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Comment by throwaway48540 | Hacker News Reader

That's pretty hard to do when the absolute majority of the sum of taxes is paid by poor people. Even if you taxed the rich at 99%, it would be short by orders of magnitude - and then of course you have to consider https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

Also, there's a distinction between people below the poverty line, and young people making little wages in their early jobs. Why shouldn't we tax the rich kid working at McDonald's because their trust fund requires them to work for a decade before they get access to it?

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When you account for all taxes this may be true but for just income taxes it isn’t. According to the link below the bottom 50% makeup just 2.34% of income taxes paid. So, eliminating income taxes and maybe adding a return free filing option for the bottom 50% of households looks super doable.

Source: https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxe...

Income taxes don't affect every person equally though. Plenty of Very Rich people earn zero income.

Yep and that is a separate issue that needs to be addressed. When you have people who are so wealthy that they can switch their nationality on a whim then that requires special solutions.

From the perspective of government receipts, the bulk of taxes are paid by the middle, not the tails. The rich don't have enough numbers, and the poor don't have enough money, to offset the area under the middle of the curve. This isn't true everywhere, but is true in the US and most developed countries.

Interested in digging deeper, do you have a source for this:

> That's pretty hard to do when the absolute majority of the sum of taxes is paid by poor people. Even if you taxed the rich at 99%, it would be short by orders of magnitude

The Laffer curve is just kind of made up. He just said "I believe this is how it should work" and then tried to make it work, even though it never quite does. And it often turns in results that its proponents don't like.

your first point is the only thing this whole discussion should be about... the second one is insanity :)

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