4 ms·

One thing being a programmer has taught me is to understand a problem if you really want to fix it. Maybe one day I will do a deep dive in politics and economic

One thing being a programmer has taught me is to understand a problem if you really want to fix it. Maybe one day I will do a deep dive in politics and economics. Then I could have real answers and better/more-informed discussions. Looking at this now though I think, okay, there's more of us than them. Let's just take it and figure out how to redistribute it. But I know most of them are probably innocent and goood people. I suspect the real problem is our failed government. Does anyone have any idea how we can solve wealth inequality? Will it happen or will we keep slipping?

adaml_623 7y ago
You just need to tweak the system to make accumulation a bit harder. Currently money attracts more money. It's not rocket science to implement a plan that means that any entity with lots of money needs to work a little harder to retain it and grow. Rich people always say they are smarter and deserve the money. Well that's fine. They'll continue being smarter and continue being rich but it'll just be a bit harder for them. Seems fair to me. P.S. Yes I think a small wealth tax is a good start. Little tweaks
- pizzaparty2 7y ago
  Do you think they can be trapped with rules? Won't they just use loopholes and write laws that benefit themselves? I'm not sure if our current governing system is up to the task.
- zdw 7y ago
  Rich people aren't smarter as a whole - they may be slightly smarter than average but much luckier, which is what the literature supports: https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-lucky https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-lucky What they do have is more luck, either by their location of birth or parentage, being in the right place at the right time, and so on. There's no outsized intrinsic merit to the wealthy, as much as members of that class would prefer to believe. Taxing the lucky to spread the luck around seems like a reasonable and commendable approach.
  - throwawaysea 7y ago
    That HBR article is poorly written and doesn’t support your comment. An example of poor quality - it mentions taller men are more likely to be CEOs, which implies causality but it offers no data or statistical analysis to support such a claim. A simple correlation may warrant investigation into causality but isn’t causal itself. Additionally that entire article is about CEOs and not “the rich”, which are two different categories. The CEO of a well-funded startup isn’t necessarily rich, for example. Most wealthy people I’ve met may have had occasional luck but they’ve also had bad luck. But they are smarter, work harder (more intensely and longer hours), and put themselves in positions to encounter luck/opportunity with high frequency. By and large I’ve observed it to be a result of their innate traits and active decision making. This recent cultural obsession with claiming that merit isn’t real and that meritocracies are a myth is itself a feel-good myth with little basis in reality. Every piece I’ve read with such claims either rests on dubious statistics or pontificates endlessly to ultimately state personal opinion.
    - zdw 7y ago
      Says the throwaway who is ignorant of the etymology of "meritocracy"
- Dumblydorr 7y ago
  "Just need to tweak..." the system was already tweaked during trump's first and only legislative achievement. It was tweaked massively in favor of the wealthy, precisely the opposite of the tweak we "just need" to do.
- mmcconnell1618 7y ago
  > A small wealth tax is a good start. They always start out small, and targeted only to the top x%. Then politicians realize it's easier to tweak the rules and make it apply to just a few more people than it would be to create a whole new tax. Introducing a small wealth tax is the start of a whole new class of taxes. See the history of income tax from a limited wartime thing to a huge a percentage of government revenue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State... I would argue that instead of a wealth tax, a more sensible option would be to look at all the sources of income for very wealthy people that are treated differently than earned income. For example, capital gains tax rates, tax shelters in real estate, and other ways to get around normal tax rates.
- logicchains 7y ago
  People respond to incentives. If you penalise savings and investment, you get less savings and investment, which in the long run makes everybody poorer. The fact is that a good chunk of the population is terrible at impulse control and will just spend however much they have, regardless of what they earn. If you take money from investors and give it to these people, they'll just consume it all. Like how the majority of lottery winners end up blowing through all their money.
- beezle 7y ago
  imo a wealth tax is as close to theft as you can get without actually showing up guns drawn. How many times is society going to "tax" the same money? The wages and compenstation have been taxed. The income from investments have been taxed. The realized gains on any investment have been taxed.
bongobongo 7y ago
This is a solved problem. A solution is already available and has seen many successful deployments all over the world. It’s called progressive taxation. The US tax system is, regardless of its code, in its results regressive.
pytester 7y ago
>Looking at this now though I think, okay, there's more of us than them. Their solution to this is 1) divide and conquer and 2) scapegoating. Which is why a racist boomer robot took your job and gave it to a Chinese millenial mexican illegal immigrant on drugs.
- pizzaparty2 7y ago
  What's funny is I was just thinking this same thing. That is, this last election seemed really divisive! Far more than true differences. When we're fighting we're easier to control.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    We have had the same thing in the UK where the EU barely made it into peoples top ten list of priorities to completely dividing the populace and subsuming every other political issue for the last three years. I'm not totally sure whether it amplified the differences or took the lid off some rather nasty but hidden opinions. Either way the result hasn't been positive.
danaris 7y ago
> But I know most of them are probably innocent and goood people. That's really only true of those whose wealth is entirely inherited. Anyone who made it to the economic top by owning a company in this day and age is statistically nearly certain to have done so by shamelessly exploiting the labor of his workers, for instance.

