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Comment by wakawaka28 | Hacker News Reader

No, it's not. He will not be paying that. He might have paid a smaller yet still large amount, but he's certainly not going to work in McDonalds to pay off $1 billion dollars. He has the same legal rights as anyone else to not be a debt slave.

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I don’t think they’ll throw him in jail if he sells off all his assets, pays everything he can, but refuses to work a job so he can pay more.

Being liable for an amount more than you have means the people you owe won’t be able to get the full amount, but it doesn’t mean you get to keep all your stuff and pay them nothing.

It's called garnishment [1]

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

Garnishment is taking a portion of income, not taking the actual source of it. No business means no income, no income means no garnishment. I love how you cite Wikipedia as if grown adults here have never heard of garnishment. Then again education really is going downhill these days I guess.

Taking away some amount of wages is very much a thing, as everyone who ever divorced can tell you. You better not ask how math works there, because it’s not fun.

As I said to someone else, taking some feasible payment from income is different from rendering someone unemployed. If you took a construction worker's tools, a taxi drivers car, or anything like that, then you put them out of business and render them incapable of paying. As far as divorce or child support, the same principle applies (or ought to). If the worker cannot sustain himself and his necessary expenses, he will become unemployed and incapable of paying.

Well, the catch is, you may not like what the judge decides is feasible. At least in the divorce cases the interests of the parties have to be balanced, here they don't have to be.

This happens all the time. It's super super common, not even accounting for pre trial detention leading to job loss for innocent people.

We should fix that system, but like, why is Alex Jones the one to get hung up on?

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