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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Here's a thought experiment. A million people read HN every day. Maybe one of them will go on to have this problem.

Meanwhile, inequality is stifling global growth and leading to protests that lead to riots that are starting to look like civil wars in several countries around the world.

But, you know, let's all pretend like we're future billionaires and only think about the future and not the present.

P.S. -- I'm sure there would be no less than 3 startups that would attempt to solve this problem if it ever materializes (which it won't because everybody in the US thinks they're a future billionaire).

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> which it won't because everybody in the US thinks they're a future billionaire

Well clearly not everyone in the US thinks that, or this plan would have literally 0% support; I live in the US and have no delusions of becoming a billionaire in this lifetime and I also support something akin to Warren's wealth tax (and would like to think that I could continue to even if I did somehow magically become a billionaire).

I don't think it can be simply reduced to "every American thinks they're going to be rich". I think a lot of Americans have this Ayn-Randian idea that billionaires truly "earned" their money, and that wealth-hoarders are a lot smarter (or better) than they are, and as a result deserve to keep their wealth, even at the expense of everyone else.

But I have issues with lumping together Americans like that; we're a pretty diverse country, with a pretty diverse set of opinions on tax policies.

I think that's a big part of it, the "they earned it" bit. I think there are two other problems: people don't realize what the government does for them -- this is the problem of the "submerged state" -- and people think that government spending is, by default, wasteful.

Having seen the inner workings of a number of large companies (think Intel-sized), I'm quite confident that waste is almost always more a function of organizational size than sector; there are efficient government bureaucracies, and wasteful ones. Same for anything big beyond a certain scale.

A third thing I think is lost on a lot of people is what the impacts of wealth disparity are on the citizenry, and this is stuff that doesn't always have an immediately visible line connecting the two. But, one thing off the top of my head, public health in countries with greater wealth disparity tends to be worse.

There's more, and I'll edit the comment to provide more examples later, gotta run for now.

Most of that million works at companies that started out years ago as one ambitious person's dream of becoming rich. It's a long pipeline and the chance of getting through is tiny, but that's how the economy works. If you eliminate that incentive, you will surely enjoy a short-term boost followed by a global economic decline that will be much harder to fix.

I genuinely do not think that I'll ever be worth a billion dollars in my life, and yet I still come to work every day. I also try and build cool new projects for fun.

Maybe I'm am outlier, but I doubt it; I think most people understand that the billionaire thing is a pipe-dream, and they work every day to pay their bills and if you're lucky to also work on stuff you're interested in. How exactly would that be affected by lowering the wealth-hoarding you're allowed to do?

Would we have more startups if Jeff Bezos were a Trillionaire instead of a Billionaire? You need to pay attention to the economics behind this, there is no evidence that people are aiming to earn $7Bn but wouldn't have bothered if they thought they'd only get $1Bn.

Exactly. If you were a new startup founder in this environment, wouldn't you likely do ANYTHING to not have a valuation >$49MM? Probably deciding not to raise more funding, not to scale, not to grow and help others.

I think that the side effects of a wealth tax might just end VC investing in high valuation companies altogether. I don't know if many people on HN see that as a positive.

I thought Warren's tax plan was the wealth over $50 million. Meaning that if you were worth $51 million, only one million would be taxed at 2%, meaning $20,000 would be payed.

The trouble with picking an arbitrary number like 50 million is the slippery slope it creates. Today we start with 2% over $50m. Tomorrow we will see a report that lowering it to $40m will help fund health care/fund climate change/(plug any socially acceptable agenda here) and the change will be voted in. A few decades after we'll wake up in an economy that will tax you heavily unless you're sharing your condo with your parents and a grandma [0] because someone has decided that it's an acceptable level of wealth.

[0] Anecdotal, but that was the way to get an apartment for my parents' generation back in Soviet Union and I really don't want to see it here again.

Yes, I believe that's correct.

Well then I doubt it would be this apocalyptic thing of people trying to be worth $49,999,999.99, since being worth $50,000,001.00 would only give them an increased tax of $0.02.

I think most people would still be willing to keep working on stuff, and I don't see why VCs would stop investing in high-value companies altogether.

> Meanwhile, inequality is stifling global growth and leading to protests that lead to riots that are starting to look like civil wars in several countries around the world.

This is patching one problem with another. The underlying economic system that is based on interest is playing a big role in this inequality. Instead of patching by adding more weird and unjust taxes, people should move away from an interest based economy.

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