Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

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I feel like you and GP are both right.

A ton of high school graduates can't do basic math (which also explains their economic illiteracy, like believing that just taxing billionaires more would fix everything[1]).

And also at the same time, we demand college degrees for white-collar jobs that anyone who completed the alleged requirements to graduate high school could totally do. I think this stems from an outdated belief that college is difficult and challenging, and therefore getting through it proves you're exceptionally clever. A notion that has been a joke for at least 15 years if not 20.

So everything is fake. The diplomas are fake, the degrees are fake, and the job requirements are fake. All of it is being used to come up with legal and justifiable ways to pick the people with sufficient brain cells to be entrusted with job responsibilities.

[1] Most college graduates would likely get this question orders of magnitude wrong: If you could split the full net worth of the top 10 billionaires equally among every man, woman, and child in America how big would each one's check be? Correct answer: Just over $6,000. (Of course, we'll ignore how to deal with the market crash caused by forcing the sudden liquidation of their 2 trillion dollars in assets.)

Does going to college and learning say, compilers or differential equations not have value? Your employer won't teach you. Please don't tell me the heat equation is fake.

I think they're saying that learning compilers, differential equations, or the heat equation aren't actually that relevant for getting a mid-level procurement job or becoming the manager of a hotel.

I mean that's what a reasonable person might write but that's not what the parent comment actually wrote.

Imagine trying to advance that the proposition of taxing billionaires is negatable on basic math. That's a critical thinking error, probably compounded by a lack of education in humanities and civilization not a basic math problem.

Tax them, don't tax them, I don't care. But you can't argue with the math that a one-time $6k or even $12k per person will not pay for the welfare state the DNC keeps promising us. Please, prove me wrong, show me the math of how you're going to take the billionaires' money (even discounting the fact it'll destroy every retirement account when that market shock happens) and pay for free college for all, double pay for teachers, triple the minimum wage, give free houses to everyone who can't afford them now.

The point isn't whether they should pay a higher tax rate (probably they should!) -- it's whether it would be massively transformative to our society if/when we enacted that. I argue it is not. Pretending it is, is the Marxist fringe's version of the welfare queen or the illegal immigrant murderer that the right-wing people try to bamboozle their base with. We could eliminate all welfare fraud and all immigrant criminals by magic and it wouldn't make our society wildly better. It would be a small improvement.

taxing billionaires isn't just about redistributing their money. it's about changing the objective functions that motivate the ultrawealthy.

when they see diminishing returns for increasing their net worth, they might think "hey, maybe instead of using my immense resources to further enrich myself i should do... anything else"

All right, but since I’ve pointed out that it won’t solve any of the main structural issues in our economy to even fully eliminate the billionaire class, what’s the purpose to society of coercing them to stop acquiring money? Just envy?

> discounting the fact it'll destroy every retirement account when that market shock happens

You're correct on the fact that taxing billionaires doesn't generate meaningful revenue. You're wrong that it would prompt a stock-market crash.

If one raised top tax rates in a revenue-neutral way, one would expect it to massively boost the economy and thus the stock market. You'd have unlocked more money for high-velocity spenders.

> You're wrong that it would prompt a stock-market crash.

It certainly would.

Where do you think those billionaires would get the money to pay the tax? It’s not like they have billions of dollars in cash somewhere; they’d sell assets. Those assets are predominately stock. Selling off that much stock at once would absolutely disrupt the markets.

Well most talk of taxing billionaires involves capital gains taxes, not one time wealth taxes, and the serious lefties care more about nationalizing their assets than taxing them.

But yeah, the imaginary tax proposals invented in this thread may or may not work out, i wouldn't call anything about them "certain" though

> Selling off that much stock at once would absolutely disrupt the markets

...don't do this.

The combined net worth of America's billionaires is about $7tn. Let's assume half of that is in public stocks. That's $3.5tn. That's about what retail investors alone bought "in the first six months of 2025" [1].

Given the fundamentals of the companies wouldn't have changed, this would be a massive opportunity for institutional investors to deploy capital. (If you didn't do the tax in a revenue-neutral manner, you'd free up tonnes of capital from Treasury demand.)

One might expect a dip in companies where a single billionaire holds a large fraction of the float, e.g. Tesla, Amazon, et cetera. But broadly speaking, these aren't numbers which–even if compressed to a single year, which isn't how you'd pass such legislation–would cause a crash.

There are good arguments against super taxes. Crashing the stock market isn't one of them.

[1] https://invezz.com/news/2025/07/07/retail-investors-defy-hea...

Well most of the people you're strawmanning also support raising corporate taxes, and generally also on millionaires. I get that the imaginary blue haired nonbinary public school grad in your head exclusively uses the word "billionaire," though.

What world do you live in where the DNC is promising people a welfare state? They've been dismantling the one they had since before i was born.

100K per family by my math. Don't know why you believe that only the top 10 billionaires have too much personal wealth.

Why does society need to create a increasingly out of touch class of people that think they are morally justified in telling people how to live their lives. The simple fact is that if the government didn't give these people billions in subsidies we would never have to hear them bloviate, Musk, Farely, all these rich A-Holes keeping America stuck in the local minima of car ownership would be utterly irrelevant.

> Why does society need to create an increasingly out of touch class of people that think they are morally justified in telling people how to live their lives.

Is that a… libertarian argument for wealth confiscation?

Why does government need to take a bunch of people’s money for no reason other than “because I’m mad you have more money than me”? Or I suppose the motivation you described is actually that we don’t like how influential successful people are. So, should everyone whose opinion we don’t like be treated this way?

There are rich and poor in every society and always have been - it’s not a government failing to have income inequality. In extreme socialist regimes, the government officials themselves are always the ultra-wealthy - because they make the rules on who gets to keep their money and their choice is “Me.”

Taxing the living shit out of billionaires won’t fix everything, but it’s absolutely the first thing we should do.

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