Hacker News Reader

Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

>PG is tone deaf and missing the mood of the nation here.

Twitter is not 'the mood of the nation'. You are not representative of 'the mood of the nation'. In fact, you're an outlier.

>The idea behind increasing taxes on the wealthy is to build a better society for everyone - including the wealthy!

You're trying to pull the same fast one as OP. Wealth tax is not the same as increasing taxes on the wealthy. You can make an argument that taxes should be increased and at the same time see that the wealth tax is a terrible way to do it.

> Why should wealth tax not be a part of modern economy?

Because it's a bad tax. It doesn't work. It doesn't bring revenue you think it does. It's expensive to administer and enforce. And it has many bad unintended consequences.

View on HN

>Twitter is not 'the mood of the nation'. You are not representative of 'the mood of the nation'. In fact, you're an outlier.

According to a Reuters poll from this beginning of this year a large majority of Democrats and a slim majority of Republicans support the idea of a wealth tax. While there isn't a large amount of polling on the subject (that I can see), that somewhat undercuts the Twitterspace argument.

The specific question people responded to in that poll was "the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs" so you can dissect it at your will.

> According to a Reuters poll from this beginning of this year a large majority of Democrats and a slim majority of Republicans support the idea of a wealth tax.

That's only because they haven't seen the specifics.

That seems like an argument that could be made against literally every opinion poll. The “specifics” according to whom?

I once dug around to specifically find out how gallup accounts for population and they simply don’t show you. You just have to take their word on it. So until opinion polls give exact equations used and raw data so I can verify myself I completely ignore them.

Yes, that is a problem with every opinion poll about a hypothetical policy proposal. Those polls aren't super useful for gauging how popular a concrete piece of legislation would be in practice.

> Twitter is not 'the mood of the nation'.

Are you saying that, presented with the facts, most Americans would express satisfaction with the current distribution of wealth and its trajectory?

Not sure what Twitter has to do with any of this. ?? Anyway..

Am I an outlier? Then I only know outliers in real life, I guess, since I only know people who share this opinion? I get that I'm in my bubble, but it seems like a really really widely shared bubble.

> Wealth tax is not the same as increasing taxes on the wealthy.

A wealth tax is a form of increasing the taxation against people who are wealthy. Are you saying this is false? What do you mean by that?

> see that the wealth tax is a terrible way to do it.

Why though? You haven't backed any of this up. I think a wealth tax is a great idea. Why are you so certain that it isn't?

> Because it's a bad tax. It doesn't work.

What do you mean by bad tax? You don't explain this and my googles turned up nothing. What about this tax makes it "bad"? Why does it "not work"?

> It doesn't bring revenue you think it does.

I don't think it brings in any particular revenue specifically. What do you have in mind by this statement?

> It's expensive to administer and enforce.

So are most good things that we have in this world. Something being expensive doesn't make it bad.

> And it has many bad unintended consequences.

What are these, though? Can you list any?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com