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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax

It could be an interesting thought experiment to consider the second and third order consequences, even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.

First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income? What portion of them are poor vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structured their income in a way as to pay zero or near-zero income taxes? Would the latter be disincentivized from continuing those regimes?

Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that.

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> Lütke holds seven per cent of Shopify, according to Forbes, and controls nearly a third of the votes attached to the company’s current shares. Since March 1, 2020, his base salary has been the figure he requested: $1, down from his previous $800,000. [1]

[1] https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/high-net-worth/wh...

So, just so that I'm clear, that means that Lütke himself pays no income tax?

(assuming that he's not paid a salary by anyone else)

No income tax, but capital gains tax. And capital gains tax is a lot less than income tax (hence Buffet’s “my secretary pays more tax than I do”). So the “$1/year” CEOs are simply reducing tax burden.

But, yes, under the proposed scheme, Lütke doesn’t get to vote. One may rest assured that this was a simple mistake. In fact, I’m sure he meant that only those pay capital gains tax get to vote, not income tax.

No capital gains tax is due until gains are realized. Lütke's gains are almost completely unrealized.

Better yet, he gets loans, collateralized against those unrealized gains to the current value of the gains, and then writes off the loan interest against his present and future taxes! Amazing!

Probably not. That strategy is a US strategy that takes advantage of holding the loans until death, then using the step up basis to zero out the unrealized gains and then pay off the loans.

Canada doesn't have that. At death, assets are deemed disposed, so trigger unrealized gains as taxable income on the last tax return. It often results in the estates of upper middle class people paying a lot of taxes.

But not the truly rich like Tobi who have good accountants and lawyers. He'll have moved his stock into a trust that doesn't dissolve on death.

In the U.S., it's about 28% of the populace which pays no taxes (or ends up netting to zero or negative taxation; for example, working families with children are often in a situation where they might owe $2,000 in taxes but also get a credit of $5,000, for a net refund of $3,000.) My 28% figure includes property, sales taxes, etc. but does not include taxes that employers, landlords, and so on pay.

This is all very beneficial for big business including Shopify: businesses can pay lower wages since the government steps in with benefits, including food, cash, housing, energy, medical care, and so on, for people with lower incomes, and then that means they have more money to spend as consumers (relevant to Shopify).

So the federal government can disenfranchise anyone they want by issuing that class of taxpayer a refund?

This would be pointless to do for one person, and it would be very curious to see a government reject a massive funding stream from a swath of people like this.

A total refund, that is, $0 in income tax.

Even more interesting (and less deliberately manipulative): The government could make it voluntary. Below $X tax liability, you can choose a total refund - but you can't vote. That would be voting by those who actually care about the vote (or who owe more than $X).

when you say "pays no taxes" do you mean income taxes or any taxes altogether? What about FICA/SECA 15.3% tax? Sales tax? Property tax? Individual income tax only makes up 53% of federal revenues as per https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover....

Introducing the shitshow of those state level taxes makes it unworkable, for sure.

The 28% included payroll taxes, sales tax, property tax and so forth. If you don’t include those, it’s closer to 60%.

Someone with 3 kids earning $26k gets about $10,000 in cash back per year (wiping out $2k in payroll taxes) and $12k of food stamps. Assuming they spend 100% of their cash on either taxable items with 8% sales tax or rent with comparable property tax, that’s still net minus -$5,280.

If we include food stamps and the value of Medicaid at $500 per head per month it’s net minus -$40k. And that doesn’t include things like housing assistance and energy assistance.

Such a person DOES pay gross taxes… they just don’t owe on net.

Somebody with three kids earning 26k is in extreme poverty. If them being a net receiver of government funds is considered a bad thing.... Christ.

Did anyone say it’s a bad thing? About 15-18% earn at that threshold of under.

With the assistance, though, the amount of net is about the same as someone earning $80k-$100k but gets no assistance at all.

