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> It's not a strawman insofar as there are people who literally say exactly that
People oppose billionaires paying low taxes, and the related lack of public in
> It's not a strawman insofar as there are people who literally say exactly that
People oppose billionaires paying low taxes, and the related lack of public investment in bedrock services and infrastructure they need. When a rural area has no hospital, or a city has crumbling roads and transit, yes, people resent enormously wealthy people for whom those are not concerns. People do not, however, oppose their success at building companies that make money.
PG is picking a fight with the least sophisticated form of the anti-billionaire argument (i.e. "billionaires suck"), which is beneath him. I get that it's easier to do that than than argue over how the structural issues that allow massive wealth accumulation also undermine the foundations that markets and societies are built on, but it's really beneath PG to choose such a trite argument to oppose.
> if we just tax Jeff Bezos more then the Water Authority in Flint, MI will somehow become more competent.
That, however, is a strawman. Nobody suggests that at all. People who support more progressive taxation point to things like the New Deal and the strong progressive taxation coupled with public investment in infrastructure and education that propelled the United States forward.
> That, however, is a strawman. Nobody suggests that at all. People who support more progressive taxation point to things like the New Deal and the strong progressive taxation coupled with public investment in infrastructure and education that propelled the United States forward.
You're making that exact argument in fancier words. "strong progressive taxation coupled with public investment in infrastructure" implies that the problem is not enough money. So take more money from people who have lots of money and let the government spend it.
The US spends more per-pupil on education than almost every other country [1], with worse outcomes in most cases. The corrosion inhibitors that would have prevented the Flint water crisis cost $140 per day. That's not a misplaced decimal point. That's One Hundred and Forty dollars. Do we need to revamp the entire US tax system to come up with a 140 bucks? No. The money is there, what's needed is some competence in how it's applied.
[1] https://www.manhattan-institute.org/issues-2020-us-public-school-spending-teachers-pay https://www.manhattan-institute.org/issues-2020-us-public-sc...
Maybe the government has enough money, maybe it doesn't. It's the structural disparity that Jeff Bezos' wealth represents that is the problem. His wealth also gives him disproportionate power to shape the incentives of the government, the economy, and the media narrative. Taxation is the proper remedy for breaking this power. We won't know what's possible until we stop letting barons write the laws.
The general structure is that people are allowed to own the things they make. If you start a company, it belongs to you. Your company might become very valuable and mine might not, which might create some disparity.
There are other systems, like where everybody owns everything, but historically when you allow it so one person can own something that someone else has to create it doesn't work out very well. People don't have any incentive to make things if they can just own things that other people make.
The general structure is that all businesses rely on the government to maintain the courts and enforce contracts, and they are all built upon public commons. Taxation is not theft, pay your share.
Entrepreneurialism is at an all-time low in this low-tax, finance-happy environment, so I don't see how you can conclude that low taxes are good for creativity. It seems like it's been pretty good for concentration - low taxes means more money for acquisitions and buybacks.
I never said taxation was theft or that taxes shouldn't exist. I said that private ownership of property was good for creativity, this is independent of taxation. You can pay taxes and still own things. Indeed, we do.
You seem to be proposing that taxation is an unalloyed good and that more taxation is always better - that all problems are the result of insufficient taxation. Do you have any actual plan for how to spend all this money you propose to collect in taxes, or do you just want to throw more money at the people who are currently doing a bad job with the money they already have?
Serious question: You say that engaging with the least sophisticated form of the argument is beneath him, but if that's the form of the argument he chooses to engage in, is it?
> PG is picking a fight with the least sophisticated form of the anti-billionaire argument (i.e. "billionaires suck"), which is beneath him. I get that it's easier to do that than than argue over how the structural issues that allow massive wealth accumulation also undermine the foundations that markets and societies are built on, but it's really beneath PG to choose such a trite argument to oppose.
PG has good ideas and experience in programming and startups, and some fresh perspectives that I enjoyed reading in the early days of HN. His essays today seem to be devoid of that. I can speculate on the reasons why, but that's not useful. He has a huge following, and like any thought leader they will consider his word as gospel. I just wish he would do better.
>Maybe the government has enough money, maybe it doesn't.
This is exactly the problem I have with this "taxing the wealthy will fix it" arguments.
What happens if it is the latter? What happens if taxing the rich doesn't fix it and actually makes things worse?
>His wealth also gives him disproportionate power to shape the incentives of the government, the economy, and the media narrative.
