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Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

What do you gain by talking about absolute numbers? They are meaningless. By this logic, Musk could pay only $1 million in tax and still would've "contributed more to the country" than most individuals.

If you talk about taxes percentage-wise, you make clear that the super-rich do not pay their fair share, that they will get richer faster than everybody else and, the most important fact, that long-term stability might suffer, because the bigger the divide between rich and poor, the more civil unrest follows.

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> If you talk about taxes percentage-wise, you make clear that the super-rich do not pay their fair share

Well, this is partisan / ideological stuff at this point. I'm only pointing out that the super rich can get away with paying very little in income and capital gains taxes. What's a fair share for the super-rich really depends a great deal on how they got rich (with corporate welfare?) and how much value they have added to the country and the world. And what the tax code should do about it is yet another story. I'm not even remotely advocating for some unrealized capital gains tax or, really, anything of the sort. If anything I think what's unfair and unwise here is that dividends get taxed as income twice (once at the corporation, once where received), which incentivizes reinvesting so as to grow a company's valuation [so as to grow its owners' net worth]. We might have more rich-but-much-less-rich people if we didn't double-tax dividends, and that would [probably] ameliorate the balance of power in the country.

What is "fair share"? What in life is always "fair"? Why are tax rates lower in the lower income brackets, instead of a flat rate - that doesn't seem fair.

Lots of citizens pay zero in income taxes (because their income is low), are they also not paying a "fair share?"

Fairness here usually refers to the inequality left over after tax, not the tax amount itself. When the US is the 127th most unequal country out of 168 measured (by the Gini Coefficient), along with still having abject poverty around, it's not overly ideological to say more distribution needs to happen.

There is no objective definition of fairness.

That’s your definition

By your definition if someone works 40 hours, after taxes they should have the same amount as someone who worked 20 hours.

That doesn’t seem fair to me

This is the kind of extreme internet Libertarianism that's dangerous in the real world. Not practical or concerned with extreme poverty through inequality, but preferring to fight on first principles, like all tax being theft (not your claim, but equatable).

I'm less concerned about the definition of fairness and more concerned about real human suffering.

> more concerned about real human suffering.

Then your priorities are misdirected. The US Govt grabbing a few extra percent of billionaires' income would not reduce human suffering in any way.

If anything, the ultra-rich have been far more effective than governments at improving impoverished human lives by setting up charities and using them to directly send money to poor regions around the world, enabling clean water and food and basic health services.

Yet the countries with the least amount of poverty (Northern Europe) have high taxes, a large welfare state and high redistribution

The US Govt, unlike any other country, has the ability to print unlimited amounts of the world's reference currency. It also has no effective cap on its annual deficit or total debt. In other words, anything that the US Govt chooses to spend money on, it already can, with little oversight and no limits. That's why collecting additional revenue from billionaires, or any other source, has no effect whatsoever on how that govt spends (or "redistributes") money. US Govt's priorities are military, social security (which actually does keep many older people out of poverty), healthcare, and paying interest on its debt. You'll need to change the core priorities (including reducing deficit & debt) before collecting more money actually goes towards the goals you're seeking.

> This is the kind of extreme internet Libertarianism that's dangerous in the real world.

Saying there is no objective definition of fairness and then calling out the unfairness in your idea is "extreme internet Libertarianism"?

No, it's just common sense.

I was referring to their rejection of the progressive tax system. I can concede there's no objective definition.

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