adaml_623 7y ago

You just need to tweak the system to make accumulation a bit harder. Currently money attracts more money. It's not rocket science to implement a plan that means that any entity with lots of money needs to work a little harder to retain it and grow. Rich people always say they are smarter and deserve the money. Well that's fine. They'll continue being smarter and continue being rich but it'll just be a bit harder for them. Seems fair to me. P.S. Yes I think a small wealth tax is a good start. Little tweaks

pizzaparty2 7y ago
Do you think they can be trapped with rules? Won't they just use loopholes and write laws that benefit themselves? I'm not sure if our current governing system is up to the task.
zdw 7y ago
Rich people aren't smarter as a whole - they may be slightly smarter than average but much luckier, which is what the literature supports: https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-lucky https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-lucky What they do have is more luck, either by their location of birth or parentage, being in the right place at the right time, and so on. There's no outsized intrinsic merit to the wealthy, as much as members of that class would prefer to believe. Taxing the lucky to spread the luck around seems like a reasonable and commendable approach.
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  That HBR article is poorly written and doesn’t support your comment. An example of poor quality - it mentions taller men are more likely to be CEOs, which implies causality but it offers no data or statistical analysis to support such a claim. A simple correlation may warrant investigation into causality but isn’t causal itself. Additionally that entire article is about CEOs and not “the rich”, which are two different categories. The CEO of a well-funded startup isn’t necessarily rich, for example. Most wealthy people I’ve met may have had occasional luck but they’ve also had bad luck. But they are smarter, work harder (more intensely and longer hours), and put themselves in positions to encounter luck/opportunity with high frequency. By and large I’ve observed it to be a result of their innate traits and active decision making. This recent cultural obsession with claiming that merit isn’t real and that meritocracies are a myth is itself a feel-good myth with little basis in reality. Every piece I’ve read with such claims either rests on dubious statistics or pontificates endlessly to ultimately state personal opinion.
  - zdw 7y ago
    Says the throwaway who is ignorant of the etymology of "meritocracy"
Dumblydorr 7y ago
"Just need to tweak..." the system was already tweaked during trump's first and only legislative achievement. It was tweaked massively in favor of the wealthy, precisely the opposite of the tweak we "just need" to do.
mmcconnell1618 7y ago
> A small wealth tax is a good start. They always start out small, and targeted only to the top x%. Then politicians realize it's easier to tweak the rules and make it apply to just a few more people than it would be to create a whole new tax. Introducing a small wealth tax is the start of a whole new class of taxes. See the history of income tax from a limited wartime thing to a huge a percentage of government revenue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State... I would argue that instead of a wealth tax, a more sensible option would be to look at all the sources of income for very wealthy people that are treated differently than earned income. For example, capital gains tax rates, tax shelters in real estate, and other ways to get around normal tax rates.
logicchains 7y ago
People respond to incentives. If you penalise savings and investment, you get less savings and investment, which in the long run makes everybody poorer. The fact is that a good chunk of the population is terrible at impulse control and will just spend however much they have, regardless of what they earn. If you take money from investors and give it to these people, they'll just consume it all. Like how the majority of lottery winners end up blowing through all their money.
beezle 7y ago
imo a wealth tax is as close to theft as you can get without actually showing up guns drawn. How many times is society going to "tax" the same money? The wages and compenstation have been taxed. The income from investments have been taxed. The realized gains on any investment have been taxed.

bongobongo 7y ago

This is a solved problem. A solution is already available and has seen many successful deployments all over the world. It’s called progressive taxation. The US tax system is, regardless of its code, in its results regressive.

pytester 7y ago

>Looking at this now though I think, okay, there's more of us than them. Their solution to this is 1) divide and conquer and 2) scapegoating. Which is why a racist boomer robot took your job and gave it to a Chinese millenial mexican illegal immigrant on drugs.

pizzaparty2 7y ago
What's funny is I was just thinking this same thing. That is, this last election seemed really divisive! Far more than true differences. When we're fighting we're easier to control.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  We have had the same thing in the UK where the EU barely made it into peoples top ten list of priorities to completely dividing the populace and subsuming every other political issue for the last three years. I'm not totally sure whether it amplified the differences or took the lid off some rather nasty but hidden opinions. Either way the result hasn't been positive.

danaris 7y ago

> But I know most of them are probably innocent and goood people. That's really only true of those whose wealth is entirely inherited. Anyone who made it to the economic top by owning a company in this day and age is statistically nearly certain to have done so by shamelessly exploiting the labor of his workers, for instance.