rayiner

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.

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.

Why can’t they rewrite Teams as native apps using AI? How in the world of AI can Teams still be such a total shit memory/CPU hog product?

It's used for background checks to identify relevant criminal records, debt records, etc.

The community of countries that are "good at direct political action" (i.e. rioting) include places like Bangladesh, where an unholy alliance of Islamists and college students recently overthrew the government. Not a group you want to be in.

Democrats are better at the top. But the grassroots is visibly trending towards ethnic machine politics, which is very third world. A lot of grassroots-level Democratic messaging would be illegal under Singapore’s system for maintaining unity in its multiethnic society: https://amp.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3329017/sing...

> the free stuff started to be delivered a couple of years after that when FDR took office (and many howled in protest).

Yes, and it got locked into the system because mass immigration changed the ideological composition of the country. Our current massive peacetime deficits dates back to Reagan’s compromise to win over Catholics and white ethnics (those were the “Reagan democrats”). Catholics had voted as a bloc for democrats for the better part of a century (JFK won 80% of their vote). Reagan this pivoted to tax cuts, social conservatism and anti-communism, which could unify catholics, evangelical whites, and much of the old Anglo and German GOP. But he could never push meaningful spending cuts because it would blow up the coalition.

The Bay Area has always had good weather. But the suburbs of Silicon Valley used to be the stereotypical idyllic middle class suburbs. That’s why the housing stock is so shitty: much of it is cookie cutter mid 20th century mass produced homes. What changed it was tech company money.

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.

If people can’t understand basic facts like how much money there is to be saved or taxed in various places they certainly can’t understand what you’re saying.

You’re coming up with all this theory and labeling to avoid the simpler conclusion that the right’s views are just based on looking at the country immigrants are coming from. That’s the proof of the pudding. (Selective immigration obviously has nothing to do with that.) The right likes Japan and, increasingly, China because they are orderly and developed countries and doesn't like Bangladesh because it isn't. It’s not because they’ve concocted some rubric of cranial measurements under which one group is “model minorities” and the others aren’t.

Nobody will do anything about it. American politics runs on promising voters free stuff without higher taxes (“no taxes on tips”). Meanwhile, the people are innumerate. Half the country thinks you can balance the budget by cutting out “fraud and waste” and the other half thinks you can do it by “taxing billionaires.” Everyone is too ignorant about the world outside the U.S. to look at what middle class taxes look like in places like Sweden or France that offer all the social services they want here.

It’ll also keep getting worse as the country fractures into more and more blocs that can be kept together only through the promise of more free stuff that someone else will pay for.

> the actual reason is neither of those things. It's because not enough housing was built.

The supply demand equation has two sides. If you give a substantial chunk of the population way higher incomes in the face of only slowly growing supply, then you see skyrocketing prices. That’ll happen especially around the centers of knowledge work, which is exactly what you’re seeing.

The town where I grew up didn’t become unaffordable because of Jeff Bezos. It was because of all the Google engineers making 10x the median income.

> "Making everyone poor is fairer to the poor" is a curious idea that I've seen you express several times on HN recently…

> Given your previous opposition to communism and socialism I wonder why you have apparently changed your beliefs

I haven’t changed my beliefs. I don’t trust “socialists” who would use government machinery to artificially make people equal. But if technology and the market renders natural human inequality irrelevant, I’m all for that. Industrial machinery went a long way to making the physical strength differences between men and women irrelevant. That was a step forward. If AI renders natural differences in intelligence irrelevant too, that would also be a step forward.

Why would they view certain asians as a "model minority?" Are they deciding based on cranial measurements? Or is it because Japan, China, etc., are orderly and developed--in which case it's not about "race" at all, is it?

Lawyer, before that a programmer. Statements are contrary to interest.

