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Comment by nullocator | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with taxing billionaires? Seems like it could meaningfully move the needle on a number of issues.

The problem isn’t the policy, it’s that taxing billionaires is portrayed as a primary solution to pay for new spending. Just like Trump points to cutting waste and fraud as the way to balance the budget or pay for tax cuts. It’s pointing to a relatively small source of potential revenue to justify large increases in spending. It’s like deflecting discussion about housing prices by telling people to cut back on eating out. You probably do spend more than you think on eating out and delivery. But that’s not a real response to the actual question.

These are strategies for people who get confused about the differences between billions and trillions. For example, 74% of people who support medicare for all think it could be paid for entirely by taxing billionaires: https://echeloninsights.com/hubfs/_Media%20for%20Insights%20.... That’s off by an order of magnitude

We have to raise taxes $2 trillion in the first year to balance the budget, even with no new spending. Realistically, we need to raise taxes $3-4 trillion to balance the budget and pay for universal healthcare and childcare. Nobody is talking about how to do that. Ironically, Trump’s tariffs have raised triple the estimated annual tax revenue of AOC’s 70% marginal tax rate proposal from 2019, and about as much as Warren’s wealth tax proposal would have in the first year.

In the quest for political power, you can't spend what you don't have — and that could well be the foremost benefit of near-confiscatory taxation of the ultra-rich, much as we did in the 1950s and early 1960s. Perhaps then the drive for status might take forms other than the urge to pile up more and more wealth as a sign of one's superiority.

Perhaps these people don't want to tax billionaires enough.

No, it’s because the government already spends Elon Musk’s entire net worth every single month. It’s also mostly not real money. Government spending pays for stuff that exists today. Someone on SNAP can’t eat the notional valuation of a company calculated based on anticipated profits decades into the future. Wealth taxes essentially attempt to tax profits from future production to pay for consumption today. All that will do is create inflation.

People have this fixation on wealth taxes because it's a bigger number. But it's very third world thinking--people who want to eat the seeds instead of saving them to plant next year. Just tax income enough to raise the tax revenue you need.

Weird how it seemed to work out okay, without only creating inflation from the 1930s-1980s right up until Ronald Reagan and the Republicans decided it couldn't possibly work anymore. We can all see how well that switch has gone; or at least most of us can.

The U.S. has never had wealth taxes. We had high marginal rates. But as noted in the sibling comment it didn’t actually raise more money.

If you wanted to go to high marginal rates on income, that’s the AOC 70% top margin rate proposal I mentioned above. Even optimistic estimates are that it would raise like $30-70 billion a year. We need to raise taxes by 30-50 times as much just to close the budget deficit.

Sounds like 70 billion a year (by your optimistic estimates) towards narrowing the deficit, that ain't nothing!

And what _I_ actually want to do is tax all the individual billionaires out of existence and also have a high marginal rate on income, because why not both?

Billionaires didn't pay any more taxes between 1930s and 1980s than they do now. Moreover, during Reagan presidency, total government tax revenues as percentage of GDP were *higher* than between 1930 and 1980.

You are simply illustrating rayiner's point: you don't understand the financial side of running the government, you have no knowledge of actual figures, neither current nor historical, but believe that taxing rich guys even more will solve all the problems we have.

I didn't say it would solve all the problems, I said it would move the needle.

I guess you're right, I don't understand. We mustn't tax the wealthiest people, and no amount of actual figures is going to convince people like you folks otherwise, not when there are billionaires to glaze.

I've been alive for quite a while now, and my actual _lived experience_ is republicans have cut taxes on the wealthy every time they've been in power for decades and decades, but sure keep trying to convince us that "billionaires are paying more taxes than ever!" and that ackshually it's the damn poors who aren't being taxed enough!

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