I wish I heard this view on taxes more often. Have a nice smooth tax curve up to like 95% at some income level (5 or 10 M). The rich are not taxed anywhere close to enough.
If someone figures out how to make 5M/year of income, I am absolutely certain they are better at capital allocation than the current administration. You are suggesting that they are not, and that we need to have the state decide where the money of the top earners go. I'm sorry, but we have tried that before. It does not end well.
OP did not imply that someone making 5M/year was not better at capital allocation than the government, but rather just implied a different measure of "better".
For example, there is a good chance that said individual would invest the money in more regulatory-capture extraction schemes. In this case, we would be better off if those resources were just straight-up wasted by the government proper.
Of course there's also a good chance that the government would use it to fund their own citizen-hostile totalitarianism (eg the NSA). The point is that the general heuristic of government inefficiency is inapplicable.
I don't think I know anyone who thinks that funding successful businesses is the ultimate goal of a society.
Many people argue that it's the best mechanism we have for achieving whatever our actual goals should be, but few if any will claim that running businesses is itself the higher purpose of human civilization.
In order for this conversation to be productive, we'd all have to agree on some underlying moral framework prescribing what society ought to achieve. And then we'd have to evaluate whether ultra-wealth people allocate their capital in a way that achieves that outcome.
No small tasks! But I expect that in the course of such a conversation, we might discover that there are a wide variety of rich people who spend their wealth in a wide variety of ways. Some of those people will typify your caricature of the rich, and some of those people will typify Harvey-Specter's caricature.
Finally, as an aside, you put the ultra-rich on quite a pedastal. They're just people who decided they wanted to accumulate wealth and then did a good job at achieving that.
It's admirable to do so well in a competitive environment, but no more or less admirable than the top 1% in anything else (a sport, medicine, religious/military leadership, teaching, etc.). Being great in a competitive atmosphere is a good signal, but wealth accumulation is not the only place where great humans compete and wealth is not the only metric which great humans use to measure their life's work...
> It's admirable to do so well in a competitive environment, but no more or less admirable than the top 1% in anything else (a sport, medicine, religious/military leadership, teaching, etc.).
Yes. And the irony is that the wealth accumulators ultimately do so using achievements made by other people, who cared more about other things than accumulating wealth.
Also, I don't think that the top 1% should have all the benefits (winner takes all).
Well what other "economics" are there if not "trickle-down" economics? How else, exactly, does wealth get from the rich to the poor if not through employment?
I think the problem with that argument is that the reasons an individual might be good allocating their own capital are distinct from the reasons they have capital, or what is justified, in the sense of ethical or societally defensible.
A successful white-collar criminal can be said to be good at capital allocation, to make an extreme example.
My argument is not that wealth means someone is criminal (although I do think criminality has as a goal wealth rather than poverty, which is the inverse but relevant). However I do think there are lots of hidden costs that people advertently or inadvertently manage to get out of paying for, and taxes are meant to recognize that fact.
The bailouts of the great recession are good examples of this to me in some sense. The government saved certain businesses, or ameliorated their crash. Whether or not this was the right decision is one thing, but given that they did get bailouts (or outs), suggests that what we should expect is taxes and regulation to support these kinds of things. There are lots of other things like this that conveniently get glossed over, like hidden environmental costs, education and infrastructure, research, etc.
I find it incredibly manipulative, for example, for arguments to be made against net neutrality on the grounds that telecom companies somehow bootstrapped their way up from nothing, when the internet itself was a government invention, and much of their infrastructure is made possible by public right-of-way laws or other privileges given by municipalities.
I think the fundamental problem with US society today is an extreme form of survivorship or fundamental attribution bias, where we grossly overattribute success to individual characteristics and not other factors. Then we get locked into these strawman debates that pit extreme capitalism against communism, as if there's no moderated grey area, that our only choices are complete equality of wages etc. or winner-takes all gross inequality.
What I increasingly see in the US are the haves and the have nots, and I no longer believe that the haves, by in the large, deserve what they have in a way that the have nots do not. Income inequality, to me, is bad not just because of the disparity itself, but because it tends to exaggerate market errors in valuation.
We tend to have these conversations and HN and elsewhere where we look at these examples of downward mobility and point to everything someone did wrong, but then do not turn to management, administration, business, etc. and ask "did they really do everything right"? We also tend to act as if, if they really made an error, that is really worth the downward mobility they accrued.
A 95% tax on incomes over $5M/year would raise about $100B per year in the US. That would be about a 3% increase in total federal revenue. Even if that were directly redistributed, every American would get a $400 check. It would not affect income inequality measurably.
Not that I think this is a bad idea but by the current nature of tech it's somewhat biased. Give more educated white males more time to participate in politics.
I would rather see the money spent on time off go to compensating part-time working minorities to participate in politics.
Like or or not, a policy like this unfairly amplifies the voice of the majority and weakens your voice as a minority due to the nature of tech companies.
A fund that dispersed compensation to people in a way that properly reflects the diversity of this country would be more fair. Tech companies and their workers do not represent the diversity of this country. That's all I'm saying.
Specify part-time working minorities was probably a little too specific, but these people represent a large portion of the population and I don't know how one is supposed to participate in politics when one is having trouble making rent.
One of the huge underlying issues here as a country is lack of understanding and communication across groups. If I was trying to help, but I was actually doing something that hurts out of ignorance, then I hope someone would point it out to me.
Again, I think the intentions are good but the execution has unconsidered side effects.
I think the answer to this is to do more to educate the individuals who will take advantage of this policy so that the actions they take help give a voice to or amplify the voice of part-time working minorities or other marginalized groups.
In other words, I believe we should laud all attempts to build a culture of civic engagement, no matter what your political beliefs are or your personal background. The next step is to help find ways for that civic engagement to be generally helpful rather than harmful.
full disclosure: i work at one of the companies named on this proposal
The nature of tech work means employees generally have more flexibility with their time, and can afford such involvement without jeopardizing their productivity or job. It is thus hard to quantify how much money it costs for such engagement.
I'm not disagreeing with your concern, but the mechanisms are a little different. As a result my opinion is that giving money to improve civic engagement among minorities, the poor, and under-privileged population is better discussed as a separate initiative.
That said, anybody can focus on projects that improve political engagement (making voting easier, help people find information about local politics) without bringing their political opinion/preference to the table.
Interesting. From my standpoint (CEO of a company that co-signed here) this isn't money spent. We already have a flexible vacation policy, and this just makes it explicit that civic engagement can be counted against that. Agree that it does amplify the voice of tech as a demographic, which is, sadly, not reflective of the general U.S. population.
The flip side is that a fund dedicated to compensating part-time working minorities to participate in politics would likely be painted as "protest checks". Would love to tease this out more though.
I love the idea of encouraging civic engagement. And there are probably things that can be done on a political level to make the playing field more even. We have the responsibility of making those things happen and supporting civil engagement via vacation policy is a good way to enable it.
It's just easy to forgot sometimes that many of us do come from a place of privilege so it's good to remind ourselves of it sometimes.
It's odd to me the government doesn't incentive participation in politics more and yet we have things like compulsory jury duty.
My take from this is that Trump is a symptom of a problem. The problem is never going to go away by attacking Trump or his policies. He is promising a solution to a problem that people are experiencing in the US. Like it or not, people are buying his solution.
If you don't like his solution, then you find a better one and sell it the people who are buying Trump's.
But most importantly, before we build another product to sell, we have to understand the problem. Get out of our ivory tower and understand the plight some people are experiencing.
