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> Tax the wealthy. Please don't tax the wealthy. I have a couple friends who are in top 0.1%. They have enough money for the rest of their lives. If you start

> Tax the wealthy. Please don't tax the wealthy. I have a couple friends who are in top 0.1%. They have enough money for the rest of their lives. If you start taking money from them, they will simply stop working and start spending more time with friends and family. The correct goal is not to take money from the rich (which can be achieved by taxing them; this is what Bolsheviks did and it resulted in millions of deaths from starvation), but to get rid of poverty. Taxing the rich won't help with poverty. Because if even if top 1% will be paying 100% taxes and still continue to work, total government tax income will be increased by 20% or so (that's from richest 1% get 30% of income). That's not a lot, and these money will be spent inefficiently by the government (as government always does). The government already has more than enough money, but it spends it inefficiently, and this issue need to be addressed (by fixing the system), for example: * fix gerrymandering * replace FPTP voting with some variant of ranked choice voting * increase the limits of the candidate money collection (currently they are very limited for the candidates, but unlimited for parties) So when more independent or less dependent on parties candidates are elected, more issues can be fixed, for example: * fix many regulations which drives hospital prices up * fix regulations which makes lives of ISP monopolies too easy and so on.

pope_meat 5y ago
Tell your 0.1 friends to focus on all those points you made, and quick, because they will be the scapegoat for the mob. Things are getting bad enough to where "cutting ones nose to spite the face" starts to make sense, redistributing the misery the rich have insulated themselves from. Just my feeling on the situation.
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  > Tell your 0.1 friends to focus on all those points you made They know it already, most of my friends are classical liberals/conservatives. > they will be the scapegoat for the mob You are probably in the top 10% (as most people here on HN), so a lot of people here might become the same scapegoat. > Things are getting bad enough to where "cutting ones nose to spite the face" I'm not sure things are getting bad. Poorest people now are more rich than poorest people 30 years ago. Like in the US now average electrician makes 70K a year. That's a lot of money. And anyone can be electrician. They say income inequality raises, which is bad, but it might be not that bad, because common inequality measures do not includes the costs of free stuff given to poorest people from the government, like better free hospitals which they can use in case of emergency. > starts to make sense redistributing the misery the rich have insulated themselves from. As I said, taxing the wealthiest (especially with extremely high taxes like proposed by certain "liberal" activists) will not make poor people more rich. It will make poor people even more poor because of economic recession. Different measures are needed.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    I'm in the bottom 50% of the population money wise, but you're right, HN is definitely full of people in the top 10%, and so literally shortwire in their brains when I say something like "it's bad enough to where cutting ones nose to spite the face is starting to make sense" Because from your position it seems absurd. From mine it seems like the only move left to make.
    - asteroidbelt 5y ago
      > it's bad enough to where cutting ones nose to spite the face is starting to make sense What is the evidence that now is worse than say 30 years ago for the bottom 50%? It is perceived that it is worse now. But is it objectively worse?
      - pope_meat 5y ago
        Cost of education Cost of housing Cost of healthcare went up. Income went down. So I guess you're right, objectively things are much better, it's just my perception of paying 80% of my income to rent that's the problem.
        asteroidbelt 5y ago
