Survivor 14

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Strangler Lewis

Frankly, I'm surprised Survivor allowed the deal given that agreements to split winnings are prohibited. Yes, people have horsetraded votes during the final immunity challenges, given up family visits, etc., but giving somebody a $30-40,000 prize is a whole different animal.

Meant to address this. Starting last season, they explicitly gave the winner of the car the option to give it away to someone else. That, in my mind, makes it a de-facto bargaining chip.

[mousepod]

Nope - the last two standing in the endurance challenge were Dreamz and Yau.

I hear what you're saying - and if Dreamz hadn't been playing the sympathy card since day one, I'd agree with you. The fact that Dreamz constantly talked about how he was "basically homeless" invited game play around that "fact".

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by mousepod

I hear what you're saying - and if Dreamz hadn't been playing the sympathy card since day one, I'd agree with you. The fact that Dreamz constantly talked about how he was "basically homeless" invited game play around that "fact".

Totally. And he played it right up to the end. There was a point before the final tribal, I'm forgetting exactly when, that he said he wasn't playing the sympathy card, that he told his life story simply because that's who he was and how he got to know people. But then right off the bat with his opening statement he said, "You all know my story, so you know I deserve the money." That was lame.

[Alex]

So, does Yau get to keep the truck after all or does Dreamz still get it?

I don't watch the show (though I've read episode recaps as they cycle through the TVgasm blog) so I don't know if Dreamz is a self-proclaimed nickname or an imposed one. If the former, I just want to say that anybody who would take such a nickname deserves neither a home nor to win Survivor. They need to live a life of squalor as an example to any impressionable young people who might otherwise follow a path towards a really stupid nickname.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Alex Stroup

So, does Yau get to keep the truck after all or does Dreamz still get it?

Yau could have kept the truck, but he has said that he's still giving to Dreamz.

I don't watch the show (though I've read episode recaps as they cycle through the TVgasm blog) so I don't know if Dreamz is a self-proclaimed nickname or an imposed one..

I think he had the nickname beforehand. But it's hard to be sure. It seemed to me like the producers have started to encourage nicknames in response to the popularity of nicknames on other reality shows. The survivors seemed to be going out of their way to give nicknames to each other and, more annoyingly, their alliances. But with Dreamz, it did seem like he came pre-nicked.

[Strangler Lewis]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Yau could have kept the truck, but he has said that he's still giving to Dreamz.

Yet another example of why life--if reality TV is life--is a law school hypo. If the truck is really Yau's, and he gives it to Dreamz, he has to pay both income tax and gift tax on it. I would think that once they made the deal, they huddled with the Survivor producers to establish that Dreamz had officially earned the truck for income tax purposes. If it had not been established that the truck was Dreamz's, I think we would have heard about it. Like many people who win such things, Dreamz will probably have to sell it to pay the taxes on it unless he hits a post-Survivor windfall of paid appearances. Or unless the producers promise to pay his taxes, like they did for Richard Hatch.

Yau could, of course, sue Dreamz for breach of contract for either the value of the truck or the difference between fourth and third place. It would probably be too speculative to say his damages were a million dollars. However, based on his comments last night, it sounds like he's not going to.

[Prudence]

Of course, if the producers pay his taxes, wouldn't he then have to pay taxes on that payment, too?

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Prudence

Of course, if the producers pay his taxes, wouldn't he then have to pay taxes on that payment, too?

It's a tricky bit of accounting, but when I was given an ipod as a bonus at work, they added the cost of the ipod + a bit more $ to my salary that week. Then they took withholding out, then they deducted the cost of the ipod post-withholding, resulting in the same amount of take home pay. I tried to explain this to a coworker, but he still thinks they took $250 out of his salary because all he sees is the "-$250" line on the pay stub.

I wouldn't be surprised if that's what they do with the truck, and possibly even with the $1 million (though probably less likely with the $1 million as the taxes on that are pretty hefty). I didn't really follow the Richard Hatch case, but it's entirely possible that they gave him a large enough sum that after taxes would leave him with an even million and he read (or pretended to read it) as, "we've already paid your taxes," rather than, "We've given you enough money to cover your taxes, but you have to take care of actually paying them).

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Prudence

Of course, if the producers pay his taxes, wouldn't he then have to pay taxes on that payment, too?

Yes, but then they just pay more recursively until it works out to the appropriate amount. This is the way sales tax works in Hawai'i. Hawai'i's sales tax is actually an exise tax (a tax on business income) that business just pass directly to the consumer (and ends up looking like a sales tax). So they tack on 4%, which is then a 4% increase in business income, so that 4% is taxed at 4%, which is passed on to the consumer and becomes income which is taxed at 4% and so on until 4% is a very small amount.

The sales tax is itself taxed. So the 4% (when I was there) exise tax is really something like 4.17% when it gets added to a purchase price.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Alex Stroup

The sales tax is itself taxed. So the 4% (when I was there) exise tax is really something like 4.17% when it gets added to a purchase price.

Except that due to the properties of supply and demand, the purchase price ends up being lower than it would if there weren't a tax for any goods that are not perfectly inelastic (namely, everything). So something that would cost $10 in a non-taxed world would not cost $10.42 (which would leave the seller with $10 revenue after the exise), it would be somewhere in between $10 and $10.42. As long as there is elasticity in demand, the producer will always share some of the cost of tax with the consumer.