So you could raise rather a lot more than you needed, actually.
Raising those taxes will also significantly drag down the cost of property (and consequently rents) which is the main outgoing for lower and middle class families.
Even assuming tapping billionaires' wealth is a zero-impact answer, that doesn't necessarily help you if you're in a random municipality which has overpromised on its pension plan. As one example, take San Jose, which is Bay Area but not prime Bay Area (and beginning to see pension problems) and could easily see its richest citizens moving a few cities away to somewhere like Cupertino or Mountain View if it means a 5% savings on income tax. And what of cities like Stockton, CA, which was already bankrupted by its pensions and doesn't exactly have a bevy of billionaires to tap?
I guess you could hope for the day that the federal government decides to send a bunch of its money to your own local government, but the rest of the nation is likely to resent that so they might not approve of the measure.
The richest citzens always make this threat but they don't actually follow through on it:
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/04/29/135813061/studi...
Apparently if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
And that still doesn't help Stockton.
False.
Some claim that the top 1% have as much as the bottom 90% but even that claim is disputed.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/top-one-percent-20110...
That article is discussing wealth (net worth) versus the article you cited which discusses income. No surprise that the lines between rich and poor differ when you measure it different ways.
I found that via: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Uni...
One question: aside from arguing the specific numbers, it is irrefutably true that a small minority hold the majority of the money, and it is widely reported that the gap is currently growing, not shrinking. Is this a good thing? Do the specific numbers change the outcome or what our course of action should be? Even that Vanity Fair article concludes the situation is bad.
"In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent."
> Do the specific numbers change the outcome or what our course of action should be?
Of course the data matters! Especially when (as crdoconnor did) you report data that is incorrect by an order of magnitude!
Jesus.
To make my point more clearly, you (and vanity fair, and Wikipedia) say the top 1% is two orders of magnitude larger than its relative size (40x). Some claim, and Vanity Fair doesn't exactly refute that the top 1% are two orders of magnitude larger than its relative size (90x). Crdoconnor appears to have misquoted by one order of magnitude, saying that the unfairness ratio is three orders of magnitude (900x).
So, ignoring crdconnors accidental misquote, and playing devils advocate for a moment, what substantive policy decisions should differ across the line between two orders of magnitude inequality versus three?
Put more simply: Just taxing the rich more isn't enough to pay for everything.
That doesn't seem to contradict anything said up-thread.
If the top 0.1% control 20% of the wealth, the next 0.9% control another 20% of the wealth, and the bottom 90% control 20% of the wealth, then the claim you objected to is true. That would mean the remaining 9%, between the top 1% and the bottom 90%, control the wealth that remains - 40%. I don't think these amounts violate any of the ordering constraints, given the relative size of the groups; in reality there will be variation within the individual groups, but if we assume there isn't the math checks out fine: 20/0.1 > 20/0.9 > 40/9 > 20/90
I'm not saying the original claim was correct - I don't know. Just that what you quoted doesn't refute it.
Really?
You accused someone of being wrong "by an order of magnitude" and the "evidence" you produced did not even demonstrate that it was likely that they were wrong. If the data matters, fucking understand the data.
I'm just not really interested in doing the legwork to provide you with perfectly cited sources. This is Hacker News not the US Congress. You know how to use Google.
You might not be wrong. You manifestly don't understand the data. Observe that, learn from it, update your confidence.
"I'm just not really interested in doing the legwork to provide you with perfectly cited sources."
I was not disputing the citations of your sources, and I wasn't demanding perfection. I was demanding that what was provided as evidence that someone was wrong "by an order of magnitude" actually be evidence they were wrong at all.
"This is Hacker News not the US Congress."
Exactly! So we're agreed that we should expect at least a modicum of decency, and respect for argument and informed discussion?
"You know how to use Google."
I do, and I know that it doesn't do a very good job answering these kinds of questions.
I engaged more deeply with your evidence (including the article you drew it from) precisely because I hoped it would inform me in the ways you'd indicated that it should. I was left disappointed.
Unfortunately, you seem quite a bit more interested in rhetoric and posturing than in actually engaging intellectually, so unless your replies are inordinately better than those above I won't be responding further.
It's a somewhat extreme measure by the standards of modern tax schemes though, and it would cause a much higher number of super wealthy people to expatriate than just raising income and capital gains taxes would.
39.6% (Fed) + 12.3% (CA) = 51.9%
There are city taxes as well in some places, for example add an additional 1.5% to that if you live in SF.
Thinking about this, I suppose that the fact that you can deduct state taxes on your fed taxes brings this down a bit so maybe it does dip below 50? Not sure about the math. Real close though.
Whether you pay the AMT or not isn't really based on how much money you make. It's based on how many deductions not allowed under the AMT you take (deductibility of state taxes being the biggest one).