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Comment by hungie | Hacker News Reader

I make 750k a year, give or take. I think I paid 150k in taxes, more or less, last year.

I would gladly pay 600k a year in taxes if it meant healthcare, education, housing, and food were secured for all.

Let me keep 20% of my work for luxuries I like, but the fact that I'm only paying like 20% is fucking criminal while people are starving in this country.

I recognize I'm differently wired and have different values than most, but like, there has to be a line between 20% and 80% tax rate that we can live with.

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I’m generally with you, though I live in CA so my effective tax rate is around 50%.

I am very troubled when people who proclaim to be liberal move here—an area with high potential—to “strike it rich”, do so, and then immediately fuck off to another state where they can sell their vested shares without paying CA tax rates. CA does try to claw back avoided taxes from the worst offenders of this, but mostly they only go after people who move out on paper but still lead lives here.

One of the biggest problems though is that bumping marginal rates doesn’t affect the ultra-rich, who use tax-avoidance schemes like loans against invested assets to live off extreme wealth with nearly zero taxable income.

Probably because CA politicians want to spend tax money on things like providing $150k of housing loans to undocumented migrants

Losing out on a house bid as an American citizen to an undocumented migrant thanks to this policy, truly the type of stuff only a CA politician could come up with.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/california-democrats...

Humans deserve housing. My undocumented neighbors are still my neighbors.

We shouldn't have to decide between which of two humans gets housing. House all my neighbors.

House them yourself, you make $750K a year.

I do. I provide housing units at the cost of maintenance. I believe profiting from rent is deeply unethical. My renters have paid basically for their share of heating, electricity, water, sewer, and wear and tear on the building itself.

But I cannot house the thousands of unhoused people in my city alone. I can provide housing for 2-5 of them at any given time.

That said, do you know what offering housing for a couple hundred bucks a month does for a struggling family? It fundamentally changes their ability to establish themselves. Build savings, escape poverty.

Edit: I'm not trying to signal or whatever by posting this. I have ethical beliefs about supporting one's local community and try not to be hypocritical about it. When people challenge me, suggesting I might be hypocritical ("why don't you spend your own money on it!") I try to respond with, "I do. And I see the changes it makes in real human lives."

But always as a response to someone trying to call me out, never unprompted.

No, pay for all of it, not what it costs you to maintain while your properties balloon in value far more than any rent you could have collected on them. You are no more ethical than any other landlord so please stop pretending to be. You and real estate investors like you are contributors to the homelessness problem.

I put the land I buy into a trust that removes my ability to profit from it. The trust cannot take actions that would cause them to profit from selling the land.

Any equity the trust holds is from me or others putting in funds that are held solely for the purposes of providing housing for the community at cost.

My personal mortgage I do pay for, and I will be ceding whatever land I hold to that trust upon my death so that it can provide housing in perpetuity.

The only reason the land is not currently in the trust's hands is because I need the ability to move freely. I could arrange to sell the house to the trust, and lease it from the trust, but because there's a bank involved with my mortgage that gets more complex.

I assure you, I am not profiting from housing.

You've been a refreshing change of the typical mindset on Hacker News

Thanks. So many people are like, "sure, I'd love to live in a world like X, but there's nothing I can do about it". Well, you can model it, make the change. Maybe someone will be inspired by you.

I read about someone who paid all his tenant's rent back to them after he became an anarchist or whatever. I crunched the numbers, and found out that for like 15k I could pay back every penny I had collected over maintenance, plus the appreciation of the principal. I sent out checks with amounts between $1500 and $4500, along with a note saying I didn't believe in rent any more.

I saw someone else do it, so I did it. Maybe someone on Hacker News will see my posts and do it too. Odds are small, but non zero.

I can tell you it made a material positive change in the lives of those people. That's a much better legacy than, "I died $15k richer" or "I went on vacation at a resort an extra time".

thank you for doing this.

I actually would love to do something like this. Can I contact you outside of HN to point me in a good direction to start?

The thing I discovered is that it's highly variable depending on location. Step one is talk to a lawyer who knows real estate and landlord tenant laws in your specific area.

Alternatively, search for a "community land trust" in your area and discuss with them how you can manage your property upon your death.

why are you so miserable?

