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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

> It also leaves out the $106 million-plus Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent in California fighting a proposed wealth tax and other issues

Damn, I can't think of a better argument for wealth tax if one dude alone is willing to spend $100m to fight it. He clearly has too much.

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The passing of Dolly Parton has really had me thinking how much good these unfathomably rich people and corporations could do. It enrages me to think of how many people $106 million could have helped.

What's really interesting is when you look at how much good they could do without ever actually affecting their lifestyle at all. What actually is $100 million to a trillionaire? What could he do with 1,000,000,000,000 that he can't do with 999,900,000,000?

The problem with this logic is that it equally applies to someone who owns 999,900,000,000.

If someone is willing to spend money above some spendable threshold, then they will never become a trillionaire. Because they will start giving away sooner.

> then they will never become a trillionaire

Good!! No one needs or deserves to be a trillionaire!

I’m not seeing the problem you’re describing. It has a name: the marginal utility of money. $1,000 is worth a lot to someone who has nothing, less to someone who has a million, practically nothing to someone who has a billion.

So, yes, it applies equally at lower levels, until it doesn’t.

> It enrages me to think of how many people $106 million could have helped.

That money did go somewhere, so it probably did “help” quite a number of people less rich than Sergey Brin.

(That’s just a side comment, not an argument that any single person should own that much money.)

People and corporations? Come on.

The US has now in one decade nearly doubled its military budget from ~$630 Billion to ~$1.2 Trillion.

ICE alone has received tens of billions in funds in the past year.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time. The real world doesn't require us to negate the commentary that the ultra wealthy people/corporations could be doing a lot more good than they're currently doing on the basis that the government is spending money irresponsibly/against the greater good.

Hear hear! I am a nonprofit tech professional, and a monthly call with ~40 similar folks yesterday started with a discussion of Dolly's passing. At first I thought it was just about loving her music and/or personality, but it was also the fact that several folks, at different nonprofits with varied missions, had received significant funding from the many foundations Dolly had set up over the years.

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