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> one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax It could be an interesting thought experiment to consider the second and third order co

• duped 3mo ago
  Almost any system that limits participation in democracy will be abused to disenfranchise people that those in power do not want to give a voice. So you're coming at this from the wrong end. The goal is explicitly to keep the poors from having a voice in politics. The exact policy and enforcement of the system will reflect that. Unintended consequences, like the rich being disenfranchised would not occur.
  • dgellow 3mo ago
    To say it differently, if that ends up disenfranchising the powerful, a different argument and set of law would be used
• kennywinker 3mo ago
  We don’t have to go farther back than 100 years in history to know what this looks like. Poll taxes, land ownership requirements, etc. were pretty common. So were goon squads to beat and murder people who tried to change that. It wasn’t good.
  • mothballed 3mo ago
    I wouldn't want a lot of the landscape 100 years ago, but I'd happily be disenfranchised if I could get the size of government 100+ years ago (federal government <~2% of GDP in non-wartime)
    • kennywinker 3mo ago
      That landscape you wouldn’t want is in part a product of the small government you covet.
    • bryanlarsen 3mo ago
      You might change your mind if you study the economy of the US in the late 1800's. Those boom and bust cycles were intense, making the great depression of the 1930's look unexceptional. If you want to get rich, you need an healthy, educated, rich and secure customer and employee base. You don't get that with <~2% of GDP spent on health, education, roads, police, courts et cetera.
  • rozap 3mo ago
    "Great men of history do not introspect, move forward, go!"
• kklisura 3mo ago
  > Lütke holds seven per cent of Shopify, according to Forbes, and controls nearly a third of the votes attached to the company’s current shares. Since March 1, 2020, his base salary has been the figure he requested: $1, down from his previous $800,000. [1] [1] https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/high-net-worth/whos-tobi-lutke-meet-the-tech-tycoon-who-draws-1-in-salary-and-runs-canadas-largest-listed-company https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/high-net-worth/wh...
  • roryirvine 3mo ago
    So, just so that I'm clear, that means that Lütke himself pays no income tax? (assuming that he's not paid a salary by anyone else)
    • mikestew 3mo ago
      No income tax, but capital gains tax. And capital gains tax is a lot less than income tax (hence Buffet’s “my secretary pays more tax than I do”). So the “$1/year” CEOs are simply reducing tax burden. But, yes, under the proposed scheme, Lütke doesn’t get to vote. One may rest assured that this was a simple mistake. In fact, I’m sure he meant that only those pay capital gains tax get to vote, not income tax.
      • bryanlarsen 3mo ago
        No capital gains tax is due until gains are realized. Lütke's gains are almost completely unrealized.
        • cayleyh 3mo ago
          Better yet, he gets loans, collateralized against those unrealized gains to the current value of the gains, and then writes off the loan interest against his present and future taxes! Amazing!
          • bryanlarsen 3mo ago
• anonym29 3mo ago
  >First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income? If you modify this slightly to the percent of people who are not net taxpayers, meaning you subtract transfer payments (including social security, medicare, medicaid) to them from the taxes they pay (including social security, medicare, and medicaid), it's about 60% of the country, which tracks quite closely to the percentage of Americans who could not afford an unexpected $1000 expense. Most of the country is on a constant financial cliff.
  • trollbridge 3mo ago
    The best analysis I have seen puts it at 28% once you net out sales taxes and property taxes. (There are a lot of people who own property that they live in, but don't work, but they do owe property tax obviously.) Your 60% figure is reasonable, though, as the gap between 28% and 60% is people who are paying a very, very small net amount, mostly via sales taxes or other taxes that exist like taxes on airplane tickets or hotels.
• biophysboy 3mo ago
  I think you would magically see more (edit: wealthy) people collect an income
• geremiiah 3mo ago
  One possibly positive side effect is that by sidelining the working and middle classes, the political landscape would pit the rich against the fuck-you-rich. It would be interesting to see the class of doctors, lawyers and small business owners fighting against the class of large cap c-suite and the billionaires.
• trollbridge 3mo ago
  In the U.S., it's about 28% of the populace which pays no taxes (or ends up netting to zero or negative taxation; for example, working families with children are often in a situation where they might owe $2,000 in taxes but also get a credit of $5,000, for a net refund of $3,000.) My 28% figure includes property, sales taxes, etc. but does not include taxes that employers, landlords, and so on pay. This is all very beneficial for big business including Shopify: businesses can pay lower wages since the government steps in with benefits, including food, cash, housing, energy, medical care, and so on, for people with lower incomes, and then that means they have more money to spend as consumers (relevant to Shopify).
  • lemonlimesoda 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • mingus88 3mo ago
    So the federal government can disenfranchise anyone they want by issuing that class of taxpayer a refund?
    • Redoubts 3mo ago
      This would be pointless to do for one person, and it would be very curious to see a government reject a massive funding stream from a swath of people like this.
    • AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
      A total refund, that is, $0 in income tax. Even more interesting (and less deliberately manipulative): The government could make it voluntary. Below $X tax liability, you can choose a total refund - but you can't vote. That would be voting by those who actually care about the vote (or who owe more than $X).
  • mae3x 3mo ago
    when you say "pays no taxes" do you mean income taxes or any taxes altogether? What about FICA/SECA 15.3% tax? Sales tax? Property tax? Individual income tax only makes up 53% of federal revenues as per https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/government-revenue/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover....