Disproportionate to what?
>Taxation is the proper remedy for breaking this power.
Why?
>We won't know what's possible until we stop letting barons write the laws.
Again, what if "what's possible" is worse?
Its not some "what if" either, its literally happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_...
Same exact line of thinking too. They figured if they taxed "the rich" they would get more money.
To this day they have probably lost untold amounts because it essentially killed their markets. You would have to do some modeling but all else holding true, they've missed out on decades capital gains taxes that just don't exist anymore because of that FTT.
> What happens if taxing the rich doesn't fix it and actually makes things worse?
How is it going to be worse if Jeff Bezos is worth $50,000,000,000 instead of $180,000,000,000? I don't get it - America doesn't have a Communist party, what are you picturing happening here?
> Disproportionate to what?
Me. If he wants a policy to change, he has lobbyists and the Washington Post. If I want to change a policy I have to spend my whole life building a coalition. That's unacceptable for a democracy or a fair capitalist economy.
Lots of "what if" and narrow examples here, but we've tried this experiment before, in this country. It worked really well! Economic prosperity, a broad middle class — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal. We've also seen some really gruesome examples of what happens when concentrated wealth is allowed to run amok for too long —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I.
Keep nitpicking individual policies, you are missing the bigger picture.
> How is it going to be worse if Jeff Bezos is worth $50,000,000,000 instead of $180,000,000,000?
Hmm, how would it be if Amazon stock dropped in price by 73%? Actually, I think that would be pretty bad. Ironically, least of all for Jeff Bezos. How good would it be for you if your 401k dropped by that much?
Or maybe you're thinking we could just confiscate the stock, or force him to sell it. Sell it to whom? Other billionaires? And do you think this wouldn't have an effect on the stock prices (i.e. people's retirement funds) and availability of capital (i.e. money to pay people's salaries)?
I'd be fine, I'm not that rich. I'm also not that heavily invested in Amazon, so I'd be even more fine.
Again, how will things be worse if Jeff Bezos was worth $50,000,000,000 instead of $180,000,000,000? That's what was supposed - that it would make things worse if we made him pay a fair rate to the American people for helping maintain his wealth.
>How is it going to be worse if Jeff Bezos is worth $50,000,000,000 instead of $180,000,000,000?
on the inverse, how much worse has it gotten since Jeff Bezos went from $50b to $180b?
It keeps coming back to the fact that there is such a focus on "wealth" or whatever.
That's like asking "how is this tax bad if it literally makes more tax revenue?" - the answer is that it will have unforeseen consequences (or even foreseen by a lot).
>what are you picturing happening here?
You're the one even implying its possible, I figured you would have the answer lol
>Me.
Oh, so anyone with more power than you is bad?
What about people that don't even have the privilege of arguing on HN?
>That's unacceptable for a democracy or a fair capitalist economy
Why? I would probably agree there's limits that should be imposed so that anyone can't just push around whatever law they want but at the same time, how else would you suggest these things work?
>Economic prosperity, a broad middle class — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal.
Since we're talking about taxes... I checked out the section called "Tax Policy"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Tax_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Tax_policy
It literally says here:
The bill imposed an income tax of 79% on incomes over $5 million. Since that was an extraordinary high income in the 1930s, the highest tax rate actually covered just one individual—John D. Rockefeller. The bill was expected to raise only about $250 million in additional funds, so revenue was not the primary goal. Morgenthau called it "more or less a campaign document". In a private conversation with Raymond Moley, Roosevelt admitted that the purpose of the bill was "stealing Huey Long's thunder" by making Long's supporters of his own. At the same time, it raised the bitterness of the rich who called Roosevelt "a traitor to his class" and the wealth tax act a "soak the rich tax".
The only other thing is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undistributed_profits_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undistributed_profits_tax
Which essentially only lasted 3 years...
If you're not talking about these things, then I would ask you don't just send a wikipedia link with over 100 subsections lol.
>We've also seen some really gruesome examples of what happens when concentrated wealth is allowed to run amok for too long
How do you reason all these things are "caused by concentrated wealth"?
>Keep nitpicking individual policies, you are missing the bigger picture.
The big picture is made up of individual policies... that is actually my entire point. I gave you clear example of what happens when one fails to remember the big picture.
You gave me links to wikipedia pages covering topics as broad as WWI and left it at that...