        > Cost of education went up If you need high education, you just take credit, and pay for it with your salary which is much higher than it was 30 years ago. And if you think that you won't be able to pay for credit because it's not possible to find a decent job with liberal arts degree, then probably you don't need that education. > Cost of housing went up I suspect that's because construction workers are paid well now. So instead of studying classical literature in high school, maybe study bricklaying. > Cost of healthcare went up This is the issue, but "taxing the rich" won't solve it. It need to be properly regulated. The fact that insulin costs $100 has nothing to do with taxes for the rich people. > Income went down Seems like it is not true. There's a chart: inflation adjusted median household income. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N It goes up. > perception of paying 80% of my income to rent that's the problem Man, I don't know your situation. Sometimes people pay for something they shouldn't. Like buying a shiny new car while old car only need occasional repairs, or buying top new iphones while cheapest android is 1/10 of that. When I was young I rented a flat which costed me about 70% of income, while I could rent a room for 30% of my income, or a flat for 30% of income and two hours commute. But it didn't matter because I was young, and I would not do that now. If that's your case, you may need to reconsider your worldview. If it's not, than I don't really know your situation to comment on that.
ineptech 5y ago
> If you start taking money from them, they will simply stop working and start spending more time with friends and family. This model of the world assumes that "rich person" means someone with high income and "raise taxes on the rich" means raising the top marginal income tax rate. I don't think either is true and I struggle to imagine how you could be familiar with the financial details of the .1% and think otherwise. This model cannot survive much contact with actual rich people. People rich enough to be included in "tax the rich" mostly get their money from capital gains, and I don't believe that any rich person anywhere would ever decide not to invest their capital because the capital gains rate is too high. Even if capital gains were taxed at 90%, what else would you do with capital? Dollars sitting in a checking account cannot "spend more time with friends and family".
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  > People rich enough to be included in "tax the rich" mostly get their money from capital gains OK, so we are talking now not about income tax, but about capital gains tax? That's quite a different topic. But, also, no, capital gains tax should not be increased. Because you cannot become rich by investing into index. You become rich by founding a company while working 16 hours a day and getting a large share of it. And after many years of that work with lots of failures and a lot of personal losses, you become rich. Some people try this path, many fail. If you tell them you can continue doing that, but in the end you will get slightly more than a regular dude working 8/5, they will think, why bother. Alternatively, you can become more rich by investing your personal money into something risky (like buy a share of your friend garage startup). Again, if cap gains tax will eat your gains, you won't do it next time. Why bother, better buy a condo and wait for it to grow. Increase cap gains tax, and you won't have new trillion cap companies in the US.
  - ineptech 5y ago
    This is kind of all over the place and riddled with non-sequiters; by way of response I will simply point out that we could raise the capital gains rate 5% tomorrow, and it would still be lower than it was when Amazon and Google were founded.
8note 5y ago
If you're rich enough to be in the 0.1%, it's not your work that's making you wealthy, it's other people's. More likely, you've inherited that wealth from somebody who's not working anymore. All the same, if they're still working when they don't have to, they're doing it for something other than money, so I'd bet that they would stay on anyways
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  > If you're rich enough to be in the 0.1%, it's not your work that's making you wealthy, it's other people's. Not exactly. The work is not just to paint the walls, but also organize the work of people who paint the walls, and that's much complex work (I'll avoid saying "hard"). I have worked with many talented managers directly and indirectly (some of them had income much higher than mine), and I know for sure that if I was swapped with them, I would screw it up. Thanks to them I and a lot of other people have the work. They deserve their pay. It is akin saying airline pilots do not deserve their high pay because without people cleaning the planes it wouldn't be possible to operate an airline. Or as the anecdote says: tapping with the hammer: $2. Knowing where to tap: $9998. Or let me put it another way. If you think you can do the work of people who get 0.1% income, why don't you do go and do their work, what stops you? > More likely, you've inherited that wealth from somebody who's not working anymore. That's not true. Quick google-fact: among people with $30 or more of wealth, 67.7% were self-made, 23.7% had a combination of inherited and self-created wealth, and only 8.5% completely inherited their wealth.
