Tax super-rich on private jet travel to fund public transport, says UK charity | Hacker News Reader

Tax super-rich on private jet travel to fund public transport, says UK charity

theguardian.com

32 pointsgbenga4real25 comments

This seems more like an attempt to punish the rich for their privilege than to solve an actual problem. I won't argue that private jets are more polluting than other forms of transportation, but the solution is to tax all forms of transportation at a rate that covers the damage they do, not just to focus on the super-rich.

You need to start somewhere. It is easier to start with the super-rich because average Joe has no problem with it. And then you can try to trickle down until average Joe is also affected with the reasoning that not only the super rich are a problem for the environment. But if you stsrt from the bottom the average Joe will pount at jets of the super rich people and fight such legislation very hard.

> It is easier to start with the super-rich because average Joe has no problem with it.

Passing the legislation may be easier but enforcing it is more difficult because:

- super rich people can afford to employ people like tax lawyers to help them get around things like this and still save money

- they can rock up to any country in the world and be welcomed in, thus leaving anywhere that bothers them. Then the tax take is zero.

They have options that most people don’t. What fascinates me is how oblivious to these options the people proposing such policy changes are, it’s why so many “good intention” laws/policies get passed and yet no progress - or even a regression - is made.

Until now, its worked the opposite way, where ordinary people and small businesses have to deal with every badly-reasoned knee-jerk law and regulation, while big companies and billionaires just ignore it or have armies or lawyers for their day in court.

This is just a proposal - a far cry from an enacted and enforced law.

Attempting to solve problems with micro-targeted taxes is a rather unfair strategy that is also unlikely to work. This article claims that a private jet is <2 orders of magnitude worse than more conventional transport. That means their contribution contributes approximately 0% to the total pollution problem.

The UK has a much bigger threat from energy security than they do from climate change. I've been watching their energy numbers on trusty old Wikipedia. They are grim. The UK does not need a policy of trying to load their problems onto wealthy people. If they leave and the UK loses the ability to build up a financial edge and the country will have nothing left.

> Attempting to solve problems with micro-targeted taxes is a rather unfair strategy that is also unlikely to work. This article claims that a private jet is <2 orders of magnitude worse than more conventional transport. That means their contribution contributes approximately 0% to the total pollution problem.

> The UK has a much bigger threat from energy security than they do from climate change. I've been watching their energy numbers on trusty old Wikipedia. They are grim. The UK does not need a policy of trying to load their problems onto wealthy people. If they leave and the UK loses the ability to build up a financial edge and the country will have nothing left.

Wealthy people have been "threatening to leave" for as long as I can remember.

Has it ever actually happened anywhere?

It was happening in France, though the numbers were small - changes in the tax code to reduce/disappear the wealth tax seemed to impact the number of rich people leaving:

> On the other hand, tax exile has slowed, the committee noted. Until 2017, the expatriation of individuals subject to the wealth tax was higher than their repatriation. Since 2018 and the implementation of the IFI, the trend has reversed: There were 380 returns against 220 departures in 2020 (470 versus 1,020 in 2016). "It's not a scientific causality, it involves small numbers, but it's a concomitance," Mr. Audenis said.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2022/10/24/the-ab...

Interesting. I do remember something about some French people getting a bit uppetiy and moving to Belgium.

Whether that had any actual measurable effect on the economy is the actual question though. I suspect not...

I don't think this should be on hacker news. It's just another political divisive article.

I've no proof but it feels like there's more and more of this type of content being posted here. Please stop.

Agreed, as I can’t see what this has to do with “hacking”. It fits the “news” part, but I am not here for this type of news.

And what have posting articles about death of Viviane Westwood or Pele have to do with hacking? We should use same meter and not post any death unrelated to tech field. I have same opinion regarding Show HN Merry Christmas or Happy new year threads.

edit: I just posted article about death of pope Benedict to prove my point, I'm sure one of the threads about his death will have tons of upvotes while it has nothing to do with technology and it's not even relevant since he was not pope anymore

You don't have to engage with things you are not "here for" that's up to you. It's not against the rules and as every "hacker" would agree with stop censoring other people.

I'm not so sure about this. If it fills with non hacker type news, what is the point of hacker news?

>If it fills with non hacker type news, what is the point of hacker news?

The point of hacker news, stated in the guidelines: "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Hacker News isn't, and has never been, a strictly technology oriented forum.

Got it. Time to start posting tiktok memes then.

HN is not just about hacking and not just about news. This is the first thing the site guidelines emphasize: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

There is no rule against political content so instead of trying to censor an allowed topic because of your own believes you can just scroll past it.

Hi, I'd say that's a pretty loose reading if the posting rules. Here's part of them:

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Flag it or don’t click it. Your appeal to have others not submit/not upvote content you don’t find interesting will fall on deaf ears.

It's a bit more complex than that. You're right that political content isn't excluded completely, but it also needs to be moderated a lot more, because otherwise the site would be taken over by political content, and also because politicized threads tend to break the site guidelines very quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If anyone wants to know how we approach this, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... leads to a bunch of past explanations, though you have to scroll through some boilerplate to find them. Just look for the longer, older posts.

The perception that HN is becoming too politicized goes back pretty much to the origins of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

There are sizeable fluctuations but I think the long-term state is stable. When too much repetition appears, users will increasingly flag it and moderators will increasingly downweight it.

I'm sympathetic to libertarianism, but I'm also in favor of targeted taxes on luxury goods. A lot of the reason people buy these goods is to signal wealthy anyways. They're "Veblen goods" where the demand doesn't necessarily go down as price increases -- it may even go up. They're also a deadweight loss for the economy. So taxing them doesn't just appease the masses. It's also good policy. Much better than taxing wealth or income, for instance.

It's stupid idea in general, but it's certainly better than taxing more poorer majority while rich 1% optimize their taxes, so they pay less than poor people as percentage of income.

Anyone who flies with private jet to conferences about saving the planet and lowering others carbon emissions should not be listened to at all.

Does anyone even do rough math when they propose these types of things?

Public transport funding tends to be in the billions of dollars.

The private jet market globally, including company jets (which I assume this wouldn’t include) is $30B.

I’m guessing some fraction is personal private jet use, maybe $5B.

So they’re going to impose a 50-100% tax?

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