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Comment by wahern | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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