Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by m_ke | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

m_ke·

Sounds like we need to start taxing the rich a lot more to pay it off.

View on HN

If you tax 100% of the money rich people have, it wouldn’t even put a dent in the debt.

Sure it would. We could pay the entire thing off with that.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/23/how-much-wealth-top-1percent...

> The wealthiest 1% of Americans controlled about $41.52 trillion in the first quarter, according to Federal Reserve data released Monday.

Can't do it again as easily, of course.

Most rich people don’t have all their wealth in cold hard cash. They have assets. You can’t force rich people to sell their assets. And if you did, it would crash the economy.

No sane person is sitting on mountains of cash.

I take you then don't consider Warren Buffet sane? As he is currently sitting on mountains of cash, or at least would be if it weren't digital...

Warren Buffet isn’t most rich people…

The IRS can most certainly seize and sell assets to settle tax debt.

Yeah, just strangle the golden goose and we'll eat like kings tonight.

Tonight.

Oh no, whatever shall we do without if we no longer have rich people but still have all their assets?

Zimbabwe. That’s what we will do. You can’t simple hand assets over to normal people and expect the assets to maintain their value.

The Zimbabwe government took the farms from their owners and gave them to normal people. Mismanagement of them lead to food shortages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com