Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandoooo | Hacker News Reader

Everybody is focused on the superrich, it's a convenient target. But how many Zuckerbergean fortunes does it take to balance the books on medicare? What's to stop him from migrating to the EU if it saves a few billion dollars?

The real extractable money is in the middle class, whose wealth passes through government-controlled bank accounts. Of course, when the time comes the lefties will be all "well actually anyone making above 80k is superrich - have you seen the homeless lately? CYP!"

>They are advocating basic healthcare and education, not exactly consumer services.

You could either give them the money directly, in which case it'll go to consumer services. Or you can subsidize their healthcare, in which case they will use the money they save on consumer services. The difference is that the government has a long track record of inefficiency and waste when it comes to subsidies.

View on HN

> Everybody is focused on the superrich, it's a convenient target.

It's a convenient target because the super-rich have never had as much wealth and power in the entire history of the U.S. as they do now. Inequality is worse now than it has ever been.

Consider an extreme hypothetical, where one person in a country has all the wealth, and everyone else has zero. That obviously cannot sustain a functional democracy. Now consider the other extreme, where everyone is mandated to have exactly the same amount as everyone else. Both are distpoian, but we are far closer to the former than the latter.

Have you done the math, though? Consider the not so extreme nonhypothetical of how many Zuks it would take to make Medicare/Social Security solvent.

The only way to make an amount of extra taxmonies actually worth getting up for is to tax the middle class. Alas, economics is not a zero-sum game, some people have invest their wealth to actually produce stuff to make it all work, and this mostly comes from the wealth of the middle class.

> Have you done the math, though?

I haven't but others have (e.g. Warren). A 2% wealth tax on assets over $50M will generate $3.75T over 10 years. Even if the actual number is half of that, it's still plenty to pay for many progressive programs.

Source: https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/ultra-millionaire-tax

The total number of billionaires in the US will drop to zero a week before this is passed into law (or maybe one or two, the remaining being people who have decided that ultra-virtue-signalling-slash-conspicuous-consumption is worth 6%/yr and who have nevertheless squirreled away most of their wealth into various nonprofits and the like), and the number of people with assets over $100m will dropped to maybe 5%. Unless they plan to retroactively tax people fleeing before the law passes, I doubt it will generate one-twentieth that amount. A person with asset of $100m will be paying $1m/year under that system. Uprooting yourself from the US is painful, but $1m/year soothes a whole lot of pain. Even more so for billionaires.

If it does become law, though, I fully expect that $50m ceiling to come down year by year as the economic situation worsens until sub-$1m. Or maybe they keep it the same and hyperinflation will meet it on the way up for the same net result.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com