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Comment by prostoalex | Hacker News Reader

Generally speaking, an economy that depends on such a small number of participants for financing is setting itself up for unpredictable revenue stream, which results in pretty rough times when some of those guys decide to take the rest of the year off, or "spend more time with the family".

US wealth calculations are also so heavily biased towards real estate prices that any year house prices head downwards, the balance of wealth shifts towards the top. Any time the housing markets stabilize and grow, everybody is suddenly more equal.

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The chart shows that the top 1%, which the 3 million people making over $615K/year, pay 45.7% of the income tax.

For people with $1 million/year or higher of income, most of the income is from sources other than salaries and wages. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/2000134-compositi... .

If all 3 million people decided to take a year off then the worst case would be a 20% drop in income tax or 10% drop in the US tax revenue.

More than likely, some of the people under 99% would suddenly have new jobs, with a higher income.

I find it hard to think of 3 million people as a small enough number to be in the unpredictable range for a ~1 year fluctuations. 300? Certainly. 30,000? Maybe. But the 1% is still the population of Iowa.

> If all 3 million people decided to take a year off

Well, the risk here is over-dependence on capital gains. Not only it's a voluntary tax with people choosing simply not to sell, or sell less than they originally intended to, economic downturns bring in capital losses, which can be deducted against the gains, which then accounts for dramatically volatile shifts in capital gains revenues.

You're right, though, the situation is much more distributed within that 1%, and thank you for the graph.

And we know the work they were doing will not be filled by anyone else.

Sure, the revenue structure based on the assumption "10 guys, most of them hedge fund managers, will make over a billion dollars, guaranteed" seems sustainable.

Most of such income is off one-time events http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2013/12/20/mark-zucke... You can hope they're repeatable, and that works during the boom years, but during the bust years it becomes a "California double whammy" - not only your projections are over-blown, but the high-income tax events (which tend to be IPOs or big hedge fund wins, judging by the caliber of people stuck with multi-billion dollar tax bills) have also been eradicated by a stagnating/falling economy.

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