> The program is currently available to low- and middle-income first-time home buyers in California and Arambula’s bill aims to open it up to tax-paying, undocumented immigrants.

This drops about fifty tiers down the stack of things I can manage to get myself seriously worked up over by actually reading the article.

I’m finding it pretty hard to find a lot of outrage over “taxpayers now eligible for government services”.

They're being offered loans, which they'll have to pay back. This won't cost taxpayers anything. And anyway, these undocumented migrants ARE TAXPAYERS THEMSELVES. I fail to see any reason to be outraged about this.

Offering loans to people that couldn't otherwise get one increases the pool of buyers, driving demand and increasing prices. I don't raise that as a reason not to have the program, but you are missing second order effects if you consider there to be no cost to the broader public.

More importantly, how exactly is an undocumented immigrant paying taxes? Do they somehow have a tax ID or SSN without documentation? Or are you just referring to things like sales and fuel taxes?

It used to be that immigrants would simply invent a fake SSN in order to get a job. The e-verify system may have complicated that, but I imagine it's still pretty much the same for smaller businesses. And especially agricultural work, meat processing plants, etc. All the businesses that rely on undocumented labor.

So the immigrants are paying into the SS/medicare system, but they don't receive any of the benefits.

I think the solution to the housing problem is to increase supply. Not to try to prevent a whole group of people from being able to buy homes.

> I think the solution to the housing problem is to increase supply. Not to try to prevent a whole group of people from being able to buy homes.

That seems totally reasonable if there's demand for more houses and the ability to build more.

Phrasing it as though people who already can't to buy a home are being prevented simply by not providing government assistance is a big disingenuous though. Preventing them implies that they could otherwise buy the home, and if that were the case a government program wouldn't be needed.

Yes because undocumented migrants are highly motivated to pay back the loan versus making a bunch of money and going back to their country of origin.

Also have you talked to any Gen Z or millennial? Most cannot afford housing, why in the world would you introduce even more demand for scarce housing?

They aren’t being handed $150,000 in unmarked bills. It’s loan assistance for a house which is pretty fucking difficult to throw into the back of a truck and haul over the border.

I am a millennial.

And supporting migrants isn't introducing new demand, it's just exposing the demand that's there. Like, the migrants are there and they need housing.

The us vs them attitude is an artificial division. We can, and should build housing for all.

> it meant healthcare, education, ...

Well you pay for this stuff, your money goes to semi-private institutions like universities (healthcare, education) instead of bouncing through taxes first. This is non-tax compulsory payments (NTCP), no?

> housing, ...

Real estate is California's #1 industry, biggest sector in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and according to everyone, community regulations and tax-adjacent policies like Prop 13 are the biggest influence on housing prices. So you kind of do pay taxes, you are obligated by law to play by the housing rules there.

> food, ...

Government subsidies are the #1 source of profits for agribusinesses. Similar to saying Tesla's main source of profit was carbon credits. Kind of a junk analysis by one interpretation, kind of central to the business by another.

Anyway my point is the average person, according to some people, pays closer to 40% like many Europeans do, when you include orthodox defined NTCP. If you think deeply about how much you are forced to pay for by law or similar mechanisms, maybe it's higher.

You live in the world you want right now. NTCPs go to regular people too. University health systems are many states #1 employers. They are socialized in a way that matters. Maybe it isn't funded through taxes but do you see how that's kind of a moot point?

I think housing should not be a commodity. Medicine and education shouldn't be run for profit. (Ideally, commodity food would be grown for the common good, too.)

But also, I'm posting here in recognition that my politics aren't exactly common here. And that's ok!

I’m affirming that your politics are really mainstream, they are the status quo. It just doesn’t sound that way because of accounting.

I wouldn't say so, what's he's speaking about is nationalizing many industries. Healthcare, food industry, housing. I mean, this is socialism. Not communism, but socialism.

Granted our media knows fuck-all about politics, but we have close to zero socialist politicians in the US. Nationalizing industries is wildly, wildly unpopular - practically unheard of.

Every industry listed does, actually, turn a profit in our current system. They are, truly, private - although regulated.

UCSF is San Francisco's largest employer, UPMC is Pittsburgh's largest employer, UMMC for Baltimore, ... They are a complex web of entities, inexorably linked to the government in each community. A plurality of middle to upper income people work for the hospital-educational-state system, and a plurality of middle to upper income people living there use its services. It gets a mix of funding from governments and private payers, but for some of those people, their income is from UPMC.

