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If you confiscated all the wealth of billionaires, you’d be able to fund the government for 9 months. We have a spending problem. Not a taxation problem. EDIT

If you confiscated all the wealth of billionaires, you’d be able to fund the government for 9 months. We have a spending problem. Not a taxation problem. EDIT: downvotes, but no rebuttals. Classic HN. We downvote what we don’t like, facts be damned.

Factorium 5y ago
We spend almost twice as much on Baby Boomer pensions as we do on the Military: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2018_Total_US_Government_Spending_Breakdown.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2018_Total_US_Government_... And a huge sum again on healthcare, overwhelmingly used by the aged (50% of healthcare costs in the final 5 years of life). America is a giant nursing home...
- qeternity 5y ago
  Total social spending in the US per capita is #2 in the world (behind France). The US is a massive welfare agency with a small military on the side.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Could you provide a citation?
    - qeternity 5y ago
      OECD - https://www.oecd.org/social/expenditure.htm https://www.oecd.org/social/expenditure.htm
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        merci
dontreact 5y ago
Our political and economic system is warped by wealth inequality and is not fair. Taxation would help with that.
- ghostwriter 5y ago
  > Our political and economic system is warped by wealth inequality and is not fair. Taxation would help with that. a musician writes a song, one million people buy it for one dollar, the musician becomes $1M richer while every purchaser is now $1 "poorer". This is your "unfair" wealth inequality in a nutshell.
  - swagasaurus-rex 5y ago
    A musician writes a song. In the past, you had to go through a label which would give labels a ton of power and the ability to write one sided contracts. Now, you can just upload to soundcloud, spotify, or apple music. Seems much more fair right? Yet it's not perfect. These platforms compensate pretty poorly. Spotify pays $0.004/stream, Apple Music somewhere around 0.005-$0.007/stream [0], Youtube even less at $0.002/stream. That means to truly earn a million dollars on these platforms, you need more than 200,000,000 views. Only very well known artists can even approach this many views. Lots of musicians are begging for an opportunity to appear on playlists so their view counts are steadily growing. This reveals a flaw in the payment model. Some artists are played a lot, in the background, as part of larger collections of curated playlists. That means popular artists have a leg up. Consider this: One subscriber listens ONLY to obscure artists. They spend 10 hours a week listening to their favorite unknown bands. These artists will only see a few pennies from this devoted follower who pays $11.99/mo to the streaming service. Another subscriber doesn't care what they listen to, but they always have music playing in their building. They listen to 100 hours of pop playlists. Their total view count will be higher - much higher than the obscure artists. The artists this subscriber listens to might collectively get $1-2 for the month. You might imagine that this incentivizes click-farms where desperate artists lacking self respect pay for inflated view-counts. It does. The streaming services may actually be in favor of these click-farms, because they profit off of every profile. Music is no longer a viable career path to people who are not risking their livelihoods. That leaves only people with more money than sense filling the cultural gap. [0]: https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts, https://freeyourmusic.com/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per-stream https://freeyourmusic.com/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per...

Factorium 5y ago

We spend almost twice as much on Baby Boomer pensions as we do on the Military: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2018_Total_US_Government_Spending_Breakdown.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2018_Total_US_Government_... And a huge sum again on healthcare, overwhelmingly used by the aged (50% of healthcare costs in the final 5 years of life). America is a giant nursing home...

qeternity 5y ago
Total social spending in the US per capita is #2 in the world (behind France). The US is a massive welfare agency with a small military on the side.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Could you provide a citation?
  - qeternity 5y ago
    OECD - https://www.oecd.org/social/expenditure.htm https://www.oecd.org/social/expenditure.htm
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      merci

dontreact 5y ago

Our political and economic system is warped by wealth inequality and is not fair. Taxation would help with that.

ghostwriter 5y ago
> Our political and economic system is warped by wealth inequality and is not fair. Taxation would help with that. a musician writes a song, one million people buy it for one dollar, the musician becomes $1M richer while every purchaser is now $1 "poorer". This is your "unfair" wealth inequality in a nutshell.
- swagasaurus-rex 5y ago
  A musician writes a song. In the past, you had to go through a label which would give labels a ton of power and the ability to write one sided contracts. Now, you can just upload to soundcloud, spotify, or apple music. Seems much more fair right? Yet it's not perfect. These platforms compensate pretty poorly. Spotify pays $0.004/stream, Apple Music somewhere around 0.005-$0.007/stream [0], Youtube even less at $0.002/stream. That means to truly earn a million dollars on these platforms, you need more than 200,000,000 views. Only very well known artists can even approach this many views. Lots of musicians are begging for an opportunity to appear on playlists so their view counts are steadily growing. This reveals a flaw in the payment model. Some artists are played a lot, in the background, as part of larger collections of curated playlists. That means popular artists have a leg up. Consider this: One subscriber listens ONLY to obscure artists. They spend 10 hours a week listening to their favorite unknown bands. These artists will only see a few pennies from this devoted follower who pays $11.99/mo to the streaming service. Another subscriber doesn't care what they listen to, but they always have music playing in their building. They listen to 100 hours of pop playlists. Their total view count will be higher - much higher than the obscure artists. The artists this subscriber listens to might collectively get $1-2 for the month. You might imagine that this incentivizes click-farms where desperate artists lacking self respect pay for inflated view-counts. It does. The streaming services may actually be in favor of these click-farms, because they profit off of every profile. Music is no longer a viable career path to people who are not risking their livelihoods. That leaves only people with more money than sense filling the cultural gap. [0]: https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts, https://freeyourmusic.com/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per-stream https://freeyourmusic.com/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per...