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Comment by bitbang | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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