Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Are super-rich people just better at making money?

pudding.cool

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 587 posts

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#11

Post by dhruval »

This smells misleading / overly simplistic but I can’t quite quite put my finger on precisely why?

Some thoughts

- consensual trades are win win (you want a sandwich, I want $5 let’s trade! And we both win)

- something about the model is overly simplistic, like it produces a statistical distribution that looks like extreme inequality from randomness, but lots of different sorts of distributions can emerge from aggregating random (for eg a normal distribution several dice and looking at their totals).

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#12

Post by hackerman123469 »

bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

But tell me, how are you going to tax the super rich? It's incredibly difficult to tax someone who's actually poor on paper. Most super rich people actually don't seem to have much wealth officially declared, all of their wealth is sort of like "pseudo" in that it's all tied up in assets, and sometimes assets that aren't directly owned by them but their companies etc. and they have a lot of shortcuts for tax breaks on the stuff that can be taxed. With the current system in place then it's impossible to actually tax the rich.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#13

Post by shafyy »

bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

> Corporations and the super rich have bought out democracy, and what is crazy is that they are supported by the very groups they intrinsically hate and hurt through their policies.

This is known since at least Marx, and still it doesn't change. This makes me very sad.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#14

Post by blfr »

bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

The US is only very loosely constrained by its tax base. It does not lack funds.

It has also been spending much more on education over the past decades[1]. With very little to show for it.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a...

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#15

Post by shafyy »

hackerman123469 wrote: post #12
bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

But tell me, how are you going to tax the super rich? It's incredibly difficult to tax someone who's actually poor on paper. Most super rich people actually don't seem to have much wealth officially declared, all of their wealth is sort of like "pseudo" in that it's all tied up in assets, and sometimes assets that aren't directly owned by them but their companies etc. and they have a lot of shortcuts for tax breaks o…

> It's incredibly difficult to tax someone who's actually poor on paper

You think this because the super rich want you to think this. Actually, it's not hard and there are some good ideas floating around (e.g. more inheritance tax, don't let them get loans without taxes againt their illiquid wealth). Does it require a change of laws? Yes, but that's the whole point of democracy.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#17

Post by derelicta »

bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

I think this time we should go above and beyond regular heavy taxation. We should seek to extend republican norms within the corporate sphere and downright prohibit rent-seeking.

A country whose inhabitants have no say in its internal politics is called a tyranny. It's more than time to see the current workplace the same way.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#18

Post by bmitc »

sgjohnson wrote: post #8
bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

> To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. That never happened. https://mises.org/library/good-ol-days-when-tax-rates-were-9...

What is "that" that you're referring to? Tax rates have absolutely fallen. If you're referring the article's claim that the rich pay much more taxes in terms of dollar amount, that doesn't necessarily mean anything because the rich are wealthier and more concentrated than every before.

For example:

> According to investment bank Credit Suisse, the fraction of global household wealth held by the richest 1 percent of the world's population increased from 42.5 to 47.2 percent between the financial crisis of 2008 and 2018. To put it another way, as of 2010, 388 individuals possessed as much household wealth as the lower half of the world's population combined—about 3.5 billion people; today Oxfam estimates that number as 26.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#19

Post by sgjohnson »

hackerman123469 wrote: post #12
bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

But tell me, how are you going to tax the super rich? It's incredibly difficult to tax someone who's actually poor on paper. Most super rich people actually don't seem to have much wealth officially declared, all of their wealth is sort of like "pseudo" in that it's all tied up in assets, and sometimes assets that aren't directly owned by them but their companies etc. and they have a lot of shortcuts for tax breaks o…

More importantly, the super rich get to choose when, how, how much, and where, and from where they are paid.

And even more importantly, they all live on low interest ELOCs.

There's also no reasonable way of fixing this.

Re: Are super-rich people just better at making money?

#20

Post by patientplatypus »

bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

[dead]
Post reply on HN