Comment by nobunaga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nobunaga | Hacker News Reader

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If a company gets too big, its not the employees fault, why should they be the first on the chopping block? If a government is too big, is it again the employees fault? Or is it someone elses?

The concept that some dude with more money than another can make screwups, then happily go off and impact thousands of lives thinking this is the way forward with no impact on them is utterly mind boggling. Similarly, we, the people who pay the salaries of government employees, are the ones who are at fault for voting in people who keep making mistakes. So why should the employees be suffering for this?

Do people not realise all of this is a smoke screen to push attention away from the conversation that existed to tax billionaires? To make them pay their fair share? This has all been nothing but an act to divert attention away. And its working. We are arguing about nothing when the solution is so obvious.

The people that should suffer are the ones in control. Not the ones who just want to live day to day.

Employees with zero to negative productivity should be on the chopping block because we want the employer to survive.

The United States has an highly progressive tax system where the rich pay the vast majority of the taxes. Why isn't that already their "fair share" (a propaganda term)?

Were it trivial to attribute the performance of complex systems to individuals, they would have no need to seek employment at firms and would be able to get the fair value for their labor in an efficient market.

And what if it turns out that let's say 70% of individuals have a zero to even slightly negative 'value', as seems increasingly possible as organizations shed mass numbers of employees but continue to function just fine? Or we can look at evidence in the other direction where you have companies taking on dramatically more employees yet not showing anywhere near proportional increases in 'productivity' (which I'm using as as a catch-all rather than as the precise term).

I really think this is the future many people behind evangelization of e.g. "AGI" futures are aiming for, with the assumption that well then we'd just have to create some sort of a basic income and everybody would live happily ever after. Of course that rather voluntarily chooses to ignore centuries of evidence to the fact that that's probably not quite what would happen. And even if it did, instead of everybody living happily every you'd instead create a dramatic stratification in society that would, over time, come to make Feudalism look like Communism. People that live only to consume will, over time, come to be marginalized with 100% certainty.

It's definitely a worry I have!

You have provided no evidence that the fired employees provided zero productivity.

Firing thousands of people should not be the decision of one unelected man. Congress funded those agencies congress has to defund them.

The middle class pay the vast majority of the taxes. The mega-rich pay very little as a percentage of their wealth.

> The middle class pay the vast majority of the taxes.

This is objectively false [1].

> The mega-rich pay very little as a percentage of their wealth.

This statement is a very different one than the previous and it’s expected since there’s no wealth tax.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

It is objectively false in the same sense it is 'false' to suggest renters pay property tax.

They don't sign the check, but the costs of tax burdens are often captured in the prices of goods/services offered by rich company owners.

Do you really believe that your second sentence is true? wow. So what you are saying is that billionaires, while they do pay taxes, pay their fair share with no attempt to avoid taxes? No overseas accounts or shady businesses? Its all above board?

But anyway, lets focus on the low productive people, because that really what is going to bring America out of the rut that it is in. Not the overly powerful rich that are totally screwing the regular joe. You're on another planet bro if you think the problem is the low productivity person and thats what America needs to focus on right now.

The main way taxes are avoided is by a lot of their wealth being paper wealth. For Bezos that's Amazon stock, for Musk it's Tesla. So when the stock doubles in price, so does (nearly) their net worth. But they're not taxed on this until they convert it to cash. So they can see their wealth double or triple with 0 increase in paid taxes, unless they try to access that money.

Taxing unrealized capital gains is possible, but it's not clear how you'd do this without destroying the entire financial (as opposed to goods/services) economy, since taxing 'wins' without crediting 'losses' makes any margins-game like investing impossible, but billionaires receiving billions of dollars in refunds when the market crashes is probably not visually great. It also seems fairly certain you'd introduce investment hedge possibilities with this, which is also probably undesirable. Not an easy problem.

And of course on top of all of this there's the Norway Problem. [1] Norway decided to introduce a hugely unpopular increase to their wealth tax system. It was expected to increase government revenue by about $146 million per year. Instead it resulted in a loss of about $448 million per year. Make taxation sufficiently onerous and people will simply leave your country. We're not talking about a captive audience, especially in modern times.

[1] - https://www.brusselsreport.eu/2024/09/11/the-failure-of-norw...

Certainly I do. I'd like the United States to change to a simpler and more regressive tax policy so that everyone has skin in the game. For example, eliminating all taxes in favor of a VAT or the like.

You live in a fantasy world. If thats what you think is the core problem right now in America or what needs to be focused on, good luck buddy!

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