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Comment by cfraenkel | Hacker News Reader

Interesting enough read, but the post title is misleading. It was hardly a gift, it was an estate tax payment.

Not everyone is a greedy narcissist only out for themselves!

Left does not mean gift, it's a common term which applies when politely referring to the a recipient of an inheritance.

Left means a gift via inheritance, which is the exact opposite of an estate tax (it's not a gift or via inheritance, it's a tax on the value of an estate and paid before distribution).

They could have squandered the money or given it away.

They could could have blown it on building a pyramid to house their corpse.

The government is not entitled to the assets.

They aren’t entitled to their assets. They only have worth because of civilisation. How well do you think bill gates would survive in a mad max utopia that Randians fantasize about?

Given the fact, as stated in the article that there are a myriad of legal ways by which millionaires and billionaires can skip paying the estate tax, it could very well have been the result of an intentional decision not to evade this by some socially-conscious dying billionaire citizen.

There is also a fair bit left after taxes: "Based on estimates of the average tax rate on estates, the February 2023 payment implied the death of someone possessing a fortune between $17.5 and $40 billion."

I was severely disappointed when I realized that, I thought some billionaire had gone nuts with https://www.treasurydirect.gov/government/public-debt-report...

and in the 3 seconds it took to read you comment, the interest on the debt increased more than this "gift"

It takes about 30 seconds for the US National Debt clock (https://www.usdebtclock.org/) to tick off $1 million, so almost 2.5 days to tick off $7 billion. I'd say $7 billion covers much more than 3 seconds of interest.

even in your "correct" math, your comment doesn't really improve the ridiculously small amount of moving of a needle that this would make

"Even if I was wrong by many orders of magnitude, I'm still correct!"

I mean... so I just noticed the "US Total Interest Paid" clock. That takes about 45 seconds to tick over $1 million, so $7 billion covers ~1% of the interest payments in a year.

That seems like a sizable contribution for a single person in a country of 330 million.

Great, so now all we need is another 99 people with similar donations and we could cover the interest for a year. Then you need to continue to do that every year forever because you have yet to make any movement on the principle

This wasn’t a donation. This was a fee for providing a society that allows him to accumulate so much.

Why do you care? The country has never paid back this debt, will never pay back this debt and no-one expects it to.

That's my point. It is ridiculous to think that $7b is anything but a drop in the bucket. While $7b is a big number to mere mortals, it is chump change in terms of national debt.

Oh okay, that makes sense, and I agree with you. That said, paying tax is still important for a number of reasons; and ultimately the national budget is a large bucket made up of small drops.

What is your point exactly? That's sort of saying the weight of the heaviest man ever alive (>300 kg) is a drop in the bucket if we compare to the total weight of people in the US, which is true but also completely irrelevant (in fact that comparison actually makes it even clearer how out of proportion the $7B are for a single person).

This person is being called out as unique because they "allowed" this money to be collected rather than doing the normal thing people with this type of money do and find ways to avoid the tax.

So if you're so gung-ho positive we can make a dent in the debt, then why not make sensible comments about making changes so the tax is not so easily avoidable instead of nonsensical fat people comments

It does improve it, by several orders of magnitude. If your point is strong enough to make without exaggerating, then use of hyperbole can only stand to distract from the point.

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