> I haven't prescribed what would happen to the money, simply that the rich need to take a haircut to make things more even
Ah, we've reached the crux of the problem. You are not concerned with making things good only with making them even. This is just crab mentality[1]. Someone else has more than you, so you need to pull them down. Or perhaps you've conflated the two and think that if things are even, they will necessarily be good, or at least better than they are when they're uneven. Let me assure you, it is entirely possible for things to become more even and also have everyone be worse off than they were before.
> If you also pursue a more robust, less concentrated economy more generally, you could certainly invest the money in entrepreneurship, small farms, improved IT infrastructure, etc., etc.
Sure, we can invest in those things. We can also pursue policies (like antitrust enforcement) that would naturally result in less inequality without distorting the market by confiscating and destroying wealth when it reaches some arbitrary number.
> Won't somebody please think of the poor billionaire!
I stated early on that Bezos and other billionaires would be the people least hurt by what you're proposing. They're not who I'm concerned about. Bezos doesn't have $180,000,000,000 or however much he's currently worth. He has shares representing about 13% of Amazon. Now they're worth that much. Ten years ago they were worth a lot less. 20 years ago they were practically worthless. It's the same shares. The market just collectively decided they're worth a lot more now. He didn't take anything from you, do you see?
It's not clear when you're proposing that his shares should only be worth $50B instead of $180B whether that you mean you want to take away a portion of them, or just limit how much they can be worth, or what. Generally stocks are priced based on how much money investors think the company will make in the future. In the aggregate, the price of the stock market overall is our belief in how well the economy will do in the future. When you propose that the value of this should be limited, you're proposing that the economy - everyone - should be collectively poorer in the future. This does happen sometimes, we call it recessions, depressions, etc. It generally does not bode well for the poorest people (billionaires are usually fine though).
But hey, who cares if we're all poor right? As long as nobody has any more than anybody else it must necessarily be good.
> Again, we've done this kind of thing before, and the billionaires and their defenders ho-hummed the same tune, and all that happened was the emergence of the middle class and fairly broad economic prosperity.
It's true the New Deal happened and then a strong middle class emerged some years later, that doesn't mean one caused the other. There was a little thing called World War II as well, and the rest of the productive capacity of the industrial world being destroyed with only America left may have contributed to the abundance of high-paying manufacturing jobs, just a little.
> FWIW, there is historical precedent for passing a tax law targeting the single richest person in the country (John D. Rockerfeller at the time).
Yeah, there's a historical precedent for burning witches at the stake too, that doesn't mean it's a good thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
Jeff Bezos' net worth was ~$33,600,000,000 at the beginning of 2017. I would argue things are considerably worse for the average American since then. It's not the wealth, it's the level of inequality that the wealth is indicative of. If every American had healthcare and access to quality education, housing, and food, it would not matter to me how wealthy Jeff Bezos gets. It's about the floor, not the ceiling, but the floor comes first.
> Oh, so anyone with more power than you is bad? What about people that don't even have the privilege of arguing on HN?
Snore. If you really want to reduce things to personal jabs, that's cool I guess. I was using myself as a stand-in for an average person - feel free to substitute any name that makes your heart warm.
> I would probably agree there's limits that should be imposed so that anyone can't just push around whatever law they want but at the same time, how else would you suggest these things work?
Sever the links between money and political power. Limit private ownership of news organizations. Take away the tools that are being abused.
> Since we're talking about taxes... I checked out the section called "Tax Policy"
Social Security taxes and Medicare Taxes; and most New Deal programs were financed by the Revenue Act of 1932 [1] passed in the year FDR was campaigning on the New Deal. Again, I didn't realize you were going to be a pendant, otherwise I would have linked more specifically. My b.
> How do you reason all these things are "caused by concentrated wealth"?
Slavery was propagated by the concentrated wealth of the southern aristocracy. They rebelled when they felt that their wealth was threatened. Similarly, in Europe, World War 1 was a war of prestige and conquest fought between a bunch of wealthy (largely related) families who had built huge empires.
> The big picture is made up of individual policies... that is actually my entire point. I gave you clear example of what happens when one fails to remember the big picture.
You mocked me a bit and told me I should have the answers, but I didn't see any clear examples. You are wrong about the first point - you can nitpick implementations and individual policies all day. I'm not claiming that 100% of policies that tax the wealthy are good, or will succeed. The big picture is important because it abstracts those smaller points away - the bigger picture is that inequality is driving our societal issues, and taxing the wealthy is an obvious, primary way to help remedy that. Talking about a Swedish wealth tax from 1990 is a joke.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1932 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1932