Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

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EDIT: you updated your comment considerably since my reply! The below was a reply to a simpler version of the parent comment. I don't disagree with what you've just written.

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Before edit:

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So why don't the ruling rich make it so that up to $100,000 everyone pays under the current tax regime, but any income over $100k is taxed at 0% (since you've already fully paid your share to the country, i.e. on the first $100K), meaning earning $500K or $5M per year gives the same tax burden?

Nobody would vote for such a tax regime. That's why we don't have it.

Your idea idea that there is a ruling class ("dynasty like Rothschild etc") that can do whatever they want is simply not true. The country is much more democratic than that. I might as well suggest that there is a secret absolute dictator who can do whatever they want. (Also not true.)

I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's pretty obvious there isn't a ruling class even close to being able to set tax rates for themselves - or they would do so. Why do you think they don't? They can't.

I think it's more insidious than that. Of course it's not done on earned income. That would be too transparent for the general public to see. Instead you create a lot of financial instruments with varying degrees of complication that all have rules for avoiding taxation while still providing yields. Even better if it takes expensive and exclusive accountants and lawyers to conceive, establish, and protect these.

This way you get to give appearance of the wealthy doing their part in a progressive tax while really only subjecting a small or zero amount of their wealth to it.

well I don't disagree with you, but I don't know that I can agree to using the term "ruling class". Does every set of influencers constitute a ruling class?

So, purely for entertainment, how much money one needs, on a population on a billion in developed countries, to influence the democratically elected leaders in 20 countries?

A lot.

Also a lot of tact. If you just leave a check on somebody's desk, you're calling him a crook, and few crooks enjoy being called crooks; it works better to hire a politician for a speech somewhere, or offer him a seat on a board of directors or a well-paid job with a charity when he leaves office, or put in a word on his children's behalf with the director of an exclusive private school, or something like that...

The Saudis make an absolute art form of this, acting as a patron to the whole of DC. There are some memorable books about this.

There's an old folk belief in the Anglosphere, that the rich are less corruptible than the poor. (In 16th-century England, the legal definition of "an honest man" was one who had an income from land and investments of ten pounds or more: maybe equivalent to $100,000-$400,000 today.) This belief isn't true, at least not most of the time; but the art of deniable bribery gives a hint of where it came from.

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