Wealthy AI workers send San Francisco house prices soaring

Post by rayiner » Sun, Jul 12, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #48

rayiner wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have expert consensus on what’s the best taxes, people just don’t like the answer: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-... (“Three. Eliminate the corporate income tax. Completely. If companies reinvest the money into their businesses, that's good. Don't tax companies in an effort to tax rich people. Four. Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For everyone. Taxes disco…

This approach is the perfect "the richer get richer" inequality engine that would run things even faster than our current system (which works pretty well already). Even the most consumerist of the super-rich spend that tiniest fraction on taxable consumables compared with any given salaried employee. Which means they have more to invest to increase their wealth (and gap between them and everyone else) even faster.

Post by rayiner » Sun, Jul 12, 2026, 1:36 PM UTC

dpark wrote: post #28

rayiner wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not classifying it as the best solution. I’m quoting an NPR article describing the consensus view of economics experts. But as I understand it, the reason is that consumption taxes have the least distortion in terms of deviating from the efficient behavior in the no-tax scenario: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/09/using-tax-to-tackle-...

That article spends most of its time explaining why a progressive consumption tax is obviously the right choice, then basically decries liberals as too dumb to understand it and conservatives as too evil to want it, but spends zero words to explain how a progressive consumption tax might possibly be implemented.

Post by rayiner » Sun, Jul 12, 2026, 1:44 PM UTC

altmanaltman wrote: post #31

rayiner wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have expert consensus on what’s the best taxes, people just don’t like the answer: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-... (“Three. Eliminate the corporate income tax. Completely. If companies reinvest the money into their businesses, that's good. Don't tax companies in an effort to tax rich people. Four. Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For everyone. Taxes disco…

This is not "expert consensus", they bought in 5 economics with different political leanings and tried to get them to agree to common points (even though they do not agree with each other politically) and this was what they agreed on. And this was in 2012, 14 years ago. If you do the same experiment again with 100 economists, they might have a widely different plan. Yes its an interesting article but you can't call i…

Post by tsoukase » Sun, Jul 12, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #6

Obviously the solution is an ai-funded-house-wealth-tax. I'm in favor of a politician tax, and an attractive people tax (I'm not worried, I will use my tax receipt for virtue signalling)

Post by ekelsen » Sun, Jul 12, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #42

ekelsen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for me, even income taxes as high as 53% have not discouraged me from trying to make more money. They have made me consider moving. At some level, certainly at 90%+, the most rational thing to do to make more money is to spend time lowering your tax bill, which is not a particularly beneficial way (to society) of making more money. But I can't image anyone at an income tax level of say 10% is being actively…

Prices are set on the margins, the reason people are paid what they are is because even a relatively small change would cause someone to do something differently. Same theory as why we can be confident raising the price of something a few cents is likely to cause someone to change their decisions - if it wasn't, the seller would raise the price by a few cents. It isn't obvious what a 10% across-the-market tax will do…