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Comment by Herring | Hacker News Reader

The problem with these threads is everyone wants to complain about Trump, but support drops drastically when you talk about policies that actually help buffer against the far-right. Eg implementing robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. How many of you software engineers want to sign up for high taxes? It's basically tragedy of the commons.

Economics on its own is probably not sufficient either. You probably also need widespread unionization, a Cordon Sanitaire, and probably German-style intelligence surveillance of the far-right too.

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> How many of you software engineers want to sign up for high taxes?

FWIW, I do. I don't live in the US, though.

Cheers, mate.

You’re right to be thinking of second- and third-order solutions to these problems, which unfortunately the commenters in these threads aren’t prepared to engage with.

But the “economic anxiety” angle is well debunked at this point. Grievance, stoked by the right wing takeover of the media, is the answer. And we’ll need to go a lot further along the vector of solutions you’ve started down to fix that.

Any sources on that debunking? I can't say I've seen anything like that, but I'm open to read about it. Intuitively any societal problems like cost of living will feed into the far-right recruitment narrative that the elites are incompetent. All kinds of incumbents lost ground worldwide after Covid. And last I read the consensus is housing is a big contributor to the far-right issues in Denmark and the Netherlands.

But sure, if you want to add "break up big tech" and "regulate social media" to the shopping cart I'm absolutely up for it.

https://scholarship.depauw.edu/politicalscience_facpubs/1/

Re: regulation Ah but you’ve forgotten to think higher order, for how can a right wing government financed by big tech break up big tech? Such action will have to come from beyond the government regulatory bodies…

> Additionally, the model demonstrates that racial resentment is a far greater predictor of White support for Donald Trump than measures that capture economic anxiety.

That paper isn't quite saying the same thing I'm saying.

Author wants to argue racism is a bigger factor, sure that's fine with me. I think he's probably right. My point is economic anxiety is also a factor, and more importantly it's modifiable. It's a lot easier to pass healthcare/unemployment/etc laws than to convince millions of racists about literally anything, they're so dumb.

And I'd prefer if the paper was studying multiple countries to get a better picture. There's a (negative) correlation between robust welfare states and far-right penetration. It's weakening a little lately for various reasons, but it's there.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...

This isn't a taxes issue. The assault on higher education and the sciences by this administration is inseparable from the assault on minorities and free speech. This is the authoritarian playbook 101. Mao went as far as locking up all the PhD's and sending them to work camps.

Not taxes. Authoritarianism.

Yes it's a taxes issue, because that's how you pay for European-style safety nets. And again that's probably not enough either, cause Denmark/Netherlands are having issues with housing causing the far-right to surge. So you probably need Vienna-style public housing too. The US is so far from the correct solutions you're not even on the same planet.

This has nothing to do with funding.

The US is spending $892.6 billion on the military, $11.3B on ICE, and planning to spend $400 million building a fucking ballroom.

It's about authoritarianism.

I want you to go to your favorite frontier LLM and ask how much it would cost the US to implement Vienna-style public housing. Figure in paying off current homeowners to get their support. Restrict it to major cities where housing is the worst, just to make it easier. I bet you it's well over $10T long-term. Iraq was $2-3T long term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

You know what? I'll bite. I just went to Gemini and asked this and the answer was between 2.5 and 5 trillion. So less than 2 Iraq wars. Deff a tractable problem if so.

A word of warning: the US government will read this and figure out the solution is another Iraq war.

I hope so.

Hold on. That ballroom is ostensibly funded by private investors including Apple, AMD, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Nvidia, Palantir, Booz Allen Lockheed Martin, Zoom, Coinbase, Ripple ...

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2026/01/trump-ballroom-dono...

Therefore the customers of these companies are contributing some of their hard earned money to help these companies grovel to a would-be dictator, and build his precious ballroom.

I'm not a big fan of the general strike idea whereby people forego income to send a message. Why not stop spending money with these companies for some period of time? I think telling these companies to go fuck themselves will put more money in everyday people's pockets than not showing up for work.

Apple consumers would be on more ethical grounds paying a tariff than what Tim Cook has committed them to. He showed up at the White House on Saturday well after the reporting that the government had murdered a law abiding citizen, while that government protected the assailants, and smeared the victims.

It's disgusting. I find him disgusting. I find all of these companies disgusting.

> $400 million building a fucking ballroom.

Seems like a lot because it’s not a ballroom, it’s a bunker.

> How many of you software engineers want to sign up for high taxes?

it's not about taxes -- that is a false narrative. Trump did not reduce the budget, he just redirected money from science to "border security" (aka an unaccountable domestic paramilitary force aka ICE) and the military. Taxes were cut yes, but primarily on the very wealthy.

but yes, you are correct that Americans from both parties support high military spending instead of investing in the wellbeing of its citizens (education, healthcare, housing, etc.), and _that_ is a significant problem that I don't see us getting away from any time soon. very sad.

I meant taxes to pay for the “robust safety nets”. I could have phrased that more clearly.

All other first world countries tax their low and middle classes at much higher effective rates than the US to pay for those nets. Google stuff like effective tax rate by decile or quintile country name historical, and dig till you find solid sources with proper methodology.

There’s a reason OECD ranked the US tax system as most progressive some years back.

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