This sounds like you are saying it is a bad thing.

Is it not a bad thing in the general case? People who produce net positive value for society subsidize the unsustainable reproduction of those who are a net drain. It is a very sterile perspective, but reality doesn't care about empathy, and you can't feed people with good feelings.

I do not agree that contribution to society is measured in dollars.

> ...vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structured their income in a way as to pay zero or near-zero income taxes? Would the latter be disincentivized from continuing those regimes?

Oh, you know if something like this was implemented, those people would re-structure their income so they pay $1 in income tax.

Or they wouldn't bother, because they have far more effective ways of influencing the political process than voting. This would be purely about disenfranchising weaker people who could get in the way of them getting even more power.

> even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.

This is a strange phrase - initially you had to either own land (therefore pay tax) or else if you lived in a city and didn't own land but paid sufficient tax[1], to vote in the early United States. Only taxpayers voting was our first principles! We only changed it later.

[1] I'm simplifying slightly because different states handled this differently

Early democracies didn't allow everyone to vote - slaves typically had no voting rights (or any rights at all). However, we've progressed to understand that if you don't provide people with voting rights, they then have to resort to violence instead either through rebellion or insurrection etc. which is why it's considered a very good idea to let women or even people with different coloured skin to vote.

The end-game to stripping voting rights from people is to surely enslave them or kill them as otherwise they will end up using violence to effect change. Personally, I don't understand how most people don't see how evil and twisted some of these "industry leaders" are.

I think it'd be interesting to only allow people a vote if they are jobless and/or poor i.e. the bottom rung of society. That would tilt society so that we would put much more attention on raising the living standards at the bottom rather than aiming to give more power to sociopathic CEOs.

> which is why it's considered a very good idea to let women

There's some revisionism going on here. Women did not want to vote. It was the feminism/communism movement that brought on women suffrage. Had the USSR not succeeded in planting this, we likely wouldn't have ever gotten it.

I've never heard of that and would welcome some sources.

As I understand it, the Women's suffrage movement began mainly in Britain during the late 19th century. The USSR didn't exist until 1922, so I think you've been misinformed.

Arguably, voting rights for some women did exist before then, with Sweden in the 18th century probably being the first. There was also Lydia Taft who was able to vote in colonial America in 1756.

>First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income?

If you modify this slightly to the percent of people who are not net taxpayers, meaning you subtract transfer payments (including social security, medicare, medicaid) to them from the taxes they pay (including social security, medicare, and medicaid), it's about 60% of the country, which tracks quite closely to the percentage of Americans who could not afford an unexpected $1000 expense.

Most of the country is on a constant financial cliff.

The best analysis I have seen puts it at 28% once you net out sales taxes and property taxes. (There are a lot of people who own property that they live in, but don't work, but they do owe property tax obviously.)

Your 60% figure is reasonable, though, as the gap between 28% and 60% is people who are paying a very, very small net amount, mostly via sales taxes or other taxes that exist like taxes on airplane tickets or hotels.

I’ve spent the last three days writing an inventory management system for a small store, using Codex and Claude Code. I realize that fully replacing online tools like Shopify is a lot more work than that (the payment integrations particularly), but: I sure wouldn’t want to be in the SaaS business right now.

None of the legit ones are at risk from vibecoders.

I don't know what a vibe coder is to you, but I expect there are dozens of experienced software developers on HN who are willing to throw a month of work over the course of a year (and a few hundred dollars of Codex and Claude Code subscriptions/tokens they're already paying for) to write customized software for their friends and loved ones to use. And that while many of these tools will be mediocre or won't get maintained, a non-trivial number will be open sourced and will form a new layer of competition with existing SaaS businesses. (And even if I'm wrong, we're barely a year into the era of coding agents. Wait til 2027 to make big predictions.)

never going to happen. there aren’t dozens but tens of thousands and every knows that everyone is a “coder” now. hence no one will be switching off any of the platforms they are on and these “competitors” will die out or keep paying $20/m to vercel to keep the lights on.

