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Comment by mjfl | Hacker News Reader

if you taxed Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates at 100% including all their wealth, assets, you would barely reduce the US deficit in one year. You would also be shit out of luck in the next year. I'm sick of the thought process which essentially says we would be in a mode of 'post-scarcity' if we simply ate the rich.

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The deficit is a red herring. We issue capital in the form of bonds. We don’t “pay it off” or there would be no money or we’d have to structure the whole system differently.

I am just comparing the potential revenue from taxation to the overall size of government spending via the deficit. I don't really understand what you are saying with this comment. Do you think government spending can be unbounded? Why tax at all?

What should the effective tax rate on wealth (assets) be?

> You would also be shit out of luck in the next year

Nonsense. In theory, any one person can pay off all the debt, given enough favors. For example, if I was hypothetically $2 in debt to you, but there is only $1 in existence (which was owned by you), I can do you a favor in exchange for that $1, and immediately pay you it back for 50% of the debt. I can repeat this a second time with a second favor, and there is now 0 debt. (It doesn't matter if I started with the $1). In other words, having less money than the debt owed doesn't really matter.

Debt is really just the flip side of money; both a measure of who owes whom a favor.

Now that said, we could go on to debate who owes what and what is fair, but we all know that won't get anywhere...

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