If we took money from rich people, they might decide to be lazy instead and not work as hard, therefore depriving society of their abundant genius and benevolence.
> If we took money from rich people, they might decide to be lazy instead and not work as hard, therefore depriving society of their abundant genius and benevolence.
They're already not paying taxes here, how is it a loss? And I don't mean they're cheating (although many are), I mean our tax rates are so low that it's not a big loss if they leave, which they won't. Plenty of rich people live in New York or California and they would continue to live in the USA if we raised federal taxes to appropriate levels.
Wealthy people have all sorts of ways to avoid taxes, but high income people don’t, and they pay for almost everything. I think the number is something like the top 1% pays 20% of all income tax and the top 50% pays 95% of all income tax. So it really is a big deal of high income people just leave. Poor people can’t support the country on their own.
That's easy. We take their land and investment properties and put it up for sale on the market so that people can buy homes again. We tax all capital gains at a point so that once you are no more than 10 or 20 times above a middle class income, you have no incentive to try to earn even more money. At that point, it allows others who want to innovate and achieve that higher level of wealth a chance to compete and innovate rather than be strangled out by rich oligarchs. Billionaires are the new lords and nobles and if you can't see that you are blind to the reality of the situation. Monarchs caught on fairly quickly after Napoleon. Who cares what you are called, as long as you still have the same power that you wielded before? Not to mention you've convinced the serfs you can be "just like them if you work hard enough" instead of claiming divine right. I'm honestly shocked by the number of "intelligent" members of Hacker News who haven't figured out the "hack" yet.
They won't go, not in big enough numbers. They will have families, friends, other connections locally. Moving away is easier said than done, you need a visa/long term residence rights, you need to learn the local language and customers, you'll probably remain a foreigner for the rest of your life.
And another thing, if currently wealthy people live, what do you think will happen? Everything turns to a wasteland? People left behind will just take advantage of the new opportunities that are suddenly available.
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This is kind of like those discussions where people say that Gates is not actually a billionaire because his wealth is tied up in shares and if he'd sell all of them he'd be poor because this sudden influx of shares being sold would reduce the share price to 0. Like:
a) the price would actually go down to 0 if he suddenly sold everything
b) he'd actually sell everything all at once.. he'd probably just do it in stages and he'd still probably get something like $50-60bn cash, at least
But they won't leave, because high income people still live in New York and California. If high income people don't even move to new states, they certainly won't move to new nations.
