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Comment by Glyptodon | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, people always say "Why should I pay more in taxes? It's not fair, they should be flat and the same for everybody!" and I'm always like "Do you have just as much to lose in a French Revolution scenario? You should be happy to pay more if it leads to more social stability."

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The top 1% pay something like half our taxes. What share do you think is fairer?

How about equally to their share of national income?

It should be in proportion to how many % of the wealth they own. So more like 90%

The 1% earn 36% of the income[1] as of 2016, and pay 37% of the taxes[2]. Everyone happy now?

[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...

[2] https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...

Income != wealth

Indeed, many billionaire and multimillionaire CEOs famously take a salary of $1. Bezos takes a salary of around $80k, IIRC. And, I'm not even sure if Bill Gates is taking a salary at all these days.

Income is taxed.

But the top 1% own much more than 37% of the wealth (and accordingly receive much more than 37% of the financial benefits of government spending) while only paying 37% of the taxes (which fund that government spending).

> and accordingly receive much more than 37% of the financial benefits of government spending

what?

They wouldn't have all that wealth if it wasn't for infrastructure, an educated population, a stable political situation, continual bailouts, and the world's largest war machine.

e.g. aircraft carriers

The wealthy produce more income via capital gains, which are taxed at lower rates. They also have greater access to tax deferred and tax free options. A married couple of high earners with a good retirement plan at work can put nearly 150,000 annually in accounts that grow tax free.

They will simply leave, or destroy the system.

How do you imagine this would work? Would no one in America found companies anymore? Would the government sit by and allow the to leave? How would companies like health insurance leave?

Imagining that the richest can hold a country like the US hostage is preposterous.

No, they would try to make a bunch of shell corps and have only 1% in each corp. Distributing the wealth (to other entities that they control less directly). It would essentially just destroy brand recognition for large companies.

They're welcome to leave. Society doesn't need rich people.

Destroying the system would do more damage, but so far it's been their system that enables their accumulation of wealth. There are a lot of poor people who want to destroy that system.

Like Sanders says, when half a million people are homeless, our healthcare system is a joke, and our infrastructure is unmaintained, we have a LOT of work to do. And a lot of spending.

There is a far-left opinion that there should be no such thing as a billionaire, that a single human's marginal tax rate should hit 100% at some point. I wouldn't say "never" to the idea at this point.

> our infrastructure is unmaintained

Bernie supporters are generally the least likely to get their hands dirty and do the kind of work necessary to build and maintain infrastructure. Pretty much everyone I meet that does that kind of work is Republican. Not saying this is a universal truth, but it's a somewhat accurate generalization.

Source for party affiliation by a sampling of occupations:

http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/

I don't respect your assertion. Not a lot of work to do when it's unfunded.

Also looking through your other comments, you seem to question peoples' sources on things without providing any for your own.

For posterity, the link was added after I commented and he probably downvoted me.

This is of course the big issue with infrastructure. The problem isn't the people doing the work, the problem is that they need to get paid for doing the work. Funding infrastructure is a political decision.

Responding to "our infrastructure is unmaintained" with "Bernie supporters won't be in the jobs actually doing the building because I found this cool infographic showing that bartenders lean Democratic and beer wholesalers lean Republican" is beyond mere non-sequitur into genuine weirdness.

It's not like our infrastructure problems are new, or weren't remarked on before 2016. They've been building for decades. They were there in the Obama administration, and the Bush administration, and the Clinton administration, and the other Bush administration, and the Reagan administration. Do you think the problem through all those years was our critical shortage of leftist construction workers?

Neither bartender nor beer distributor are building infrastructure.

That list actually does a good job comparing related professions. For example, while home builders lean Republican, architects lean Democrat. Plumbers Republican, carpenters Democrat. I don't see this support your assertion at all. Road workers or bridge builders are not listed at all.

> Road workers or bridge builders are not listed at all.

If you scroll past the 1:1 comparisons and hit expand all, there's a much bigger list of occupations, many of which would fall under the "people building infrastructure" umbrella.

Looking at those jobs it seems like it leans a bit right, but overall is fairly balanced.

It's certainly an interesting list to browse through. Some make sense, some are surprising, some don't make sense at all.

You'd expect most jobs to be roughly 50/50 divided between Republican and Democrat. (Actually, I'd expect a big chunk Independent. What happened to those?) Some lean so strongly to one side that it makes me wonder what's going on there.

Environmentalist strongly Dem and oil worker strongly Rep makes sense. I suppose high-paying jobs with authority like pilot leaning more Rep whereas service-oriented jobs like flight attendant leaning more Dem is also understandable.

But farmers lean Rep, but once they retire they lean Dem. Why? I'm a bit surprised to see stay-at-home moms as well as most religious professions lean strongly Dem. I mean, to me it makes sense that religious people lean left, but it often sounds like many Americans feel exactly the opposite about that. I guess I'm glad to see these stats make more sense than the news.

But in skilled trades, I absolutely don't understand the reason for the large differences. Why would a locksmith or machinist lean to strongly Rep, while sheet metal workers and cartographers lean so strongly Dem? I can't think of any good reason for that difference.

I see a lot of inspectors and rafety/regulation related professions lean somewhat Dem, but safety director leans very strongly Rep.

And what's the difference between a landscape contractor and a gardener? Or a landscaper and a garden designer? Could it be that some people choose to identify by a particular professional label based on their political leaning, rather than the other way around?

And how representative are the various groups? If you asked only 4 horticulturists, it's easy to get 3/4 of them leaning one way or the other. How many book publishers did they ask that all of them are Democrats? Surely there are also Republican book publishers?

They can only do so because of the bottom 80% from which they extract their profit.

Apparently they own more than half the wealth, so fairer would mean they need to pay more.

How is that any different from the proposition offered by your local Mafia muscle?

Thanks Bob. Very helpful comment. If people live a fulfilling life and are taking care by the state when they hit a bad time or go through health problems, they are less likely to want to overthrow the state. This social net requires taxes. It’s a social net, not a racket.

All governments are Mafias to some extent. That's what it means to have police. The difference is that we expect the government to leverage its Mafia-like power in a manner that best suits its citizens.

That seems like an unfair comparison. The govt has courts that can overturn it. Before trump we didn't have the whim on the executive.

It may make you feel good to blame the current guy but we've had the whim of the Executive since the beginning. The only things that has changed are a) the willingness to use it and b) the sheer number of places it can be used.

Obama ordered drone strikes on Americans. Reagan ran Iran-Contra. Kennedy tried to invade Cuba. FDR tried to grow the Supreme Court to 13.

A better approach would be for the federal government as a whole - yes, all three branches - to reign in their power so that there's less power to abuse. The odds of that are zero.

Constitution is built with the understanding that those odds are zero, and that gridlock is the natural tendency.

You only have to look at the behavior of prosecuting attorneys who are free to downgrade criminal charges as they see fit with predictable biases as a result.

A big difference is that governments should be accountable to the people. Not all are, in which case they are indeed pretty much like a legitimised mafia.

It's the democratic basis that gives a government its legitimacy.

I mean some really wealthy people seem to want to replace the government with autocratic royalist fiefdoms so I guess you may have a point in their eyes.

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