They might not be monopolies, they might not be nationalized, but functionally, they are like really effective monopolized community corporations.

Think about it from the other side: define nationalized corporation. What would make it last a long time? What would make it provide services effectively and competitive against imported goods and services? You get something that looks like university hospital systems, state university education systems, the real estate lobby, etc.

Nationalization in some reductionist sense doesn't work in the US for these industries because of the open market we live in - you can, after all, drive to another place for medicine and educations, and many people do. But the levers that are used to incentivize people to choose their local semi-private provider, and the way the communities are themselves employed / derive income from the provider, is holistically nationalization.

If everyone that wealthy was left with 150k, there would be no businesses, and no jobs. We'd go from a mostly employed country to a mostly unemployed country and the governing class would become the 1% overnight and the previous 1% would be part of the 99% instantly.

That's a heck of an assertion! Can you walk me through it?

It's communism. You should keep your 600k. No government is going to spend it better than you. They're going to erase it, it will go directly to military generals and their projects.

There's lots and lots and lots of kinds of communism. It's actually more socialism (which there are also lots of types of) than communism to advocate for raising taxes like this.

It's not communism, nobody actually knows what communism is. Working in the private sector, earning a salary, and then giving some of your salary to the government in exchange for some services is not communism.

Communism is more radical than that, meaning cut out the middle man - no private sector at all. The government, or more accurately the people, own the economy collectively. Or that's the idea, implementation varies especially when you sprinkle in dictatorship.

Everyone would be employed by a Uniparty government.

A fantastic system, just ask the Soviet Union.

FWIW, fuck the Soviet Union. Single party, authoritarian communism kills people.

That's not what OP says. You're talking about an absolute $150k, that is communism (everyone gets paid the same amount). He's talking about a fair percentage of taxes, paid by everyone, regardless of their income. This way, people that are left with little can be helped, and people that are left with a lot can still enjoy their wealth. I think 50% is fine, but taxes should be fair, no taxing already taxed goods or assets, and the ultra rich should not have ways to avoid paying their share like they do now.

Put your excess money where your mouth is and leave coercive government out of it.

You, personally, you can provide these things for people in need.

For example, I am in a similar financial situation. My family took in a Ukrainian refugee. We house, feed, clothe, and educate this refugee to provide one individual with exactly the things you bemoan others not having.

In your and my income bracket, it takes only caring enough and the true will to do something tangible for others.

For $300K of otherwise unused income you could support 4 people. So go support 4 people. And keep your hands and your politicians' hands off my finances.

He can't do it as efficiently as an organization can as it can see the bigger picture of what is needed where. He also probably doesn't want to spend hours of his life figuring out which people to give it to. Why duplicate effort?

If he doesn't want to spend his life doing this then it isn't a priority for him.

In these income brackets, time is the only true coin. If he doesn't spend his time then he doesn't value the outcome.

Pretending that amassing wealth to produce good societal outcomes is efficient is how we get shit like FTX.

Just jump in.

Please read the thread. I'm offering housing, securing forestland for conservation, and setting up or working with trusts to ensure those things continue in perpetuity.

I'm also passionate about growing food and giving it away.

Don't say, this person doesn't care/doesn't actually believe until you have evidence of that.

He can probably do it significantly more efficiently than an organization can. Governments and non-profits are not known for their efficiency, only their scale. Many non-profits are famously, scandalously inefficient.

I doubt that. I cannot understand much beyond my immediate area, and I cannot activate economies of scale.

Read the rest of the thread. I provide many examples. I do this, but charity is a different thing than taxes.

You don't need a charity. That's diffusing responsibility. Be responsible.

"A charity" and "charity" are different concepts. Charity is the act, not an organization.

You're quite free to voluntarily send all your money to the Treasury.

Charity serves a different purpose. And, please read the thread to discover that I am, in fact, putting my money where my mouth is.

> You're quite free to voluntarily send all your money to the Treasury.

Taxes should be fair for everyone of course. The original question was whether billionaires should pay more, and they should. The amount of money they have allows them to dodge the amount of taxes they truly owe. This gives them an unfair advantage over the rest of us, which only increases over time.

