Taxing Extreme Wealth | Hacker News Reader

Taxing Extreme Wealth

inequality.org

26 pointsthazework25 comments

Yes, redistribution from the wealthiest to the poorest would drastically raise the average wellbeing of humanity. However, the problem is and always has been that the wealthiest people are the ones who run the political system. It's much more explicit here in the UK where the Conservative party is full of both old and new money, but this is true everywhere. Even revolutions just replace the old rulers with new ones.

It should be plain to see that poverty is caused by a lack of money, the hard part is prying that money from those who have the vast majority of it.

> An annual wealth tax applied to the world’s richest would raise U.S. $2.52 trillion a year > An annual tax on the world’s richest would be enough to lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty

So, the US govt printed an additional $2 Trillion last year. How many people did it lift out of poverty?

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/who-was-lifte... 11.7 million or so, for $400 billion accounted for. I'll leave others to track down the rest.

"if we give people more money, their reported income becomes higher"

I mean, sure.. but I'd want to see the flow on effects. (Health, education, jobs, etc).

From my experience it heads in the same direction, though the exact numbers will differ depending on exactly what you're asking.

Looking up some data on UBI might be worthwhile, even if it's not the same as ad hoc "stimulus".

>How many people did it lift out of poverty?

Well, that's a trick question without considering how many were or will be knocked down a notch or two in living standards at the same time, including many pushed into actual poverty themselves, only with lingering downward momentum that "keeps on giving" in ways that are opposite of those being "lifted".

Note the paper advocates two separate policies (the second even less likely to happen than the first due to lack of political will) - taxing the global richest; spending it on the global poorest. Printing money isn't terribly relevant to this proposal since most of the global poor do not live in countries that can print US $.

> So, the US govt printed an additional $2 Trillion last year. How many people did it lift out of poverty?

It devalues the dollars for everyone, so the rich gets a bit poorer overall (unless they get a substantial slice of that 2T$, which is likely if they take care of some government contracts), while the poor are poorer too.

Anyone holding cash assets gets poorer. But the rich have very little (no) cash holdings.

Why do we need to gather even more tax revenue when congress and the fed can just expand their balance sheets to infinity?

The government is terrible at managing money. More tax revenue != less poverty.

> Why do we need to gather even more tax revenue when congress and the fed can just expand their balance sheets to infinity?

Because printing money is an awkward and not very flexible way to raise money.

> The government is terrible at managing money. More tax revenue != less poverty.

We should also improve our government then, and get them to address poverty better.

>We should also improve our government then, and get them to address poverty better.

Sure, but that proposal along with clear milestones and deliverables should come before the funding. I'd vote for it but only if the money goes right back to the billionaires if/when the gov. fails to deliver on the plan.

One of the primary things we can do to improve the government is define objectives for new legislation, and make the new laws null and void automatically if they fail to achieve the desired objective.

> Sure, but that proposal along with clear milestones and deliverables should come before the funding.

Probably not the worst idea. The CBO already does a lot of that though.

With the current situation though, we already did the spending. We need to at least reduce the deficit, if not the debt.

> One of the primary things we can do to improve the government is define objectives for new legislation, and make the new laws null and void automatically if they fail to achieve the desired objective.

That's a recipe for either a bunch of way-too-low bars to jump, or a lot of legislation that was on the right track but we just undo it.

With the current situation in the US Senate, more hurdles to passing legislation is _not_ what is needed.

> We should also improve our government then, and get them to address poverty better.

Let’s do that first.

It's a big government with lots of people, we can do both at once.

I don't think we can improve government, based on what I observed over past 30 years.

We keep doing the one thing (spending more money) but keep making no progress on the other (better functioning services).

Adjusted for inflation, we spend 50% more on education than we when I was a kid in the 1990s: https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditures-per-...

This flow seem very convenient for the extremely rich:

1. Milk as much taxpayer money as possible, while providing as little as possible through profit-driven social services etc. that require increasingly larger budgets to not collapse entirely.

2. Tax us? Look at all the money the government isn't getting any value out of!

3. Rinse & repeat.

> An annual tax on the world’s richest would be enough to lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty, make enough vaccines for the whole world, and deliver universal health care and social protection for all the citizens of low and lower middle-income countries (3.6 billion people).

That would be a level of investment that generations to come would notice. To invest that money would paid off not just by moral metrics of wellbeing, but in pure economic ones.

Why are we obsessed in spending money in powerful individuals instead of smartly invest in humanity's future? Billions will get better jobs, we will spend less in security and war, geniuses will pop up in the thousands from that population, and artists, and so much potential would be put to better use.

We should do it.

Raising money is one thing. Spending it is another. So much energy is spent on policies to do the former, and seeimingly very little on how to do the latter far more efficiently. This policy proposal makes for a fantastic soundbite, but how will the additional revenue be allocated in a way that actually leads to better outcomes?

Simply increasing the top of the funnel is not going to make all the downstream inefficiencies and inequalities go away.

Well, if we can't solve every problem in one fell swoop, I guess we should just give up.

That’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m not saying we shouldn’t raise taxes for the ultra-wealthy, just that we should also spend time on solving the structural issues that prevent efficient and effective allocation of capital, both new and existing.

Sorry, false alarm. That's my bad, rereading I don't get the sense I originally did, I'll attempt to read with a more generous mindset in the future.

I completely agree. IMO part of the problem is there's a bunch of theories on how to improve the situation, but economics is so... difficult(?) that any proposal can be argued against, especially in the realm of politics. I don't really know how to fix that. I think we just need to try some things to be honest, run some experiments.

The answer is direct cash transfers to people living in extreme poverty with few strings attached.

https://apolitical.co/solution-articles/en/brazil-lifts-mill...

http://blog.gdi.manchester.ac.uk/just-give-money-to-the-poor...

Surely there's a way to allow for an increase in prosperity of the non-wealthy more effectively by taxing commerce/transfers-of-wealth alone.

I pity the fool who thinks that taxing people, income, or property can allow for any real move toward relief of the non-wealthy.

If it needs to be accomplished to the extreme, then concentrate on extreme commerce.

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