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Comment by Fins | Hacker News Reader

And that 90% was effective, not marginal rate? Talk about being daft...

Obviously it's marginal, and so is this whole argument, tax massive amounts of wealth (at that time it was anything over 200k (2 million in today's dollars at 90%), not your average Joe. Keep grasping at straws. And yeah make as much as you want...

* make 2 million = get 1 million (50%)

* make 3 million = get 1.1 million (63%)

* 10 million = get 1.8 million (82%)

* 100 million = get 11 million (89.1%)

* 1 billion = get 101 million (89.9%)

Make as much as you want.

It is grasping at the straws indeed, to try to come up with any kind of justification for a scheme like this. Esp. when it would be pretty obvious to anyone who bothers to check, that people with that kind of "money" do not have it as cash they got as a salary, but rather as assets (stock). Do you propose taxing unrealized gains? Or simply confiscating assets when they appreciate "too much"?

The only positive I can see here is that this will kill SV for good. Unfortunately it will also kill most real innovation as well.

It does not make sense to take control away from people who are running companies and have all their assets tied up in them like Zuckerberg, Bezos, et. al. This is a disasterous recipe for sure. But once they are not longer doing that or especially when they die it's easy enough to tax it then. And yes it would wipe up some venture capital, but that's already going gangbusters. It went from 25 billion to 90 billion in 10 years, 4x growth. So yes it would reduce some of that.

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Screen-Sho...

But isn't this what the original proposal in this thread was? Setting an upper limit for how much an individual can hold?

Apart from technical difficulties in determining if someone is still running the company, or just pretending to, what would the upside be from implementing something like that, apart form making those who like counting money in other peoples' pockets happy?

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