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Comment by danny_codes | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is suggesting that raising the effective tax rate for the richest people will magically fix all our problems.

However, we are saying that making the tax code progressive is better than what we're doing now.

I think we can all agree that Bezos paying an effective tax rate of 4% or whatever is not a fair way to organize society.

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Whatever scheme you will think is “fair” - Besos, not you, will find a way around it. But thousands of middle class and small business owners will bear the burden while dumb marxists keep complaining about their free lunch.

I mean that's the entire point of structuring your taxes so they are unavoidable. Piketty's proposal of a 2% wealth tax floor on wealth over $100M is a great way to solve that problem.

I'm not sure why thousands of middle class people would "bear the burden", since by definition they are far too poor to be effected by a wealth tax.

> I'm not sure why thousands of middle class people would "bear the burden"

Because there are many ways it can play out.

One of the obvious - if rich are too uncomfortable they flee the assets out of the country and the amount of taxes collected drops -> all middle and low class is left to compensate for it.

As far as i know similar dynamics already happened in various places throughout history.

But dumb marxists are incapable of thinking about anything productive or creative to solve the problem, they only think about how to take someone else’s.

Partially because of low intellect (i.e. inability to calculate multiple steps forward), but mostly because of the scarcity mindset, thinking about life as a zero sum game.

We need to be better than that.

I mean I'm talking about a specific policy proposal, for which people have done the analysis. Piketty has several books on the subject you can read. The tax structure is simply designed to make taxes progressive for all income groups, instead of progressive up until upper middle class and then highly regressive.

I can't imagine anyone is supportive of an upper-middle income earner having a 50% tax rate and a super wealthy billionaire paying 5%.

Or are you in favor of a regressive tax code, where richer people pay less tax? If so, I'm curious why you believe we should structure society that way.

Not sure what to make of your Marx rant. I never mentioned Marxism so I'm not sure what you're referring to.

Are you talking about wealth tax or income tax? Your comment doesn’t make much sense to me.

In all places i know - income tax is already progressive enough. It never regresses.

> Piketty has several books on the subject you can read

There are plenty of books written on marxism, voodoo magic etc. it doesn’t prove pikketty is smart or his ideas will work. What kind of argument is that?

Piketty's proposal is a wealth tax. That's the subject of my previous post.

I agree income taxes are progressive. Tt's just that very wealthy people don't pay them by virtue of not having any taxable income (they of course have tremendously large incomes, but our tax code doesn't consider their income taxable).

Thus our tax system effectively falls off at the top end: the overall tax burden decreases after say $50-100M and continues to fall from there. If you are really wealthy you can entirely avoid income tax rather easily, as Trump and Bezos demonstrate for us quite regularly.

The point is that income tax's progressivity is ineffective when your richest people don't have income, which is why you need a wealth tax to fill the gap.

The Piketty proposal I mentioned is designed to target this tax specifically at the gap: that is, people will very large amounts of wealth.

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