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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Its unpopular but one option would be to tax the wealthy to pay for additional services for the poor and underemployed. This is not my preferred way to deal with social issues but it strikes me as absurd to expect the 50 year old woman whose job has been automated away to struggle when there are people who could make that go away without any appreciable suffering at all. We have to consider how historical inequity has led to the status quo (for example historical union busting leaves the 50 year old worker with less today that she would have had otherwise) and what we may do to right those historical wrongs in the present.

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> would be to tax the wealthy to pay for additional services for the poor and underemployed.

There's not enough rich people to do that in the first place. You will end up taxing the whole middle class, which is effectively what politicians are increasingly doing, which brings everyone down

> There's not enough rich people

I’m not sure that’s true. There are more rich people than ever and taxes are at their lowest point since ~1940

>> There's not enough rich people

>I’m not sure that’s true. There are more rich people than ever and taxes are at their lowest point since ~1940

There are 2,640 billionaires in the world, 28 fewer than in 2022 (according to Forbes). Their total wealth is $12.2 trillion. Some portion (how much?) could certainly help a sizable number of people, but it is difficult to know how many and for how long.

There are several magnitudes more millionaires than that.

> but it is difficult to know how many and for how long.

Permanently? Finding out how many is the job of the IRS after the top marginal tax rates are increased by an extra 10-20%. The top capital gains tax rate is also much too low.

Globalization and the removal of capital control resulted in a race to the bottom between countries offering ever lower tax rates. That’s a huge problem, it’s something only rich people can utilize and leads to continually increasing inequality.

> There are several magnitudes more millionaires than that.

According to the Distribution of Wealth page on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth), millionaires (> US $1M, i.e. incl. billionaires) own 46% of property, while the middle class (US $100 - $1M) own 39%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#/media/...

Yes? Seems about right.

Excluding primary residences would likely significantly shift this figure, but the figures seem reasonable..

> There are several magnitudes more millionaires than that.

A lot of people can become a millionaire throughout their lifetime just by having a normal job or small business. That's nowhere the level where I would describe as "rich".

It’s great that marginal tax rate brackets don’t have to be fixed at even numbers then..

> There are more rich people than ever

There are also more people than ever, in case you haven't noticed

There is plenty of money that can be shaken loose, but there is no political will to pursue it.

Bezos himself could personally pay to educate a generation of US citizens. Most of us can’t process the amount of wealth that one individual has, let alone that whole demographic of people.

There’s also a question of what fair taxation even looks like when you have such a small number of people in the US economy controlling the lion’s share of the capitol.

Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that the capitol isn’t there. It most definitely is.

> Bezos himself could personally pay to educate a generation of US citizens.

Let’s assume there’s a little over 3 generations in the US at any given time. Call it 100M people per generation.

Bezos has around $150B.

$150B divided equally across 100M people, there would be $1500 per person for all of their education. I think that’s obviously not enough to cover the education of an entire generation.

> Most of us can’t process the amount of wealth that one individual has

My experience is that many also can’t comprehend just how many people there are out there and how quickly program costs multiply out as a result.

Also, if Bezos tried to sell all his stock at once, the price of the stock would drop so he would never get $150B.

Also, if we dumped $150B into any existing program overnight, it would explode into a wasteful bureaucracy, even more so than it probably already was

When you tax the rich to give to the poor that money gets recycled into the system increasing monitary velocity.

From the Forbes billionaire list 2023[0]:

> Globally, we counted 2,640 ten-figure fortunes, down from 2,668 last year. Altogether, the planet’s billionaires are now worth $12.2 trillion, a drop of $500 billion from $12.7 trillion in March 2022.

For comparison (via various wikipedia pages reachable from[1]), the US federal government budget in 2022 was $6.3 trillion (against an income of $4.9 trillion).

If 100% of the $12.2 trillion owned by billionaires was seized and annually disbursed at 3% annually for social programs, this would provide $366 billion dollars annually. In 2022, the US spent $747 billion on Medicare alone.

Increasing the Medicare budget by %50 seems nice, but it also doesn't seem like it would be a transformational change to society. It may be a better idea to spend a large chunk of the $12.2 trillion immediately on high-upfront-cost things, but I don't have the imagination to come up with good ideas.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

> There's not enough rich people

It doesn't have anything to do with how many there are, but how much wealth they hold. And the 0.1% hold an enormous amount of wealth which absolutely would help fund effective services for the poor.

You could have one guy with a hundred trillion dollars and the fact that he's just one guy would be irrelevant.

"The United States is losing $1 trillion in unpaid taxes every year, Charles Rettig, the Internal Revenue Service commissioner, estimated on Tuesday, arguing that the agency lacks the resources to catch tax cheats. The so-called tax gap has surged in the last decade." Oct 13, 2021 -- New York Times

We just need to enforce the tax laws we already have on the books.

We can't[1] do that. Golden rule dictates that people with gold make the rules and likewise are protected by the system in ways that regular Joe would not be. I agree that the rules are there, but can't even seem to be able to do it, when the case is very public.

[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/20/hunter-biden-to-plead-guilty...

> We just need to enforce the tax laws we already have on the books.

Alternatively, make the Government waste WAY LESS money is a better answer. have you ever seen a mafia going bankrupt every year despite collecting protection money from everyone? only the government is so utterly incapable.

In the end this is more a question of who should decide what people do.

Money only has value when they are spend. If you lock money up in an account and never use it, it is practically taken out of the economy.

Do, do we let governments circulate money for education, health, care, etc. or do we let corporations circulate money in the pursuit of more money?

For me, it's a balance. Right now it does seem like the inequality has been raising (in particular under the pandemic) and we probably should try to redistribute a bit more. But the increasing interest rates are already leading us in this direction. And the social unrest will probably also accelerate salary increases over the next years – which in turn needs to be financed.

I think the biggest issue we face are reaching multi-lateral agreements like the global minimum tax that can hand the power to tax companies back in the hands of governments (as it becomes unattractive to move to low-tax jurisdictions).

Money doesn’t grow on rich people, you don’t need to increase taxes on the wealthy in order to ensure full employment with no inflation risk if you use a Job Guarantee

Making people do pointless work is stupid and cruel. If they can't do anything useful, just give them the same amount of money you were going to pay anyway.

> Making people do pointless work

Who is making people do pointless work?

Giving people money they need to survive conditional on them doing work that isn't economical is that.

> work that isn't economical

What does this mean?

Work that wouldn't be done in a free market

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