The peak of the Laffer Curve is thought to be around 70%, so anything above that is bad.

Ok, if you said let's compromise at 70% I suppose I wouldn't fight you!

Is all of that $750k wages?

If some of it is assets (stock), I firmly believe that should be taxed differently than earned cash wages.

It's a mix. I sell my stock immediately and rebalance it to other things.

It should be taxed differently, but the core problem is that the ultra-wealthy never realize gains. They borrow against the value and then their inheritors pay off those debts with the assets which have now had a reset tax basis.

The sanest solution is to simply preserve cost bases for inherited assets.

"healthcare, education, housing, and food were secured for all."

Ah yes all of this provided to you by Big Government, who can at a whim withdraw these services if you are found to engage in WrongThink.

We already have seen Western governments like Canada financially banning grandmothers who donated to a trucker protest or the UK imprisoning people for tweets.

Do you really want a bunch of DC politicians to have the power of life and death, not to mention access to swaths of capital that they will inevitably use to engorge and enrich themselves?

Your 600k in taxes will go into the pockets of various interest groups that markup their goods and services because they know Uncle Sam will foot the bill.

I would ultimately prefer a system of small, local, community managed democratic syndicalism. But, if I have to live in a capitalist world I'd prefer to live in one where the people in power at least try to take care of people.

Ideally, no, it would be centralized in neither the wealthy nor the government. But I think "raise taxes" is an easier path to net good than "let's seize the factories and run federations of democratically run industries in the interest of the wellbeing of all".

I think you're missing that the suggested path is not "let's seize the factories", but instead a return to "distributed charity" like we had before the Great Depression.

Then give away the $600k!

OP said:

>I would gladly pay 600k a year in taxes if it meant healthcare, education, housing, and food were secured for all.

Don't be obtuse by saying "give it away".

That statement is a lot of things, but I'm not sure how it's obtuse, mind explaining a bit?

The original poster clearly defined the terms that they would be willing to pay extra taxes. The user I replied to ignored that and said "give it away". The comment was obtuse.

The way you quoted made it seem like you were saying asking for increased taxes was the obtuse bit.

Edited for clarification!

Thanks!

Charity is not the same as taxes.

It's also not mutually exclusive. I can and do give away huge sums until those taxes go up.

I'm buying land and putting it into conservation, giving to community land trusts, and other ways that essentially make permanent changes towards the world I want to live in.

One person giving away their money just means they don’t have the money and society still doesn’t have, say, Medicare for all. It takes a collective effort to get the collective gains we need to see.

So "do as I say, not as I do"?

I think if you read my other posts, it's clearly "do as I do".

There's a coordination issue here. I'm astonished that so many people fail to see it. The result of one person donating $600k to charity / the treasury is completely different than ten thousand equally-wealthy people all paying $600k.

This person is saying "I will cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma, if and only if I can arrange a binding agreement by which others cooperate too", and a bunch of people are replying "then go ahead and cooperate; let the rest of us be free to defect"!

(By the way... uh... what do you do to earn $750k? As someone earning about 1/20th of that amount, I'm curious for some pointers).

Which means you are not willing to pay taxes because your preconditions are almost impossible to achieve judging how the government operates.

I recognize no system is perfect. If there was an attempt to achieve those things, crank my taxes up. I don't need perfect to be the enemy of good.

I don't think people like you should pay more taxes. The problem is at the much, much higher levels. The concentration of wealth like Musk, Bezos, and others have, should simply not exist.

Here's the criteria: Your wealth level isn't enough for you to have an oversized power over society. People like Musk have and they are not elected by the people. This threatens democracy itself.

> People like Musk ... are not elected by the people.

Untrue.

Everyone who bought a Tesla voted, with their dollars, to give Musk this wealth. Everyone who owns Tesla stock voted, with their dollars, to give Tesla this wealth. And everyone who voted, with their votes, for representatives that gave EV tax breaks voted to give Musk this wealth.

The man is rich because of economic and political cause and effect. Don't pretend the world that made Musk eye-bleedingly wealthy is somehow disconnected from the world of our collective actions.

If anything, it’s an intransparent trade that gives Musk and the others their power. It is not a vote.

The issue isn't their economic power by itself. It is their outsized political power that derives from that economic power. The more political power the oligarcs have, the less power all the other citizens have.

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