- coryrc 5y ago
  Eventually you must realize the assets, either you spend them or you die with them. We let the ultra-wealthy "spend" them in ways they don't have to pay tax, and we let them pass then on untaxed after death through tax-sheltered trusts.
coryrc 5y ago
"The correct goal is not to take money from the rich ... but to get rid of poverty." I mostly agree with you on this point. However, we can't do that without reforming the tax system. For example, Seattle is one of the most regressive places to live in the country, people in the lowest brackets pay 30%+ in local taxes but people over six figures pay 2.8%. People in single-family zones (wealthy) are slowing the supply increase in apartments which is allowing prices to rise. You can't get rid of poverty without going through the wealthy.
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  > People in single-family zones (wealthy) are slowing the supply increase in apartments which is allowing prices to rise. Seattle has not enough homes? Just build them. Give tax credits to construction companies, give tax credits to construction workers, give land for free to construction companies, ease regulations, reroute budget to transportation, and you will have a lot of new homes quickly. If you rob the rich to punish them for their hard work, you won't have more homes. You will have fewer rich people. (Also, it is rich people who drive construction of new homes, not poor people.) > You can't get rid of poverty without going through the wealthy. Yes you can, and there is a ton of ways to do that. For example, medical insurance is expensive. Increasing the taxes for the rich won't make it cheap. But better regulations (anti-monopolies, easier licenses, transparent prices etc) will make it cheaper. What else is too expensive? It can be fixed similarly.
imtringued 5y ago
>The correct goal is not to take money from the rich (which can be achieved by taxing them; this is what Bolsheviks did and it resulted in millions of deaths from starvation), but to get rid of poverty. Getting rid of poverty requires taxing money (and taxing nothing else). This doesn't have anything to do with redistribution schemes. Rather, the act of hoarding money in a 0% interest environment is regressive and makes it harder for all other participants to do the same. When everyone saves their money, it gets harder to save money because deflation will reduce your income and thus ability to save money. New money must be created to catch up with savings demand but all the demand for loans and mortgages has been saturated at this point. The only entity that can take on further debt is the US government but it refuses all the time, forcing unconventional monetary policy at the last remaining institution that actually cares about the economy. Remember why the Fed was founded? To prevent irresponsible government spending and fight the resulting inflation. It was not created to create inflation, that's the governments job. Just think about a simplified real economy that produces housing and food but nothing else. At some point you have more housing and food than you know what to do with and people stop building and making food leading people to quit their job but also losing their ability to buy food and housing. The village chief (the government) then decides to just build a luxurious house for himself with the help of the surplus workers because he doesn't want to see them starve. This is an allocation problem. We expect everyone to pay for their own living expenses but we do not guarantee that they can do so. We cannot send them welfare and be done with it because the busy people building the few housing that is actually needed feel like they should also get rewarded for simply existing (more likely they get angry at the welfare recipients). Because we want everyone to work to earn money, we must create bullshit government jobs that ensure full employment. Only when we run into scarcity of materials and full employment do we need to cut back on spending and an institution forcing the government to cut spending already exists, it's called the Federal Reserve. Wouldn't it be better if we didn't have to rely on our politicians to do the right thing and instead we have a mechanism that kicks the private sector in the balls when it is asleep? Absolutely but it would require the above mentioned "wealth tax" on bank accounts with large amounts of money. I don't care what they do with the money, heck, I don't even want them to pay the wealth tax because then the government has to come up with a way to spend the money, defeating the purpose of the wealth tax. They can buy stocks and pass the hot potato to someone else until they find somebody who actually wants to spend the money.

