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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Open season on people with X amount of money?

Open season on people _who commit crimes_ with X amount of money, FTFY.

If you have a problem with this, try committing fewer crimes. If you don't commit wage theft, you should have no problem with increased enforcement of it, for example.

> who commit crimes

Like speeding?

Why not?

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

> Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket

> Most of Scandinavia determines fines based on income. Could such a system work in the U.S.?

I'd assume not - the rich anyways hardly get large salaries (I'm sure they do, but the majority of the money they make is probably borrowing on equity).

That doesn’t seem like what the other person is proposing.

If you're factoring on income then the person is not rich. Rich people make their money on capital gains. Laws like that would just make the world eggshells for the rest of us and the people who can afford Ferraris wouldn't be bothered.

Capital gains _should_ be counted as income. But that's a separate conversation.

The solution to "it's too hard to penalize the rich" isn't to give up, it's to figure out how they hide their real income and take that into account.

I don't think anyone said give up.

Defining "the rich" would help. Arguably someone making their money on income is not "rich", they're still moving up the economic ladder. Someone making capital gains, especially exclusively or in majority, is definitely rich.

There's also wealth taxes. Currently a lot of places implement income taxes which actually slows down or halts economic fluidity.

Capital gains are taxable income in most jurisdictions.

Yes, at max 20%. Yet, the majority of jurisdictions keep taxing income at a much higher rate. As a general rule people working on income are still making their way up the economic ladder while people on capital gain, especially exclusively or in majority, are not.

who commit specific crimes

do not mess up with The Swamp or else…

why the downvotes?

in the other news today sbf gets his charges dropped from 13 to 8.

probably has nothing to do with his connections and pedigre.

when you steal make sure you steal from the roght people

Your eyes see "the government should help regular people", but you chose to interpret this as "this guy thinks the government should harm the rich!". What is causing this disconnect for you? My guess is too much consumption of corporate media.

I’m asking a question of the other user.

dfxm12 is asking a question of you.

I don’t really care about his theory about me if it hinges on missing that I was asking a question / such grand assumptions that I don’t understand where they are coming from.

I really was asking the other person a question.

thank you for sharing that you don't care that you were asked a question, while yourself asking a question

I expect your attitude of not answering questions to now be reflected in others' decisions whether to answer your own

as for your theories regarding the questioner's theories, such theories of yours are irrelevant to your answering: dxfm12 really was asking you a question

Nah, you're making weird rhetorical question strawman arguments.

No, holding people accountable for stealing money is attacking the wealthy only if you believe all wealthy people are literally stealing money for some reason.

No, stealing money from people is not the same as a traffic violation, but, yes, people should be held accountable for operating heavy machinery recklessly.

I don't know why you've decided to deliberately misunderstand things and engage petulantly, but here we are.

I'd be happy with enforcement resources allocated proportional to the number of victims, instead of mean wealth of victims.

Employees at a given company?

I think open season on anyone two standard deviations from mean income is fair. /s

Globally, anyone who has leisure time to read this website is probably at least two standard deviations above the mean income.

In the future, anyone with a working computer instead of a 25 dollar surveillance appliance from the cell provider is going to be considered rich.

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