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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

Or maybe it can be used to provide job opportunities to people currently underserved, for example, if you are bound to a hospital bed you can get a VR telepresence job to make some money and help pay your medical bills.

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We're doomed if regular people have fully absorbed the propaganda to the extent that they'd think asking invalid hospital-bed-ridden people to work remotely for the uber-rich rather than fixing the tax situation so that those uber-rich can buy one less golden toilet for their private planes (and the state can provide for those poor people) is a good idea.

I think (hope) the poster who suggested that was being sarcastic, although it's hard to tell anymore!

The math doesn't math. You could tax all the ultra rich people at 100% and it wouldn't significantly change the social contract. The part people don't like hearing is that it's a lot of the middle class that has to pay much higher taxes if you want those guarantees of minimum living standards.

Citation needed.

Here is one for the contrary (just a book review. The citation is the book).

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/06/we-need-to-tax-billiona...

That strongly supports my point. What do you think $250 billion a year worldwide pays for? That's $30 per person per year.

It's $250 billion less that goes to the ultrarich, so that they can't purchase another $250 billion of assets.

After a certain amount of money, financial engineers can basically build all kinds of leveraged instruments that will let you buy those assets anyway.

If you assume your taxation mechanism is actually perfect and actually gets you the theoretical maximum amount of money from the ultra rich, or even the fairly rich, it's still orders of magnitude less than it costs to make sure everyone is taken care of like the scenario we were talking about above.

I think that's a very different goal post. We were talking about the social contract, publicly funded services. You must realize it's just not a meaningful amount, right? That was my initial point. If you want a real safety net, you have to tax the middle class, and a lot.

That's not really how that works. Almost all of that money is tied up in operating businesses. Most very rich people mostly hold investments in stock - and generally at large companies. That's debt, not an asset I think the way you're thinking of. Overall, taking that money out of market holdings reduces the value of those holdings, for everyone else as well. You really end up lowering the retirement savings value of everyone who has a retirement plan by some amount.

Gross.

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