Comment by citilife | Hacker News Reader

Comment by citilife | Hacker News Reader

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> This is simply not consistent with facts.

Is it really a "fact" though? I know there are studies out there and that it's a popular opinion. The question is, why? There are near infinite factors impacting "success" and "success" is fluid, but also any statistics used are correlations and generalizations at a massive scale.

My point, is that we cannot begin to determine each case independently. Instead, we should uniformly tax the society for funding society. The ultrawealthy will pay more on a percent based system, the upper, middle, and lower classes will progressively pay less.

> Where you are born, what education you got, and what risks you were able to take has a huge impact on success.

Also, I've seen this thrown around - let's assume this is true. I tend to agree, but you also have to recognize that by 30 years old, we shouldn't be treating people like children. By 30 it's entirely possible making minimum wage to attend college or to take risks. It may have been harder or they may have had to work hard, but there's no reason to make the argument the opportunity wasn't there, because it typically is.

> It may have been harder or they may have had to work hard, but there's no reason to make the argument the opportunity wasn't there, because it typically is.

This a a fallacy. The difference between pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or not is far more than just "how hard you work". Similar to a successful start-up, hard work is a prerequisite but not sufficient.

In reality, that opportunity is just frequently not there for many poor people, regardless of how hard they work. Yes it is there for some people and some of those people fail to work hard enough to take advantage of it. However, the belief that people are poor because they are lazy is generally false and quite disrespectful.

You want to see taxes as money being taken at gun point. That is sorta true, but then you must also be opposed to debt collectors being able utilize those same guns to collect on their loans?

In my view, our ability to make money is inherently dependent on the society we live in. You can't make millions without customers or infrastructure or educated workers or the rule of law. As such, wealthy individuals owe a debt to society for helping them acrue and keep that wealth. That debt is what justifies taxing that wealth. There is a good deal of evidence that the sort of broad investments you can make with that money have incredibly high returns for society and the ability for individuals to accumulate wealth.

I think we agree that the money is best spent investing in providing more opportunities to society rather than encouraging bad choices and laziness.

> By 30 it's entirely possible making minimum wage to attend college

It may be, barely, depending on the state you live in[1]. But presumably no one would argue that it would be a lot easier if your family had the means to help you...

1: https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/Minimum-Wage-Work-Alo...

> I tend to agree, but you also have to recognize that by 30 years old, we shouldn't be treating people like children.

But we should be treating children like children and in America they largely inherit the disadvantages of their parents.

> It may have been harder or they may have had to work hard, but there's no reason to make the argument the opportunity wasn't there, because it typically is.

The evidence disagrees. Our Kids by Robert Putnam examines this exact issue. While there are many, here's a particularly sobering quote from the book: "high-scoring poor kids are now slightly less likely (29 percent) to get a college degree than low-scoring rich kids (30 percent)."

> By 30 it's entirely possible making minimum wage to attend college or to take risks.

This is a mighty big leap ... many minimum wage jobs have erratic schedules that make attending classes difficult, let alone barely paying you enough to eat and have housing. God help you if you start a family.

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