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Comment by acchow | Hacker News Reader

> Remote work, deglobalization, stalled technology have started eroding some advantages of higher-skilled workers

Their premise is broken. The largest inequality is not between highly skilled workers and everyone else. It is between the wealthy (top 0.1% or 0.01%) and the rest.

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That's not what the literature says about differences in income - there, skills are indeed very relevant (though of course sheer luck and superstar dynamics matter a lot at the very high end). Wealth is a whole other ballgame, it's a stock not a flow; it grows globally when asset values rise (as they clearly have in recent times, due to r < g); and at an individual and subcultural level when people refrain from drawing down on it, preserving a long time horizon often across many generations.

But why focus on income when the game is all about owning capital.

This is the magic trick the ultra high net worth have done. The vast majority of their assets are never sold to realize any income. They just keep leveraging upwards to expand and also borrow against their assets to run their lavish life.

Not a broken premise at all. The focus on the ultra rich is mostly just a political ploy since it's easy to villainize extravagant wealth. But the vast majority of income (I'm including capital gains in this) is made by the middle class and wage-earning upper class, not by the ultra rich. If you take all the wealth of the ultra rich and distribute it evenly, every person would get a one-time, nice, but not life-changing check (somewhere between $70k and $150k). And then next year everyone is mostly back where they were before except you can't raid the ultra rich again since you just wiped them out.

I wonder if there was someone in King Louie's court that had a similar statement.

The French Revolution was an evil thing. Its horrors exceeded anything that the ancien regime could even fathom doing. And in any case, the situation isn't comparable. The average poor American is overfed and lives a life of comfort that the rich of 200 years ago could only dream of.

Nonsense, you're doubling down on the false premise. The problem with the ultra rich isn't solved by a one time tax on their accumulated wealth, its solved by ongoing redistribution of the profits from industry into workers pockets.

A classic case that was borne out this year is the dichotomy between Warren Buffet and the average railway worker. Railways took in massive profits over the pandemic, and precision scheduling literally killed workers to get there. All the while our supply chain breaks down.

The vast majority of the profits from those industries are not going to the ultra-rich either. They mostly go to pension funds and 401k holders.

The focus on the ultra-rich is an obvious political ploy. In every western country with a more socialistic arrangement than another, the taxes on the middle class are inevitably higher. And the salaries for high-skill positions are also depressed to begin with, due to legal/social arrangements that force more egalitarian pay scales. You can't get what you want by just taking the income/wealth/whatever of the tippy-top.

And the problem with the upper middle class and middle class, and from the developed to the developing, from the perspective of those lower who want your stuff, is solved by redistributing your stuff to their pockets. There can be more than one "problem" that can be solved by redistribution.

The problem isn’t that people are ultrarich. See PG’s essay on the merits of inequality. The problem is rentier parasites.

Rentier parasites enabled by state overregulation, which is in response (usually) to overeager or immoral entrepreneurs (ARM loans, thalidomide, slum lords,crypto, supplement industry, lemon cars, malware, vaporware, stock scams, etc). The regulation is supposed to protect us, but in reality just enables those with the resources to meet the new standard to have a (olig|mon)opoly. I'm not sure what the solution is, just pointing out how "rentier parisites" tend to arise.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Uni...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Uni...

It's all in the top 10 or 20%.

The top 20% is household income over $109,000. That's not the ultra rich by any means.

> That's not the ultra rich by any means.

Bingo. And don't forget that the AVERAGE number of earners in a top-quintile household is 2![0]

[0] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/explaining-us-income-inequali...

The ultra wealthy avoid having much income by borrowing against their assets instead of selling. So they usually never realize capital gains on most of their assets all the way until their death.

https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-tax-av...

> The focus on the ultra rich is mostly just a political ploy

No, it's about the power asymmetry that breaks the promises of democracy that comes with it.

This is pure conspiracy thinking, it sounds just like those people who obsess over Bill Gates and George Soros. Please explain how the ultra-wealthy can be so powerful if they aren't spending down much of any wealth, and a lot of what they do spend is on charitable grants made in the public interest to 501(c)3 organizations, which must be politically neutral as a matter of law.

501(c)3's are some of the most political organizations out there. The only thing they can't do is be directly involved in electoral politics. But social influence and ideologically driven work, that's totally fine.

It's not conspiracy to say that the ultra-rich use and abuse their wealth to work to tilt the system further in their favor.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that "many people with a common characteristic working in ways that mutually benefit the whole group" is necessarily a conspiracy. Sometimes it is, sure, but very rarely. It's much, much more common for members of a group—like, say, the very wealthy—to individually recognize "hey, if I do X, it makes things better for me!"

That's what happens with massive wealth inequality.

Really?

They use 501s as kobashi schemes for tax dodges through donor advised funds. It's a shell game. That's why they take the $1 salary as well.

As far as the other one, if you think, say, Peter Thiel or Jamie Dimon has the exact same access to the political process to influence policy as the guy fishing for bottles in the recycling dumpster out in my alley, I don't know what to say.

Money doesn't "buy" power and influence, power and influence is an ancillary structural artefact of the money. It comes with rights and privileges. We'd call them oligarchs if they lived in any other country.

Nah. Have you ever heard a mainstream progressive offer up a concrete plan to actually address the existing power asymmetry? All you get is impotent platitudes about reversing Citizens United, or the implied belief that tax-and-spend policies (i.e. the progressive platform) will naturally solve the problem over time.

In other words, the pitch is something like, "The ultra rich are have too much influence. How do we fix it? Why, just vote progressive!" which is exactly what you would expect if the focus on the ultra rich was merely a political ploy.

"mainstream progressive" does all the lifting in that sentence.

You knew for a fact that I could point to dozens of people so you guarded it with something you could move the goalposts on and then be "dude that's not mainstream enough".

Cool. Not playing that stupid game. The entire internet is so fed up with all of these stupid right wing negging games. Nobody cares any more.

You're liars frauds and scoundrels. Everyone's on to it

>since you just wiped them out.

It's a start.

Weird that you think incomes that can approach effective tax rates of ~50% are the problem and not the capital gains that are taxed at 15% to 20%.

If you are wealthy you don't need an income that's taxed a high rate for the plebs, when your wealth is generated by capital gains. Surely you knew this.

Also, your hypothetical is a bit weird. The point of investments isn't to liquidate them immediately, but to reap returns. Owners of significant assets tend to borrow against them instead of liquidating them.

Like I said, I'm including capital gains income in my figures. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make in your first sentence. Capital gains are taxed lower because, in theory, that income was already taxed at the corporate tax level, since capital gains come out of corporate profits. Wages, on the other hand, are a corporate expense, so they're exempt from the corporate tax. This whole thing is somewhat broken by the corporate tax being easily avoided for large corporations. But anyway, this whole thing is an aside and irrelevant.

Look here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Uni... . The Top 1% is the small bright pink part of the furthest right bar. You can raid them at 50% tax every year if you'd like, but that's not going to make a big difference.

Capital gains are created by investing income that has already been taxed. Any tax on capital gains, at least in principle, is double taxation. (This doesn't mean that the optimal tax on capital gains should be zero because in practice, lots of capital gains correlates with lots of competence at generating earned income - so, in a way, that double taxation can be seen as earned-income taxation in disguise. It does mean that there's plenty of reason not to treat them the same.)

So what? Those low skilled workers want your money just the same, why shouldn't we give it to them?

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