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Granted. I was a bit sensationalist, but from the politically charged landscape in which I exist, it seems as though the rich get to arbitrarily dictate transfe

Granted. I was a bit sensationalist, but from the politically charged landscape in which I exist, it seems as though the rich get to arbitrarily dictate transfers which directly benefit them without much in the way of taking on the empirical burden for justifying those transfer. Put another way, what if in the U.S. the recent tax bill would have been put forward as a trial in which some randomly selected number of large businesses were selected to have their tax rate reduced? We could then examine if those businesses were more inclined to increase hiring, extend additional benefits to their employees, or become in any way better "engines of growth". Why must it be the poor who must wait for their lottery ticket from the heavens?

dang 9y ago
> I was a bit sensationalist, but from the politically charged landscape in which I exist We all exist in that landscape, so we all need to have the discipline not to be sensationalist when commenting about it on HN, or we won't have much of an HN left to comment on. Could you please help us with that? The spirit of the site is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.
T2_t2 9y ago
The problem is pragmatism. The tax cuts that were proposed in the USA could actually be a massive windfall, because currently a lot of companies (and individuals) keep profits offshore, so pay no tax at all. The USA is different to most countries in that it has almost all the world's biggest companies. The number one way to maximise US tax revenues is to reduce the incentives to offshore cash, and even a small change in the monetary strategy could have huge results. Contrast that with Iceland (~330K people) and their best way to maximise tax revenue is to sell their cheap geothermal power to aluminium smelters and have them pay virtually no company taxes, as taxing the wage earners the smelters generate is their best bet. Pragmatism is often extremely ugly.

dang 9y ago

> I was a bit sensationalist, but from the politically charged landscape in which I exist We all exist in that landscape, so we all need to have the discipline not to be sensationalist when commenting about it on HN, or we won't have much of an HN left to comment on. Could you please help us with that? The spirit of the site is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.

T2_t2 9y ago

The problem is pragmatism. The tax cuts that were proposed in the USA could actually be a massive windfall, because currently a lot of companies (and individuals) keep profits offshore, so pay no tax at all. The USA is different to most countries in that it has almost all the world's biggest companies. The number one way to maximise US tax revenues is to reduce the incentives to offshore cash, and even a small change in the monetary strategy could have huge results. Contrast that with Iceland (~330K people) and their best way to maximise tax revenue is to sell their cheap geothermal power to aluminium smelters and have them pay virtually no company taxes, as taxing the wage earners the smelters generate is their best bet. Pragmatism is often extremely ugly.