Comment by runnerup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runnerup | Hacker News Reader

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> Not sure if that quells the "billionaires should pay their fair dues" shouts that haunt him on every public discourse.

Probably not. I think there are calls for 90% taxes on all earnings over $100 million or so. Even with a 90% tax, there's still plenty of incentive to continue earning/building. I think the argument is that a person can reasonably be individually responsible for $10-100 million of value, but past that isn't realistic. Any excess value captured by one person is almost certainly actually being created by either their employees or by public infrastructure.

This 90% tax would really just be re-capturing that value by the entities which created the value (the taxpayers who work for the billionaire, and/or the government who built the infrastructure used).

I mean, if you were paid $600/hr since Christopher Columbus sailed to America and saved every penny, you still wouldn't have a billion dollars. It's really, really hard to say anyone has worked hard enough or created enough value on their own to justify a billion.

And a 90% tax over $100 million would still allow Bezos/Musk to have $30 billion each. Which is equivalent to a someone saving $1 million/year since the middle of the last ice age.

>This 90% tax would really just be re-capturing that value by the entities which created the value

Man those folks should start a co-op, since they don't need their employers and are capable of creating value outside of them.

This is a facetious retort and adds very, very little value. Maybe there's something else you can provide to further the discussion.

I think your retort conflates "corporation" and "corporation owner / billionaire". Generally the intellectual property, capital, lobbying relationships and business relationships of the corporation are self-sustaining and do a good job of keeping competition at bay. That's axiomatic because if they didn't, the corporation would be succeeded by another which did. Surely you understand that sub-optimal systems can be self-perpetuating.

The core issue isn't so much "Can employees create as much value outside of a corporation?" but rather "How much of that value was created by one particular employee / investor / owner?"

> Man those corporations should really start their own countries, since their owners don't need to pay taxes to their nations and are capable of creating value outside of them.

> That's tautologic

It isn't and the fact that you assert it is proves my point very succinctly.

You're attempting to establish an ideological framework that doesn't require empirical evidence and cannot be challenged logically, because you dismiss challenges to your logically fallacious assertions with zero supporting evidence as invalid because they do not coincide with your axiomatic assertions.

What evidence do you have that better businesses exist and are failing to supplant sub optimal ones because of the reasons you indicate.

Why would you pick those two words as the place to make a strong rebuttal? Especially when the following paragraph explicitly states "The core issue is..." which indicates it might provide a more substantive area of discussion. Even if people concede that you proved me wrong on this, it doesn't affect the core point.

The demand you make cannot be satisfied to someone discussing in bad faith.

- Better businesses exist (no metric for "better")

- because of [whatever] (can always be claimed that it was because of something else)

Instead of showing that -- perhaps we could both agree on the following:

- Some companies, like Boeing, have excellent lobbying relationships.

- Those relationships lead to something we could agree to call "regulatory capture"

- This regulatory capture makes it so that better companies have a much more difficult time supplanting Boeing. Even if it does eventually happen, it probably takes longer and several additional other companies fail before one succeeds.

Surely if Tesla paid their fair share of taxes then Joe-shmo's EV startup would take off.

This is a straw man plucked out of nowhere. The previous discussion is neither about corporate taxes at all, nor about tax-avoidance being a competitive advantage against other companies.

Its called a society

Very interesting. Will these incentives create "100 millionaire" clubs? If a person knows he will have 110 millons, and know he will be tax 90% on the last 10 he can choose between a million for himself or 10 million for a person of their choice.

I like your insight on this! That would absolutely be a common effect of implementing a naive version of such a policy.

Theoretically the current top tax bracket is 37% for anything over $523,601 -- I wonder if that's enough to be causing this already. There is, of course, the differential between this new "90%" (or whatever) bracket and the next highest bracket, which is currently 37%.

I'm curious how much people would do this. I suspect this would be very common for someone earning $120 million (give wife/child/best friend $20 million which would become $12.6 million after current existing taxes), but not common at all for someone earning $2 billion (they'd likely prefer to keep $290 million purely for themselves rather than keeping only $100 million for themselves and giving others $1.2 billion after taxes).

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