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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

What a shitty post. I guess I don't believe in climate change after all unless I also believe in public losses for privatized gains. Corporations raked in billions while wrecking the environment and I'm sure they all love framing this as an individual responsibility that we're all "failing" to do.

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> In February 2019, the center-right American Action Forum, estimated that the plan could cost between $51–$93 trillion over the next decade [0]

Take the low estimate of $51 trillion over a decade so $5 trillion per year.

> The top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data last updated Oct. 19, 2020

So if you seize all the wealth of the top 1% you'll pay for ~7 years of something that no one claims will actually solve climate change.

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

[1] https://windfalldata.com/blog/what-it-takes-to-be-in-the-top...

> Take the low estimate of $51 trillion over a decade so $500 billion per year.

Over a decade, that would be $5 Trillion per year since a decade has 10 years.

Thanks for pointing that out. edited

> seize all the wealth

How do you propose doing that legally? Or how should the US government survive the wealthy citizen's legal assault if they were to find a loophole?

I'm not. I'm just pointing out that a massive effort requires a broad tax base. I understand everyone wants the wealthy to pay for everything, but there is quite literally not enough wealthy people in the world to begin to tackle a large problem. Everyone has to contribute

You should clarify such; it's not even remotely clear from the original post.

Personally I tend to be skeptical of anything that discusses nationality at all when it comes to climate change, unless we can somehow move all of the pollution outside the environment (into another environment)

The American Action Forum is nowhere close to “center-right”, only they call themselves that. It is a conservative think tank that almost exclusively works for Republicans.

Their figures aren’t even in “let’s debate” realm. They cite $36 trillion just for universal healthcare when even the CBO admits that Medicare for All would save $300-600 billion per year. This is nowhere close to good faith accounting, it’s intentionally misleading

This was the google snippet for green new deal cost. Please provide a better source of the actual cost.

I quick search yields that the best answer is "no-one knows because the proposal remains too vague and too much in-flux to provide an answer".

The CBO has not yet weighed in. That's usually a good starting point for any legislation that's getting seriously close to consideration.

The $36T figure isn't unreasonable, just cherry-picked. It's counting up the costs without counting the money that is no longer spent elsewhere.

It's like saying that if I decide to patronize the Chevron station it's going to cost $800/year to buy gas, without considering that I'm currently spending $800/year at the Shell station.

> $51–$93 trillion over the next decade

About right when you spend $1280 on a coffee cup: https://www.businessinsider.com/us-air-force-spent-1280-on-c...

The GND included universal healthcare and jobs programs, both of which are the biggest line items in the AAF estimates. They estimated the cost of dealing with carbon emissions at around $7 trillion. And that money is largely for capital expenditures, which anyone who has half a brain would finance over 20-30 year period. And a large chunk of that $7 trillion can be passed off to utility rate payers over that time period with barely a noticeable increase in rates based on how cheap renewables are getting.

Also, AAF can hardly be trusted to fairly evaluate the cost/benefits. A slight increase in utility bills pales in comparison to having to abandon your house due to increased flooding due to climate change. It is funny how when they are doing analysis of tax cuts, they turn over every stone looking to squeeze out questionable "economic productivity" increases to add to their models, and yet when it comes to climate change, they just throw out a bunch of big numbers and call it a day.

So if you seize all the wealth of the top 1% you'll pay for ~7 years of something that no one claims will actually solve climate change.

Maybe we could buy some healthcare or bike paths or something. The important thing is seizing the wealth of the 1%.

Why do you think you're entitled to 100% of my wealth?

I doubt I'll get it. I don't even get a discount on healthcare.gov. Mostly I'd like to see USA governed by its citizens rather than the rich. If they weren't rich anymore that might happen. Of course the point is that the rich won't allow this. The system will not fix the harms it was designed to create. If something like this went through it would probably take from the (5-1)% and give to the 0.1%.

Got it. Make everyone poor and suffer. Great plan.

The cutoff I've seen for the 1% is $11M net worth. Is everyone poorer than that, "suffering"? What kind of world do you live in?

By definition there's a new 1% when you take the top 1% and make it 0. Then you take the new 1%. And so on.

Simple math. Everyone ends up with zero.

Haha that's the most amusing slippery-slope argument I've seen recently, and it also has a pleasing Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox aspect to it as well. Bravo!

It's easy to throw around numbers without understanding the people behind them. Say the plumber whose business is worth $10 million dollars, pays himself $100k, and re-invests the rest back into his business and his employees. Is he rich? No. That's the problem with ideological socialism. You just want to stick it to the guy who is rich on paper - it has nothing to do with actually improving peoples lives.

I'm not a socialist at all, let alone an "ideological" one. My motivation is not to make people poor. My motivation is to arrange some sort of sovereignty for the vast majority of people. As long as billionaires choose all our public officials [0] while paying minimal taxes [1], we don't have majoritarian rule. If we did have it, this country would be better-run and better for both the people who live here and everyone else in the world.

Even if we can assume there is a single ten-millionaire working plumber (and really, that's far-fetched), such a person won't be harmed if all of the billionaires get trimmed back to her level.

[0] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

Well at the end of the day, corporations are feeding individual demands to make profits. If individuals demand more sustainable alternatives, I am sure the corporations will pivot.

People refuse to peel garlic themselves, and you see shelves full of pods of garlic, peeled and packed in plastic that ends up in the oceans eventually. If everyone decided tomorrow to just buy whole garlic that doesn't need packaging, corporations will supply you with that.

It's easy to blame corporations, and no doubt with their shady lobbying practices over decades should be accounted for. But individual responsibility also needs to be acknowledged.

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