ignorant of the suffering.

IMO, the real problem is Musk's lack of actual empathy. He has to at least be semi aware, that he is going to increase suffering (and deaths) of those in precarious situations.

He just doesn't care. At all. Travelling would not change that.

Worse, I think he actually enjoys inflicting it.