One possibly positive side effect is that by sidelining the working and middle classes, the political landscape would pit the rich against the fuck-you-rich.

It would be interesting to see the class of doctors, lawyers and small business owners fighting against the class of large cap c-suite and the billionaires.

We don’t have to go farther back than 100 years in history to know what this looks like. Poll taxes, land ownership requirements, etc. were pretty common. So were goon squads to beat and murder people who tried to change that. It wasn’t good.

I wouldn't want a lot of the landscape 100 years ago, but I'd happily be disenfranchised if I could get the size of government 100+ years ago (federal government <~2% of GDP in non-wartime)

You might change your mind if you study the economy of the US in the late 1800's. Those boom and bust cycles were intense, making the great depression of the 1930's look unexceptional.

If you want to get rich, you need an healthy, educated, rich and secure customer and employee base. You don't get that with <~2% of GDP spent on health, education, roads, police, courts et cetera.

That landscape you wouldn’t want is in part a product of the small government you covet.

"Great men of history do not introspect, move forward, go!"

The majority of voters who pay no income tax are (heavily Republican) retirees.

> First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income?

Most corporates, for starters.

Seen in that light, it might not be such a bad idea.

I think you would magically see more (edit: wealthy) people collect an income

> Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that.

Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. Every part of the system has trade-offs that must be evaluated. You can make a logical argument that any other policy is open to abuse, etc. But why do you have to accuse other people of being “crazy” for having ideas about how to engineer a system?

You mean government and society are an engineering exercise. You can't strip people of power and then say it's a democracy, at least not if words mean things.

Words do “mean” things. But the word “democracy” refers to a broader category of government systems, of which democracy with universal adult franchise constitutes a subset of the broader concept. The ancient Greeks practiced democracy, but universal adult franchise was a much later development.

Like any engineering exercise, there are ideas within the bounds of reasonable debate and ideas that are so bad they should be immediately dismissed and those advocating for them excluded from further discussion until they can participate like intelligent adults.

If I'm a civil engineer designing a bridge, I think it's perfectly reasonable to call someone crazy if their plan is to build it out of Popsicle sticks and unicorn tears. Or more appropriate for this discussion, from the bones of poor people. Wasting time on their nonsense not only makes it harder to reach our actual goal of building a bridge, but reinforces the nonsense notion that all ideas are equally valid or worthy of consideration just because someone voiced them.

The difference is that you can prove with math and physics that building bridge out of popsicle sticks is crazy. Whereas your point here is based on emotional appeals (“bones of poor people”) and religious dogma. Poor people are the ones who suffer the most from dysfunctional government. Every unit of inefficiency or dysfunction in public services—every late bus or bad teacher—is a tax on the people who can least afford it.

You seem to imply that allowing poor people to vote leads to a dysfunctional government, whereas it seems clear to me that allowing corporations to influence politics is far, far worse.

You’re not thinking it through. Corporate money influences politics because campaigns are expensive. And campaigns are expensive because advertising to vast swaths of low information voters is expensive.

Say you cut out the third of the electorate that’s most susceptible to advertising. That would increase everyone else’s voting power by 50%. But it would greatly reduce the actual power of rich people, because the remaining electorate would be much harder to influence by buying advertising.

The other thing is that narrowing the electorate by a third would be less elitist than the systems the Wilsonians came up with in response to the Jacksonians. Today, everyone votes, but votes don’t matter very much because the government is actually run by a small elite of credentialed experts and civil servants, and lawyers. APA litigation has a far outsized impact compared to voting.

> Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system.

God, tech people should have stayed in basements.

The person you're quoting is a lawyer.

I was a basement dwelling tech person first. I don’t know when techies got soft, but back in my day we were like “remove all the warning labels and let god sort it out.”

