Comment by willholloway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willholloway | Hacker News Reader

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60% of the poor don't collect income reportable on a w2 form. That does not mean they do not engage in productive activities that produce cash.

There is a huge informal cash and barter economy of legal goods, and another one for illegal goods.

And yes, the tax man will sell your home out from under you in a tax sale if you do not pay property taxes for long enough.

All of us live under a sword of damocles in regards to cash flow. You gotta keep putting quarters in the meter to live in modern capitalism.

I define rich as those who have sufficient wealth in financial instruments and assets such as treasury bonds and equities to pay for their lifestyle without the need to collect 1099 or w2 income.

They are the only ones who truly do not work, the only ones who can truly sit back and relax. They are the real loafers, the true moochers, and the laziest of all classes of society, I also have the ambition to become one myself, but I will have no pretensions that I would be engaged in anything other than having found a way to have others serve me, no different than any lord or pharoah or emperor, and in fact with much greater security and ease.

So you're saying that we overestimate poverty because the poor engage in extensive tax evasion/disability/welfare/unemployment fraud? And that if we properly tracked work activities by the poor, that poverty would be a much smaller problem than it really is?

Good to know. How large do you think this problem is?

I define rich as those who have sufficient wealth in financial instruments and assets such as treasury bonds and equities to pay for their lifestyle without the need to collect 1099 or w2 income.

Numbers please. How many such people are there?

What percentage of the 15.6 million officially non-working poor do you believe are actually committing tax/disability/welfare/unemployment fraud?

Now lets compare the numbers.

They are the only ones who truly do not work, the only ones who can truly sit back and relax. They are the real loafers, the true moochers, and the laziest of all classes of society...

So a person who produces X resources in year 1 and 0 resources in year 2, but consumes X/2 in both year 1 and 2 is a moocher? Um, ok. That's an interesting definition, to say the least.

> So you're saying that we overestimate poverty because the poor engage in extensive tax evasion/disability/welfare/unemployment fraud? And that if we properly tracked work activities by the poor, that poverty would be a much smaller problem than it really is?

No, Im saying that almost all poor people work, they have various hustles to get by. Most of them are not illegal activities, but yes for the most part these are untaxed cash transactions.

Even the homeless man on the corner with a sign is engaged in a form of work, as it is an active process that takes time, and if they did not do it, they would not have money.

Is it productive, no not very, but the good ones provide entertainment in the form of funny signs, stories or puns. I have donated to quite a few who made me smile on my trip across America.

It does less harm than many respectable professions.

And yes, if you are living off the dividend payments from S&P 500 companies that you neither created, work in nor manage, you are mooching.

It's a respectable mooch, for sure, but a mooch none the less.

What else can we call Sam Waltons heirs other than epic mooches?

Tens of thousands of people toil everday for them, all over the world. They have expert MBA's manage the entire operation for them. The pharoahs themselves didn't have such a great system of exploitation of labor.

My main point in all of this is to be aware of class biases in our perception, and the ideology that comes from, and mainly that we should stop beating up on the poor and scolding them.

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