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Comment by geofft

9 years ago

> If you work a 40 hour week already and make a decent living at 40-50%, and now get told that anything above that will get taxed at 75%, unless you're going to somehow generate more than double, you're going to spend that time doing more productive things (like spending it with your family).

Hold up -

1. Why is this about working more hours, instead of working harder / more effectively? There are 168 hours in a week; even if you don't sleep, you cannot maximize your income beyond about 4x just by working more. I am currently making about 15x the lowest hourly rate I ever worked for, and I'm still fairly early in my career and feel like there's a lot of room for my salary to increase as I become more skilled.

2. I'm reading the discussion was about a tax on wealth, not a tax on income (dwealth/dt). If you're making a decent living and want to make more money so you can spend it on things that are not investments (consumer goods like video games, services like vacation travel/hotels, charity, raising more children, sending them to college), a tax on wealth will not affect you, because your wealth stays right where it is. And doing all that is net-positive for the economy.

'majormajor is clearly talking about wealth in the sense of static assets, not change in assets over time: I'm worried about having a single medical emergency, not having one every year. Make enough for your (static) safety net, then stop making more money.

> Why is this about working more hours, instead of working harder / more effectively?

Because they are tightly linked for most people.

I've managed to increase my income ~5x from what it was when I started but to do that I have had to put in 2 hours/day of side study.

  • Sure, and if I insisted on working exactly 40 hours I probably would not have gotten the raises or opportunities I got. But I am personally nowhere close to the amount of income we're talking about here, let alone wealth, and I've sort of maxed out my ability to be productive. Do we think that at the margin that a wealth tax would kick in - which is specifically not most people - the number of hours worked is relevant?