A lawyer who has, in the past, said only property owners and people with at least two grandparents born in the US should be allowed to vote (which excludes him by the second criteria). He's been an advocate for disenfranchisement for a while now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46885305

I do believe the “we have to strip voting rights from the poor in order to save the poor” framing expressed in this thread is new, however.

It is new, but it's not that surprising given his stated positions in the past.

If you think poor people know what’s best for them, how do you think we should decide vaccine schedules for kids? We should have online voting on it with universal franchise, right? We have the technology now. If you don’t agree we should do that, explain why you think we should gatekeep such an important decision instead of letting people decide what’s best for them?

Sorry, did you intend to link this reply to a different comment?

* * *

I'm just pointing out that you have advocated, repeatedly, for the disenfranchisement of people (including yourself, which leads to a question: Do you practice your current right to vote, or stand by your conviction that you don't deserve that right and so don't vote?. And your plan for disenfranchisement includes cutting you off from the vote, but not your children, but could disenfranchise your grandchildren.

How that'd work:

You were not born in the US (per many, many past comments you've made here). Your wife was (also per many, many comments). Your parents were not, but your wife's parents were, so your children get the right to vote (they have two grandparents born in the US).

If your child marries an immigrant or the child of immigrants, then their children would be deprived of the right to vote despite the fact that one of their parents had the right to vote. Your grandchildren would only have 1 grandparent (your wife, their grandmother) born in the US, so you think they wouldn't deserve the right to vote.

How is this possibly a reasonable system? Have you told your children yet that if they don't marry the right kind of people that you don't think their children (your own grandchildren) deserve the right to vote? You're no better than the Jim Crow pushers of old.

I don't think "crazy" is the best word, but maybe "malicious", "evil", "megalomaniac" or something similar would be more appropriate.

However, I would describe the idea itself as being "crazy" as it seems like something that could very easily be abused. There's a long history of voting laws being twisted to deny certain groups of people (e.g. slaves, women) and of course, there's the old U.S. intelligence tests that they used to give to black people to validate whether they would be allowed to vote (spoiler: the tests were ambiguous enough to invalidate everyone subjected to them).

Imagine if this was implemented and then some bright spark announces that Starbucks workers no longer have to pay income tax. Then, following the election, an immediate decree is made that Starbucks workers are now the property of Starbucks and are not considered to have individual rights.

It’s fallacious reasoning to say that, just because some distinctions for voting are illegitimate, therefore all distinctions are illegitimate. We already have distinctions: kids can’t vote, non-citizen foreigners can’t vote, felons often can’t vote.

> It’s fallacious reasoning to say that, just because some distinctions for voting are illegitimate, therefore all distinctions are illegitimate

I agree, but that's not really the argument here. My argument is that it is very easy to abuse certain distinctions and so we should not seriously entertain those distinctions. Proof of worth or intelligence can be easily gamed to prevent certain classes of people from voting,

Almost any system that limits participation in democracy will be abused to disenfranchise people that those in power do not want to give a voice.

So you're coming at this from the wrong end. The goal is explicitly to keep the poors from having a voice in politics. The exact policy and enforcement of the system will reflect that. Unintended consequences, like the rich being disenfranchised would not occur.

To say it differently, if that ends up disenfranchising the powerful, a different argument and set of law would be used

Trump paid about $750 in taxes in 2016 while still claiming to be a billionaire. I wouldn't consider it a fair share, but would that $750 entitle him to a vote under this plan?

>Trump paid about $750 in taxes in 2016 while still claiming to be a billionaire

Right, because the tax system (generally) taxes income, not wealth. Not taking this into account is like asking "you're millionaire, yet you don't have any income, how come?" to a retiree. According to the new york times article that broke this story, most of it seems to be from his loss making businesses elsewhere. Moreover in recent years he has been paying tax, as those losses have stopped.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-tru...

It is legal, but is it "fair"? And should someone who doesn't pay a fair share be entitled to a vote? Is the fairness important?

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