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Comment by seattle_spring | Hacker News Reader

This an outrage! We should increase taxes on the middle and upper middle class to compensate. That'll show em.

Billionaires are not paying their fair share! Everyone who makes over $400k will now pay 45% total tax to fix this (never mind that you could have written the law to specifically target people with assets > $1B. Who has time for that?)

precept that a law should address a particular form of behaviour rather than a specific individual or group

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

The pols who shout from the rooftops that 'billionaires should not exist' and stuff like that are being disingenuous at best, liars at worst. All that is rhetoric, pure and simple. It's trivial for billionaires to defer income, as it is drawn from capital investments, which can easily take flight to more favorable climes. Not to mention the considerable legal muscle and access to the corridors of power.

The only people who suffer from the mass hysteria are the working stiffs who happen upon a couple windfalls in their lives, i.e., your typical tech workers.

How can someone saying 'billionaires should not exist' be lying? It's an opinion at best.

And that's why the billionaires are democrats and the millionaires are republicans.

only about 1/3 of US billionaires are democrats

(That said, I could definitely believe that NYC billionaires would have a very different distribution)

> NYC billionaires would have a very different distribution

Of course, because democrats have higher presence in NY. It would be reversed otherwise. Remember that even D.T. was a democrat a few years ago.

What's the source for that number?

Any number of surveys going back the last ~10 years. Forbes, PolitiFact, Open Secrets, etc.

Here's a more recent forbes one:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2020/10/20/even-am...

Except Charles Koch, David Koch, Sheldon Anderson, Peter Thiel... and all the rest?

Both parties had prominent billionaires in the last presidential election so I think it's safe to say this is pervasive.

Born Sheldon Gary Adelson August 4, 1933 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

Died January 11, 2021 (aged 87) Malibu, California, U.S.

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

Well, he was still alive during the 2020 election, so the parent comment still stands.

Both have their billionaires, but dems do have the majority of rich households in broad terms.

"Democrats now represent 65% of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000 or more, according to pre-pandemic Internal Revenue Service statistics."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-19/democrats...

Educated people vote for democrats. They also have money. Not super surprising.

> Educated people vote for democrats.

That's little divisive for no real reason. Smart people disagrees on politics but don't insult each other. I am sure we can find plenty of stats that reflect badly on Democrats eloctorat.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pr...

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-...

Democrats lead by 22 points (57%-35%) in leaned party identification among adults with post-graduate degrees. The Democrats’ edge is narrower among those with college degrees or some post-graduate experience (49%-42%), and those with less education (47%-39%). Across all educational categories, women are more likely than men to affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic. The Democrats’ advantage is 35 points (64%-29%) among women with post-graduate degrees, but only eight points (50%-42%) among post-grad men.

I think you’re missing the initial point of not weaponizing stats as an insult. One can argue that hard science and engineers vote more conservative than progressive. [1] Reversing the insult. This kind of exchange are not productive as we’re not debating actual policies.

[1] https://scholarworks.unr.edu/handle/11714/2246

This paper is a lot effort to show that older white male STEM people nudge the aggregate partisan lean a little bit to the right.

I like this paper's framework and cites. Will use it to better understand the work of Data For Progress and adjacent.

We shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking more years in school equals higher intelligence. We also shouldn't judge a person mainly on their intelligence level or level of schooling. There seems to be a strong current in contemporary society that believes sitting around in a classroom hearing about life makes one superior to those out living life.

> We shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking more years in school equals higher intelligence.

The person you are replying to never said anything about education being correlated to intelligence or superiority.

> There seems to be a strong current in contemporary society that believes sitting around in a classroom hearing about life makes one superior to those out living life.

Claiming people who go to school aren't also living life and having generally a far more diverse set of experiences than dropouts is... well, it's certainly an interesting perspective.

I'd bet that higher wages correlate with living in metro areas, which also correlates with voting for Democrats. Not too surprising.

yet per a sibling comment to yours the majority of billionaires supports us conservative politics.

500.000k y/y is no billionaires privilege. the billionaires annual wealth growth is much much higher.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JThOdF95e0NYoea5pCWd...

source

https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/

Well the numbers would disagree with your assertion.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiasavchuk/2014/07/09/are-ame...

Anecdotally accumulation of wealth could be correlated with a shift towards fiscally conservative/small government libertarian ideals.

No inclusion of Bezos, Gates, or Zuckerberg in this list. It’s not clear that there was even a rules-based method for selecting their “50 richest families”… The data seem cherry-picked.

Billionaires tend to be much more pragmatic about their politics than dogmatic. They support politicians on both sides of the aisle, because they know the value of having a politician owe you a favor. They don't really care if that person is R or D because at the end of the day as long as that representative votes for the policies they like, they don't really care about the rest.

Agree - the idea that R v. D alone has serious explanatory power is silly. It's naive to think that money does not have the greater effect on politics than the converse. This is a power issue not an issue that arises out of political planks of ideology.

To Billionaires, politicians aren't people who "might" do something you like to better your life...they're a concierge service, and the more you have on your staff, the more you get done.

I guess a millionaire has to pick one party to buy, while the billionaires can just pay off both.

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