Comment by shakna
6 days ago
The top 1% aren't the billionaires. It's also not most of the millionaires. It's people earning a tiny bit less than 700k a year.
The suggestion is simply that the top 0.1% pay more - as they will be little affected by it.
It's important to distinguish between wealth and income. Like, I would say that a lot of HN readers are in the top decile of income in whatever country they live in, but far, far fewer are in the top decile of wealth.
Personally, I think that we should tax wealth more in general, and probably make the income tax a bit more progressive (I currently pay 52% which sucks, but if I had to pay a few pp more to get rid of homelessness and poverty in my country then I'd be ok with it).
> as they will be little affected by it
Everything you tax away from wealthy people is removed from their investments.
For example, if all of Musk's income above $1m were taxed away, the following companies would never have existed:
1. Tesla
2. SpaceX
3. Starlink
4. Neuralink
You didn't have to sweeten the pot, I was already on board
Its still less than the fines most of those companies have incurred in the space of a year.
Do you think they were arguing for taxing away all wealth over $1 million?
If they were taxed $1, that's $1 taken away from investments.
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Do you think they weren't? What about that logic doesn't apply to millionaires?
Or to put it another way, if I make the same claim about millionaires; how do you expect to argue that they will be greatly affected by being taxed more? A 1% tax increase on someone's gross income is never going to "greatly" affect them unless, but if it happens 100 times they will be pennyless.
If you take money away from someone, they will have less money and do less because they have less resources.
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I am going to abstract from the hard 1 million number which is obviously low in 2025, and just base my arguments on maybe a few million as a reasonable limit. Make it ten or twenty if that fits your mental model better. You have no way of knowing that those companies would never have existed. They could very well have existed, just no billionaire would have been the majority owner. The money is not removed from their investments, but they are required to divest them to other owners. Funding mechanisms for the companies now self-funded by billionaires would be quite different if the ultra-wealthy were never allowed to exist. It would require more cooperation, but it would not therefore be impossible.
If somebody cares about progress and is highly motivated, they should remain highly motivated to create incredible products and services, whether that buys them unchecked power or not. If some people would be less motivated and do less than they do now, it would be a lesser evil that creating oligarchs thirsty to dominate whenever they get the chance. As long as people can live a good and comfortable life, they do not have rights to more than that.
People who argue against progressive taxes tend to ignore the fact that modern capitalism is basically a game, one where the rules greatly favor the richest, who have virtually unlimited leverage compared to the average person. They make money exponentially more easily than others. It is absolutely right to correct this game through appropriate progressive taxes. Every once in a while an adult needs to step in to keep the game fun for everybody, and not just let the best player dominate others and make everybody else miserable. Maybe if we did this, the price gouging and constant turning of the screws would give way to a society where fair trade was the default cultural and economic norm.
Certainly hoarding more wealth than Smaug is a crime of grave injustice against humanity. For the mind completely sold to capitalism, this is impossible to understand. But people come before wealth and power.
> If somebody cares about progress and is highly motivated, they should remain highly motivated to create incredible products and services, whether that buys them unchecked power or not
If you tax their money away, they have that much less capital to invest.
> It is absolutely right to correct this game through appropriate progressive taxes.
Only if you don't like electric cars, cheap space rockets, cheap global communications, and enabling people with spinal injuries to need a lot less help.
> Certainly hoarding more wealth than Smaug is a crime of grave injustice against humanity. For the mind completely sold to capitalism, this is impossible to understand. But people come before wealth and power.
Nobody hoards wealth. They invest it. Nobody has a Smaug hoard. There are no Scrooge McDuck cash vaults.
I suggest you check out what happened under communism in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, etc., under communism where people came before wealth and power. Your ideas sound good in a textbook and in the classroom, but they just don't work in the real world.
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