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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Instead of relying on billionaire's whims I'd rather we taxed them more and used CDC's and NIH's epidemiology and scientist's opinions to fund research that benefits society the most.

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Hard disagree.

The CDC and NIH undoubtedly do great work, but they are one model and thus a single point of failure.

I'd much rather see dozens of more or less eccentric billionaires put money into other things and other ways of organizing and incentivizing research and problem solving.

You want to tax all 536 billionaires? Capital gains perhaps?

I’m not exactly sure why everyone middle class and above wouldn’t want to pay a little more for more medical research. We’ll all likely benefit. The ”let’s just tax the rich” is only going to get us so far.

Any stronger taxation scheme to make the rich pay their share is probably fine.

I personally prefer a small financial transaction tax.

In the United States:

The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent).

The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of total individual income taxes.

The top 1% was 1.4 million returns in 2016. The top 50% is 140.9 million returns.

How much is "fair"?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/top-3-of-...

Income tax is also hardly the only tax wealthy people pay. It's probably the least interesting tax to consider.

I keep reading people talking about billionaires "hoarding" their money, as if it was just sitting in a vault like Scrooge McDuck and not being reinvested in countless businesses, while only a small percentage is going towards their 'luxury' lifestyle (which they also assume goes all into useless flashy cars and fashion like lower-tier wealthy celebrities they see on TV who also frequently happen to end up broke... for some reason).

We should tax that consumption, not the investments the return value and therefore jobs, technology, science, etc to society). Or focus on the far wealthier corporations who pay no direct tax through various financial trickery and/or incentives to off-shore it instead of keeping it locally to spend (although most still pay tons in taxes through other means).

neither income nor consumption should be taxed, instead, consider taxing that which we do not produce via the work of our own hands, such as land value (which ultimately comes from nature/the productivity of the surrounding community).

Consumption should very much be taxed considering it is the simplest way to claw back all the environmental externalities in an ever polluted world with no one willing to take responsibility.

if you really want to do that levy a carbon tax or a packaging tax or something more direct

a consumption tax would also penalize transactions that might decrease environmental impact e.g. solar panels, or of tools used in the construction of a composting toilet, those being easy, obvious examples.

I'm always here for the Georgist takes. Wish the LVT was as politically feasible as a VAT.

So I agree if a 1 percenter is paying 37.3% on their income, they are paying enough.

But that's not how it works for the top of that tier once you're living primarily off complicated capital gains and financial instruments, and it's disingenuous IMO to lump this all together.

Even my conservative (mostly) tax-hating friends are not happy seeing occasional individuals pay 5% or less, which they do, through a variety of tax loopholes and shelters. And because of this, the richest Americans, the top 0.001%, on average, pay at a lower rate than the rest of the 1%.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldurkheimer/2018/03/01/0-...

I said I prefer a financial transaction tax. That is not an income tax, but something that taxes (at a reasonable rate) the churn in our stock markets. It greatly dissuades front-running and HFT.

It hits the corporates and rich where they actually care (passive gains), while not increasing the tax load of anyone's income (active renumeration).

FTT's are retarded and are very bad for any nation's financial sector. Instead, tax capital gains higher.

"If it was up to the NIH to cure polio through a centrally directed program instead of independent investigator driven discovery, you'd have the best iron lung in the world, but not a polio vaccine." -Samuel Broder, former Director of the National Cancer Institute

How are the independent investigators financed if not mainly through taxes?

Publisher Gerard Piel credited [Basil] O'Connor with a "unique social invention: a permanently self-sustaining source of funds for the support of research — the voluntary health organization." With a centralized administration, state and local chapters and a large corps of volunteers, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis became the prototype for dozens of similar foundations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes

Why CDC and NIH instead of the EPA?

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