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I mean....sure, I guess, if you're only talking about the top 10 or maybe top 200 streamers. My favorite twitch streamer, 'x5_pig' (996th highest earner on twitch) only grossed $186,000 over 24 months, and lives in a fairly HCOL area in Australia. I'm happy to give him $5 or so to help make sure that he continues to stream an EOL game, Starcraft2. Sure, he has other revenue streams as well but I can only imagine the risk he takes by sticking with a game that's been EOL'd. When Blizzard shuts down the servers I imagine he'll have no career left at all and will likely have to start over in a totally different career. I'd be surprised if he could start streaming some other strategy game and maintain enough earnings. I pay him $5/month to help swing his risk-reward balance in favor of continuing to produce the content that I most enjoy vegetating to after my 12 hour day of coding/troubleshooting/collaborating. Sure, he has other revenue streams (YouTube, announcing for major tournaments, etc). But I imagine for him it may be important to earn enough over the 10 year life of Starcraft2 to mostly-retire in case he ends up without a "real" career. In fact, sometimes I wonder whether income tax brackets could potentially include consideration for short-lived high earning careers. Seems it might be slightly broken to tax someone who has a stable $1MM/year income for 30+ years (e.g. car dealership owner) the same % as someone who makes $1MM this year, but next year might be earning $40,000 working at that car dealership (athletes, streamers, windfalls, etc). Seems like it might make sense to allow people to "defer" earnings to future years, as long as income tax is eventually paid in full. This could allow people who unexpectedly earn $1MM for just one year to spread out those earnings over 10 years and pay a more appropriate % as taxes. Not sure what else this could break though, or how much of a problem it really solves vs. other things legislators could be spending time on. |
https://www.ato.gov.au/business/primary-producers/in-detail/...