pope_meat 5y ago

Tell your 0.1 friends to focus on all those points you made, and quick, because they will be the scapegoat for the mob. Things are getting bad enough to where "cutting ones nose to spite the face" starts to make sense, redistributing the misery the rich have insulated themselves from. Just my feeling on the situation.

asteroidbelt 5y ago
> Tell your 0.1 friends to focus on all those points you made They know it already, most of my friends are classical liberals/conservatives. > they will be the scapegoat for the mob You are probably in the top 10% (as most people here on HN), so a lot of people here might become the same scapegoat. > Things are getting bad enough to where "cutting ones nose to spite the face" I'm not sure things are getting bad. Poorest people now are more rich than poorest people 30 years ago. Like in the US now average electrician makes 70K a year. That's a lot of money. And anyone can be electrician. They say income inequality raises, which is bad, but it might be not that bad, because common inequality measures do not includes the costs of free stuff given to poorest people from the government, like better free hospitals which they can use in case of emergency. > starts to make sense redistributing the misery the rich have insulated themselves from. As I said, taxing the wealthiest (especially with extremely high taxes like proposed by certain "liberal" activists) will not make poor people more rich. It will make poor people even more poor because of economic recession. Different measures are needed.
- pope_meat 5y ago
  I'm in the bottom 50% of the population money wise, but you're right, HN is definitely full of people in the top 10%, and so literally shortwire in their brains when I say something like "it's bad enough to where cutting ones nose to spite the face is starting to make sense" Because from your position it seems absurd. From mine it seems like the only move left to make.
  - asteroidbelt 5y ago
    > it's bad enough to where cutting ones nose to spite the face is starting to make sense What is the evidence that now is worse than say 30 years ago for the bottom 50%? It is perceived that it is worse now. But is it objectively worse?
    - pope_meat 5y ago
      Cost of education Cost of housing Cost of healthcare went up. Income went down. So I guess you're right, objectively things are much better, it's just my perception of paying 80% of my income to rent that's the problem.
      - asteroidbelt 5y ago
        > Cost of education went up If you need high education, you just take credit, and pay for it with your salary which is much higher than it was 30 years ago. And if you think that you won't be able to pay for credit because it's not possible to find a decent job with liberal arts degree, then probably you don't need that education. > Cost of housing went up I suspect that's because construction workers are paid well now. So instead of studying classical literature in high school, maybe study bricklaying. > Cost of healthcare went up This is the issue, but "taxing the rich" won't solve it. It need to be properly regulated. The fact that insulin costs $100 has nothing to do with taxes for the rich people. > Income went down Seems like it is not true. There's a chart: inflation adjusted median household income. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N It goes up. > perception of paying 80% of my income to rent that's the problem Man, I don't know your situation. Sometimes people pay for something they shouldn't. Like buying a shiny new car while old car only need occasional repairs, or buying top new iphones while cheapest android is 1/10 of that. When I was young I rented a flat which costed me about 70% of income, while I could rent a room for 30% of my income, or a flat for 30% of income and two hours commute. But it didn't matter because I was young, and I would not do that now. If that's your case, you may need to reconsider your worldview. If it's not, than I don't really know your situation to comment on that.

ineptech 5y ago

> If you start taking money from them, they will simply stop working and start spending more time with friends and family. This model of the world assumes that "rich person" means someone with high income and "raise taxes on the rich" means raising the top marginal income tax rate. I don't think either is true and I struggle to imagine how you could be familiar with the financial details of the .1% and think otherwise. This model cannot survive much contact with actual rich people. People rich enough to be included in "tax the rich" mostly get their money from capital gains, and I don't believe that any rich person anywhere would ever decide not to invest their capital because the capital gains rate is too high. Even if capital gains were taxed at 90%, what else would you do with capital? Dollars sitting in a checking account cannot "spend more time with friends and family".

asteroidbelt 5y ago
> People rich enough to be included in "tax the rich" mostly get their money from capital gains OK, so we are talking now not about income tax, but about capital gains tax? That's quite a different topic. But, also, no, capital gains tax should not be increased. Because you cannot become rich by investing into index. You become rich by founding a company while working 16 hours a day and getting a large share of it. And after many years of that work with lots of failures and a lot of personal losses, you become rich. Some people try this path, many fail. If you tell them you can continue doing that, but in the end you will get slightly more than a regular dude working 8/5, they will think, why bother. Alternatively, you can become more rich by investing your personal money into something risky (like buy a share of your friend garage startup). Again, if cap gains tax will eat your gains, you won't do it next time. Why bother, better buy a condo and wait for it to grow. Increase cap gains tax, and you won't have new trillion cap companies in the US.
- ineptech 5y ago
  This is kind of all over the place and riddled with non-sequiters; by way of response I will simply point out that we could raise the capital gains rate 5% tomorrow, and it would still be lower than it was when Amazon and Google were founded.

8note 5y ago

If you're rich enough to be in the 0.1%, it's not your work that's making you wealthy, it's other people's. More likely, you've inherited that wealth from somebody who's not working anymore. All the same, if they're still working when they don't have to, they're doing it for something other than money, so I'd bet that they would stay on anyways

