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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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...

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