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Comment by g_sch | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is a bit too narrow in their definition of "political clout". They seem to define it as the ability to personally influence federal policy. However, as a class, people with $4M in wealth or more have an immense amount of political clout. Most contemporary US local, state, and even federal policies are geared toward attracting and retaining these people. Think property tax caps, mortgage interest deductions, zoning, traffic and transit policy...etc.

If you have $4M in wealth, you might not be able to personally call up a lawmaker and get them to pass your pet law, but governments everywhere are bending over backward for you and people like you.

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Remember the audience is doctors. Doctors make bank but work hard and don't have the time to participate in the political process.

A small/mid time real estate guy with a similar net worth will have much more political clout because he has the time to do political events and interact with that strata of people.

This is such a weird, backwards way of framing the situation.

People in that income/wealth group fund essentially the entire government budget while also costing essentially nothing, so of course there is an incentive to retain them, but generally governments are trying to just stop one cent short of bleeding them so dry that they move away.

In 2018: "The top 1 percent paid a greater share of the federal tax revenue (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent)." Put another way - your local school would be in trouble if all you had were families on $40k sending 3 kids to public school, it's being funded by the family on $300k and sending their kid to a separate private school.

> In 2018: "The top 1 percent paid a greater share of the federal tax revenue (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent)." Put another way - your local school would be in trouble if all you had were families on $40k sending 3 kids to public school, it's being funded by the family on $300k and sending their kid to a separate private school.

This kind of statistic would benefit from being balanced against the share of income and/or wealth held by the top 1%. Taking wealth, for example: the top 1% owns 35% of the wealth in the USA as of 2014. [0]

This proportion has been increasing over time, so even if governments were attempting to "bleed[] them dry" (I don't believe they are), they're not doing so very effectively.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

My local school would have problems if that were the case, but median income is over 100,000 in my district.

All local schools basically get money from their surrounding households, and high income families live in entirety different zipcodes from low income ones.

$4M in wealth is certainly enough to get a lawmaker to pass a "pet law" - some minor change to a zoning code or regulatory infrastructure that matters for your business. At least, if there's no concerted opposition to your pet law.

In my opinion, the easiest way to have personal influence on federal policy is to be willing to spend your twenties working for peanuts on the Hill. Those staffers are the ones doing most of the real work.

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