asteroidbelt 5y ago
> If you're rich enough to be in the 0.1%, it's not your work that's making you wealthy, it's other people's. Not exactly. The work is not just to paint the walls, but also organize the work of people who paint the walls, and that's much complex work (I'll avoid saying "hard"). I have worked with many talented managers directly and indirectly (some of them had income much higher than mine), and I know for sure that if I was swapped with them, I would screw it up. Thanks to them I and a lot of other people have the work. They deserve their pay. It is akin saying airline pilots do not deserve their high pay because without people cleaning the planes it wouldn't be possible to operate an airline. Or as the anecdote says: tapping with the hammer: $2. Knowing where to tap: $9998. Or let me put it another way. If you think you can do the work of people who get 0.1% income, why don't you do go and do their work, what stops you? > More likely, you've inherited that wealth from somebody who's not working anymore. That's not true. Quick google-fact: among people with $30 or more of wealth, 67.7% were self-made, 23.7% had a combination of inherited and self-created wealth, and only 8.5% completely inherited their wealth.
coryrc 5y ago
Eventually you must realize the assets, either you spend them or you die with them. We let the ultra-wealthy "spend" them in ways they don't have to pay tax, and we let them pass then on untaxed after death through tax-sheltered trusts.

coryrc 5y ago

"The correct goal is not to take money from the rich ... but to get rid of poverty." I mostly agree with you on this point. However, we can't do that without reforming the tax system. For example, Seattle is one of the most regressive places to live in the country, people in the lowest brackets pay 30%+ in local taxes but people over six figures pay 2.8%. People in single-family zones (wealthy) are slowing the supply increase in apartments which is allowing prices to rise. You can't get rid of poverty without going through the wealthy.

asteroidbelt 5y ago
> People in single-family zones (wealthy) are slowing the supply increase in apartments which is allowing prices to rise. Seattle has not enough homes? Just build them. Give tax credits to construction companies, give tax credits to construction workers, give land for free to construction companies, ease regulations, reroute budget to transportation, and you will have a lot of new homes quickly. If you rob the rich to punish them for their hard work, you won't have more homes. You will have fewer rich people. (Also, it is rich people who drive construction of new homes, not poor people.) > You can't get rid of poverty without going through the wealthy. Yes you can, and there is a ton of ways to do that. For example, medical insurance is expensive. Increasing the taxes for the rich won't make it cheap. But better regulations (anti-monopolies, easier licenses, transparent prices etc) will make it cheaper. What else is too expensive? It can be fixed similarly.

imtringued 5y ago

>The correct goal is not to take money from the rich (which can be achieved by taxing them; this is what Bolsheviks did and it resulted in millions of deaths from starvation), but to get rid of poverty. Getting rid of poverty requires taxing money (and taxing nothing else). This doesn't have anything to do with redistribution schemes. Rather, the act of hoarding money in a 0% interest environment is regressive and makes it harder for all other participants to do the same. When everyone saves their money, it gets harder to save money because deflation will reduce your income and thus ability to save money. New money must be created to catch up with savings demand but all the demand for loans and mortgages has been saturated at this point. The only entity that can take on further debt is the US government but it refuses all the time, forcing unconventional monetary policy at the last remaining institution that actually cares about the economy. Remember why the Fed was founded? To prevent irresponsible government spending and fight the resulting inflation. It was not created to create inflation, that's the governments job. Just think about a simplified real economy that produces housing and food but nothing else. At some point you have more housing and food than you know what to do with and people stop building and making food leading people to quit their job but also losing their ability to buy food and housing. The village chief (the government) then decides to just build a luxurious house for himself with the help of the surplus workers because he doesn't want to see them starve. This is an allocation problem. We expect everyone to pay for their own living expenses but we do not guarantee that they can do so. We cannot send them welfare and be done with it because the busy people building the few housing that is actually needed feel like they should also get rewarded for simply existing (more likely they get angry at the welfare recipients). Because we want everyone to work to earn money, we must create bullshit government jobs that ensure full employment. Only when we run into scarcity of materials and full employment do we need to cut back on spending and an institution forcing the government to cut spending already exists, it's called the Federal Reserve. Wouldn't it be better if we didn't have to rely on our politicians to do the right thing and instead we have a mechanism that kicks the private sector in the balls when it is asleep? Absolutely but it would require the above mentioned "wealth tax" on bank accounts with large amounts of money. I don't care what they do with the money, heck, I don't even want them to pay the wealth tax because then the government has to come up with a way to spend the money, defeating the purpose of the wealth tax. They can buy stocks and pass the hot potato to someone else until they find somebody who actually wants to spend the money.