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Comment by glutamate | Hacker News Reader

How about we just have a wealth tax and give the money to those affected by the pandemic.

Because nobody is wealthy. The "wealthy" is always that other person who has more than me.

Truth is that everybody in the US (and Europe) is wealthy. The panhandler on the corner is making more money than the median daily income of the world population.

Until people admit "I am wealthy, and I need to help out" instead of pointing to whoever has more wealth than they do, nothing will change.

Simply not true. Poorer households give a larger proportion of their income.

> It is clear from the graph that when put in the context of their individual budgets, donor households towards the lower end of the expenditure distribution tend to give away more of their money to charity than donor households in the higher expenditure percentiles. On this measure, poorer donor households are more generous than richer donor households, those in the bottom decile donating approximately 3% of their budget compared with those in the top decile donating roughly 1%.

http://www.cgap.org.uk/uploads/Briefing%20Papers/CGAP%20BN7%...

Your argument is completely non-sequiter. My point has nothing to do with who gives what portion of their income. My point is that when defining who is rich, it's almost always somebody else. While taxing the rich more than the poor is a reasonable proposition, it usually will fail when defining who is actually rich, because most of whoever finds themselves defined as rich, will object and point to somebody making more than themselves as the "truly rich".

If a rich person gives $100 and a poor person gives $10, it's still just $10. It might be more of their income in proportion, but it's still only $10. It doesn't magically become $100 just because it was more of the poor person's income.

Too much for people to complain about.

In other words, loss aversion is a strong incentive.

People would rather over-pay to receive something than pay for a general tax (a loss) even when it would provide an absolute equivalent result.

IMO a wealth tax completely misses an unspoken fact of finance: Tax evasion is illegal; tax avoidance is not. For every "wealth tax" you come up with, there will always be loop holes that the wealthy use to avoid paying it. Eventually the net gain is zero.

The only way for those loop holes not to be would be if the government were entirely staffed from top to bottom by poor people, including (or perhaps especially) everyone who is elected.

Speaking of which, you'd first have to ban all election spending. Campaigning would be done by marching in the street with a bristol board sign colored with crayons, taped to a softwood plank.

Interesting a younger Donald Trump proposed a wealth tax back in 1999 (of 14.5% on $10M or more). But the 16th Amendment clearly says "income" tax. It doesn't say "wealth" or "assets" or "property", so any wealth tax without an amendment would fail on constitutional grounds.

Yes I remember him proposing that; as I recall, the quid pro quo was a concomitant permanent abolition of the estate tax, which would have a sweet deal for the Trump dynasty.

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