• fhdkweig 3mo ago
  Trump paid about $750 in taxes in 2016 while still claiming to be a billionaire. I wouldn't consider it a fair share, but would that $750 entitle him to a vote under this plan?
  • gruez 3mo ago
    >Trump paid about $750 in taxes in 2016 while still claiming to be a billionaire Right, because the tax system (generally) taxes income, not wealth. Not taking this into account is like asking "you're millionaire, yet you don't have any income, how come?" to a retiree. According to the new york times article that broke this story, most of it seems to be from his loss making businesses elsewhere. Moreover in recent years he has been paying tax, as those losses have stopped. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-tru...
    • fhdkweig 3mo ago
      It is legal, but is it "fair"? And should someone who doesn't pay a fair share be entitled to a vote? Is the fairness important?
• matthewdgreen 3mo ago
  I’ve spent the last three days writing an inventory management system for a small store, using Codex and Claude Code. I realize that fully replacing online tools like Shopify is a lot more work than that (the payment integrations particularly), but: I sure wouldn’t want to be in the SaaS business right now.
  • dd8601fn 3mo ago
    None of the legit ones are at risk from vibecoders.
    • matthewdgreen 3mo ago
      I don't know what a vibe coder is to you, but I expect there are dozens of experienced software developers on HN who are willing to throw a month of work over the course of a year (and a few hundred dollars of Codex and Claude Code subscriptions/tokens they're already paying for) to write customized software for their friends and loved ones to use. And that while many of these tools will be mediocre or won't get maintained, a non-trivial number will be open sourced and will form a new layer of competition with existing SaaS businesses. (And even if I'm wrong, we're barely a year into the era of coding agents. Wait til 2027 to make big predictions.)
      • bdangubic 3mo ago
        never going to happen. there aren’t dozens but tens of thousands and every knows that everyone is a “coder” now. hence no one will be switching off any of the platforms they are on and these “competitors” will die out or keep paying $20/m to vercel to keep the lights on.
• rayiner 3mo ago
  > Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that. Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. Every part of the system has trade-offs that must be evaluated. You can make a logical argument that any other policy is open to abuse, etc. But why do you have to accuse other people of being “crazy” for having ideas about how to engineer a system?
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • maxerickson 3mo ago
    You mean government and society are an engineering exercise. You can't strip people of power and then say it's a democracy, at least not if words mean things.
    • rayiner 3mo ago
      Words do “mean” things. But the word “democracy” refers to a broader category of government systems, of which democracy with universal adult franchise constitutes a subset of the broader concept. The ancient Greeks practiced democracy, but universal adult franchise was a much later development.
  • jmye 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • rainsford 3mo ago
    Like any engineering exercise, there are ideas within the bounds of reasonable debate and ideas that are so bad they should be immediately dismissed and those advocating for them excluded from further discussion until they can participate like intelligent adults. If I'm a civil engineer designing a bridge, I think it's perfectly reasonable to call someone crazy if their plan is to build it out of Popsicle sticks and unicorn tears. Or more appropriate for this discussion, from the bones of poor people. Wasting time on their nonsense not only makes it harder to reach our actual goal of building a bridge, but reinforces the nonsense notion that all ideas are equally valid or worthy of consideration just because someone voiced them.
• lux-lux-lux 3mo ago
  The majority of voters who pay no income tax are (heavily Republican) retirees.
• palmotea 3mo ago
  > ...vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structured their income in a way as to pay zero or near-zero income taxes? Would the latter be disincentivized from continuing those regimes? Oh, you know if something like this was implemented, those people would re-structure their income so they pay $1 in income tax. Or they wouldn't bother, because they have far more effective ways of influencing the political process than voting. This would be purely about disenfranchising weaker people who could get in the way of them getting even more power.
• simonsarris 3mo ago
  > even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society. This is a strange phrase - initially you had to either own land (therefore pay tax) or else if you lived in a city and didn't own land but paid sufficient tax[1], to vote in the early United States. Only taxpayers voting was our first principles! We only changed it later. [1] I'm simplifying slightly because different states handled this differently
  • ndsipa_pomu 3mo ago
    Early democracies didn't allow everyone to vote - slaves typically had no voting rights (or any rights at all). However, we've progressed to understand that if you don't provide people with voting rights, they then have to resort to violence instead either through rebellion or insurrection etc. which is why it's considered a very good idea to let women or even people with different coloured skin to vote. The end-game to stripping voting rights from people is to surely enslave them or kill them as otherwise they will end up using violence to effect change. Personally, I don't understand how most people don't see how evil and twisted some of these "industry leaders" are. I think it'd be interesting to only allow people a vote if they are jobless and/or poor i.e. the bottom rung of society. That would tilt society so that we would put much more attention on raising the living standards at the bottom rather than aiming to give more power to sociopathic CEOs.
    • Ferret7446 3mo ago
      > which is why it's considered a very good idea to let women There's some revisionism going on here. Women did not want to vote. It was the feminism/communism movement that brought on women suffrage. Had the USSR not succeeded in planting this, we likely wouldn't have ever gotten it.
      • ndsipa_pomu 3mo ago
        I've never heard of that and would welcome some sources. As I understand it, the Women's suffrage movement began mainly in Britain during the late 19th century. The USSR didn't exist until 1922, so I think you've been misinformed. Arguably, voting rights for some women did exist before then, with Sweden in the 18th century probably being the first. There was also Lydia Taft who was able to vote in colonial America in 1756.
• pseudohadamard 3mo ago
  > First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income? Most corporates, for starters. Seen in that light, it might not be such a bad idea.