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Comment by dageshi | Hacker News Reader

I think what always annoys me about articles like this is that the author spends the entire article telling us how everything is changing and the future is completely different but the answer is to tax the rich a bit more. The answer to everything for certain people has always been "just tax the rich a bit more" apparently in this world of ours which is changing beyond recognition, that part never changes.

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This is the go-to "solution" for people that don't know how to solve a problem.

To be fair, the rich are getting exorbitantly richer. CEOs are making multiple hundreds of times what one of their workers makes. We are heading back to the age of Rockefellers and Carnegies, where wealth is taken from the many so the few can be insanely rich.

And it's not like the educated aren't doing much better either. Google makes billions but doesn't pay a ton more than anywhere else. Wages and salaries have been pretty stagnant for those making less than 200k. Meanwhile, costs increase for a net loss of income.

So what else is there to do, other than tax the rich? That's the reality they are building for themselves by being so greedy.

It would be more accurate to say that wealth was generated for the many, so that Carnegie and Rockefeller could be insanely rich. Meanwhile Google could be the company that ushers in the age of the electric car, making us all wealthier still. Taxing them isn't going to help that much.

Also, in a civilisation where the richest tend to own law-abiding corporations succeeding on the back of innovative products/services, it is frankly to be expected that the rich will get ever more exorbitantly richer. Only in a despotic regime do the elite have a hard limit on how rich they can really be (because there's only so much wealth you can suck from starving subjects).

But the poor are getting exorbitantly richer too. The so-called poor in our society pay $100+ a month for cable, have cell phones with data plans for all their 10+-year-old kids etc. And these are the people that get welfare for food and live in subsidized housing. They are not poor.

The fact that the rich are richer is not a problem when the entire population is getting richer.

The poor have an increasing standard of living but that hardly means they are getting 'richer'. The poor may have a roof over their heads, three square meals a day, and maybe even a vehicle, but they don't have health insurance and are typically locked in jobs and locations. Meanwhile, services that help the poor generally get cut - like public transportation, education, etc. But at least we'll always fund the jails.

The rich getting richer is definitely a problem when that wealth is never converted into something that benefits society and just sits around generation after generation. In the US we've completely removed the so-called 'death tax' which was actually a great thing. It forced wealth to be used instead of horded. Currently there's no incentive in the US to build a company to pass on to your kids, it's better just to keep it all in cash and hand that over. Minimal investment happens with such a system. Sure some is in stocks and bonds but generally in super-safe stuff so you just pay low capital gains and not real income tax.

There's just no excuse for CEO wages currently. The new CEO of JCPenny just got $53 million in stock for 4 months work. The stock is down since he joined. How many employees could've gotten even a little better wage instead of it going to 1 man?

I think the modern financial system is pretty efficient at using that cash while it's "sitting around", if it's in the bank it's being lent out to somebody, if it's in bonds it's financing either government or corporate activity and if it's in stocks then it's in a partial ownership of a company that helps capitalise that company. Just because that money is concentrated in a particular place doesn't mean it's not doing society some good.

I don't think people get rich or stay rich without putting in an incredible amount of work and I truly don't understand why you would penalise people for being successful.

The situation I described (have a house, car, smartphones, cable TV, etc.) could hardly be described as poor IMHO. And compared to the truly poor (either around the world or in our country in previous centuries) I'd argue they do indeed qualify as rich.

And sure, CEO wages are ridiculously high. But the government has generally shown that it's inept at managing things like that. Is the solution to force the wages lower? Hardly. It's to allow companies like that to fail (rather than propping them up with stimulus) so that management is actually both vulnerable and accountable.

So what's your solution? Crack the whip and yell 'You /can/ learn! You /will/ be a creative knowledge worker!'? Inject everyone with nanites or genemods to make it so? Or dump them in their own restricted area and let them subsistence farm or fight it out?

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