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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of. They are just workers making somewhere in the mid-6 figures - doctors, lawyers, small mom-and-pop business owners, best coders, etc. And they pay the majority of taxes, actually. Bottom half of Americans pay nothing and top 1% pays 35-40% of all taxes. You are not fair to those educated, strong, hardworking people.

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Are you referring to 1% of wealth or 1% of income? I think you are correct in regards to income as it is mid six figures[0]. But I think the general complaint about the 1% is in reference to wealth which has a cutoff of about 10 million[0]. Also I was skeptical of your claim about the 1% (of income earners) paying that much (at least in terms of income tax) but this[1] does seem to support that you are at least in the ballpark.

https://dqydj.com/top-one-percent-united-states/[0]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/top-3-of-...

Top 1% of capital owners are just mostly very old people with comparatively little income. And their capital is passive and brings no or almost no profit (having 10M of capital and making 350K of income only 17% of which is income from capital - rest is from work - means abysmal 0.5% average return). It is in fact even less because most people who are top 1% by capital aren't top 1% by income: top 1% by capital is typically someone who bought some land on the cheap in 1950s and turned out lucky now when he's 90 years old, top 1% by income is a 30-year old Hollywood agent, Google coder, or a NYC lawyer.

These people (top 1% by capital) are as far from archetypal "sharks of capitalism" as it gets.

Top 1% of capital owners are just mostly very old people with comparatively little income.

Indeed. Someone who bought their house in the 70s or 80s and has now paid off their mortgage and also been contributing to a pension fund for a 40-year working life could easily retire with a “net worth” of $770k. It would be a stretch to count them as “rich”.

To be global 1% means earning $32k/year (source: investopedia). It’s a catchy phrase but ironically basically any Westerner using it is part of it. The archetypal Occupy protestors clutching their latest-model iPhone in one hand and a Starbucks in the other

I assume you got this from the Investopedia article [1]? This seems a little disingenuous, no?

To make the top 1% in terms of income, yes, it's $32k/year but to make the top 1% in terms of wealth you would need $770k in net worth, well beyond most Americans, even with assets such as an iPhone and a Starbucks coffee.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...

This seems a little disingenuous, no?

Not at all - from the comment I was replying to “Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of.”

But my wider point being that it is just used to mean “anyone slightly wealthier than me”.

"1%" is a mirror that reflects human tendencies to only look jealously at those doing better than them, rather than objectively include those worse off.

Radiolab (I think?) had an episode on this.

Even the rich are jealous of their "1%".

> Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of.

I disagree, they have vastly more capital than the 99% of earners below them. Unless you're comparing those 1%ers to someone like Zuckerberg specifically, there's really no way to square this statement.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, the earnings threshold to be in the top 1% of earners in 2017 was $718K.[0] That's a pretty incredible amount of annual capital for an individual. Sure, it's not enough to start a hedge fund, but even after taxes, you're able to seriously invest in things like real estate, which fewer Americans are able to do.

0: https://www.epi.org/blog/top-1-0-percent-reaches-highest-wag...

It's not threshold. It's an average value. Threshold is a lot, lot lower, must be around 350K. The table say those in top 1% but not top 0.1% make $492,311 on average so clearly threshold of 1% is a lot lower than even that. No figure in your sources but my bet would be it's ~$350K

Whoops, misread that table.

But still not enough capital for the statement in the original comment to apply to them:

> There’s so much ease to global movement of capital they just move it around so they pay - no taxes - have no accounts with their name on it - launder all their money legally (if need be) - buy up property and invest without any interest in any country in particular.

This statement is often used and is misleading without the context of income of this 1% as a percentage. So, if this 1% earns 80% of all income, then 35-40% is relatively low. I'm not sure if your intent was to mislead or just reiterate stats that you saw from some where, but please give the appropriate context and data to support you claim that this is unfair.

Except the top 1% actually earn around 20% of income (https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...). It should be obvious that they pay a disproportionately large share of taxes (relative to income) -- how could it be otherwise given that higher income means a higher tax rate?

IMO people earning 6 figures should still be paying more taxes than they are (I earn less than that, and I'm pretty sure I should be taxed more than I am), but they're not the people that are really the problems. It's the multi-millionaires and billionaires that are hogging a disproportionate share of the worlds resources.

This is just the inifinite scalability of success in the digital world, right? How can we complain if we are all actively working on the same thing?

Right. And our economic model needs to change to account for that scalability, because the natural constraint which previously made the system work(ish) has gone.

I would say we must adjust our political model rather than economical. Let go of 'everyone votes' democracy, to give more representation to these people in the top 1% and less to the bottom 50% who don't contribute, just take from the public. Otherwise the government will turn into charade, it already does, see Trump. How can we expect people who don't pay takes, to vote responsibly? They don't put their money on the table.

Do it, or Chinese will do it for us.

On what do you base that claim?

https://www.atr.org/top-percent-pays-more-taxes-bottom-a3619

>top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes

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