Elimination of these jobs is going to be good for everyone else. It's going to reduce the unearned returns to people born with high IQs and aptitude for coding or lawyering or whatever, and reduce upper middle class wages. That, in turn, will drive down prices. The reason housing is unaffordable isn't Jeff Bezos. It's because 20% or so of workers get paid very disproportionately to everyone else and they've been bidding up the price of housing. If Google could fire all their engineers housing would become much more affordable for everyone else in the Bay Area (like it was decades ago before engineering salaries got so high). It'll be more like Iowa or South Dakota is today.

Yes. It’s also why the right loves Japan and, increasingly, China.

According to Blue Rose Research’s 2024 post mortem, Trump narrowly won naturalized citizens. In a way that illustrates the problem.

The countries most immigrants come from have both liberals and conservatives. Immigration can’t change the long-term political balance. What it does instead is change what kind of left or right wing candidate is viable. The Bush/Romney GOP would have been wiped out in a landslide under 2024’s demographics. But Trump was able to win Nevada and rack up the margin in diverse states like Texas and Florida with stupid policies like “no taxes on tips.” Theatrics, handouts, and patronage is how politics works in most countries immigrants come from. Trump can play that game, the old Anglo GOP couldn’t.

Over time, American politics will more begin to resemble the politics of the places the immigrants are coming from, with guys like Mamdani instead of Carter and Trump instead of Reagan.

The Harvard-Harris survey linked above asks separately about “deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes.” Support for that was at 78% in July.

There was opposition to Noem’s theatrics. But it seems like Mullen’s quieter approach has taken the heat off and most of the focus now is on the shit inflation and Iran war.

"1 billion Americans" is different than "filling America with 1 billion people." Decades from now, people like Yglesias will be living in the wreckage of their idealistic beliefs about nationhood and they'll be like "but true mass immigration has never been tried."

It's based on the state of the countries they came from, not skin color.

The ICE theatrics under Noem was unpopular. The underlying policy of mass deportations has been consistently popular: https://harvardharrispoll.com/assets/uploads/2026/07/HHP_Jul... (p. 22).

"Deporting all immigrants who are here illegally" was polling at 55% approve/45% disapprove as recently as July.

> People are moving to the states not because it's a great country, it's because they're able to make money there.

How are people with that mentality--here for the money, but don't buy into the underlying concepts--going to affect the civic structure of the U.S.?

Gallup does this survey regularly, and I think perhaps the most interesting thing on the chart is how few people in south and east asia (around 10%) want to leave even if they had the opportunity to do so. I think that says something about the psychology of people who do leave their countries.

Ordinary people having “living space” is a capitalist invention. I remember staying one night in my dad’s village in Bangladesh—a country where socialism is one of the pillars of the constitution—in one of the tin-roof houses. Half a dozen people sleeping on the floor in maybe 300 square feet. Third world villages in rice-farming parts of the world are very socialist.[1] They share resources and nobody gets ahead of anyone else.

The cookie-cutter 1950s northern virginia house my brother and I grew up in was 1,100 square feet. We were upper middle class, with two college educated parents. Adjusted for CPI inflation, I paid less for our house in 2016 that’s three times the size.

People aren’t mad about “capitalism.” They’re mad about the knowledge work industries that pay a large fraction of the population so much better than everyone else that everyone is priced out of the communities where they grew up. After Google moved into Northern VA, prices skyrocketed and the same shitty 1,100 square foot house is $900,000. Shitty 1950s houses in what used to be drab faceless suburbs in the Bay Area are $2,000,000. In a way the knowledge work industry is capitalism’s fault too, but not in the way people think.

[1] https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol4/iss1/7/

I saw a Tik Tok that said something like “capitalism gives society marvels faster than socialism can declare them human rights.” In 50 years Mamdani’s grandkids will be saying that universal AI tokens are a human right.

The animals aren’t eating the same processed food, etc.

With birth rates collapsing around the world in completely different cultures, why isn’t anyone looking hard at the pollution angle?

I’m not implying anything. I’m just talking about trends in affiliation over time. E.g.: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/significant-figures/the....

Note that in most places besides Korea, the male/female political divide is driven more by unmarried women becoming more liberal.