Hacker News Reader

Comment by IncreasePosts | Hacker News Reader

High income individuals already pay a majority of personal taxes in America. And American governments get about $10T(or $29k per citizen) to play with each year between federal, state, and local.

Exactly how much money is needed to create this society you're imagining? America has more than enough money (IMHO), we just suffer from cost issues, and if you just throw more money at a situation where you have cost issues, you are just burning the money.

View on HN

To piggy back on this, as a thought experiment, if you took all the wealth of every American billionaire combined you would pay for the US government for about a year.

Top 10% wealth is $113T. Government is operating off of $5T revenue.

Seizing all of it and putting it into even a foreign owned asset basket (could pick an economy as shielded as possible from US in case it causes instability in US economy) should yield enough interest (at least 5% real) to operate the federal government and public entitlements indefinitely based on present real revenues.

It's not clear if this is meant to be a serious thought experiment, but nonetheless I would ask why you equate expenses ($6.8T) with revenue ($4.9T)? I suppose it might not make a big difference, but it's a strange decision (within an already very weird thought experiment.) Also not sure why you picked top 10% wealth, since the previous comment was about billionaires. The top 10% of net worth starts with low millionaires so... goodbye every single employer, I assume.

We suffer from billionaires hoarding money and companies creating an unfair market. Tell me what's the need for billionaires? Even having 100m is enough to feed a few generations of your family, isn't that enough?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com