No, I don't think that's true. That's a delusion people with money tell themselves.
I mean, we can put you in the matrix and you can have that be true if you care zero about the rest of reality. Cypher.
also, social economics has demonstrated what most people care about is their wealth relative to their neighbors so you're going to create poverty whether you like it or not if there's no ceiling.
is your solution to tally up all the "wealth" periodically, and then "distributing" it to all the humans equally? And if we did that, how does it ever get allocated to productive means?
People with wealth in excess of "$X" though might suggest that either 1) our tax code is not progressive enough or 2) that there are loopholes some people are exploiting. For the good of democracy, it should certainly be looked into.
Wealth is power. If the ceiling is unlimited that means power is unlimited, which is incompatible with democracy.
The problem with inequality isn't just that extremely wealthy people exist or that they live really comfortable lives. It's that they use their power to try to control us all. If Elon Musk was just a trillionaire who messed around with cars and rockets and women, there wouldn't be a problem. But he got into politics, and his wealth means his political opinions count for far more than yours or mine, and that is a serious problem. You or I can't destroy a federal agency we don't like or make major foreign policy decisions as a private citizen, but he can.
Because the wealthy provide unlimited value back to the world?
If you have a gap of over 10,000x, then the most likely cause is that the system is broken rather than some humans make the world way better than other ones.
A yes, the private equitization of dental offices, old peoples homes, and veterinarians (and creeping into more and more niches) is making everyone's lives so much better and more productive.
Most states require that a dentist own the practice so PE essentially splits the business in 2 where a dentist (maybe the original owner, maybe a new dentist brought in by the PE) own hiring any dentists and the patient records, while an MSO owns the building, all other staff, contracts and cash flow rights. So sure on paper a dentist "owns" the practice, but in reality the PE firm owns everything that makes it a business and exerts a ton of control.
But sure, keep imagining PE is pumping money into the industry to buy nothing.
Infinite nonsense. "some human make the world way better than other one" are you claiming that the wealthiest are better humans based on what? Why would accumulation of money make somebody better?
What exactly do you intend to do with infinite wealth? What kind of life do you lead that isn't satisfied by what would be otherwise normal constraints?
I'm asking seriously. I've done this exercise for myself on what I want for my life, and the answer is that I can already afford it, and if we weren't so wasteful with our surplus of food, weren't so corrupted by regulatory capture as to allow companies to charge whatever for essentials, then most people would probably be able to achieve that same level of comfort.
What is it that you or anyone else needs an infinite amount of wealth for?
According to rich people, there are some genuine significant life improvements available to the rich. But at some point the improvements become very marginal. A few servants can improve your life, but going to 100 doesn't add much. A vacation home is one thing, but 7 is only very marginally better.
As your post implies, upper middle class Americans have already hit the point of marginal returns for most aspects of life. You don't get much better than an iPhone, a PS5, a standard dishwasher, standard fridge, a reliable car, et cetera.
But there are a few out of reach. The most expensive significant upgrade is a private jet. That's available to centi-millionaires. Nothing available to billionaires is a significant improvement, just a marginal one.
The biggest argument I have against a wealth cap is that in implementing it by force, you’ll do a great deal of violence to the markets themselves.
Is this a global cap? If so, can we just have a global world peace treaty first, just to prove you can get 200+ states to all agree on something easy, before trying one where it’s in their extreme economic interest to not agree? If not global, it’s just a game where the wealthy will hire lawyers to move money around and structure it in ways that escape the trap.
And the level at which it triggers will be subject to constant fuckery by politicians, depending on their budgetary needs. Once it’s low enough, and it will be eventually, it’ll hit normal people who just own a couple of McDonalds franchises. And they won’t be able to do the fancy maneuvers that Bezos, Musk, Zuck will do. In the end you’ve solved nothing and driven a ton of tax revenue out of your country.
The wealthy pay the vast majority of taxes in the US by almost every metric.
We should have plenty of money to pay for services, but government officials are never held accountable when they piss it away on inefficient programs and sevices.
Healthcare.gov cost a billion dollars. I've managed projects much bigger and more complex for a fraction of this. Nobody in the tech community talks about this for some reason....
The blame is always shifted to the wealthy by these politicians. It still won't fix the problem, if we don't have a better way to spend it.
The wealthy pay the vast majority of taxes because they make so much more than everyone else.
Completely hilarious argument because the more asymmetrically wealthy the richest get, the larger proportion of taxes they’ll pay. Then they’ll whine some more about paying such a huge portion of taxes.
Anyway, the US government is designed to be inefficient. It is a purposeful safeguard against autocracy and more pedestrian corruption. It will not be as efficient as private enterprise because private enterprise doesn’t need to be accountable to everyone.
Surely government services can and should be more efficient than they are today, but “I’ve managed things more complex than healthcare.gov” is only true in a world of frictionless spherical cows and a bureaucracy-free government of 380 million people — that is to say: not reality.
> It is a purposeful safeguard against autocracy and more pedestrian corruption
I get how inefficiency is a safeguard against autocracy. But how is it a safeguard against pedestrian corruption? Seems like inefficiency is a perfect cover to spin up a 501(c)3, bid on some social contracts and underdeliver. In our city, an audit was performed and homeless services contracts underdelivered by at least 60%. There's good evidence that medicare fraud nationwide is rampant.
How do you combat a culture where people can scam the government under the cover of inefficiency?
Let’s take a super trivial example: required competitive bidding for contracts
When a business finds a vendor they’re happy with and trust, they just keep going with that vendor.
For a government official, “vendor I’m happy with and trust” can be either an excellent, efficient vendor — or the official’s cousin. So we require bidding processes for almost everything. This process is a cost, risk, and delay that gets baked into the “cost of doing [government]” at every level. And yeah, it does open up new avenues of corruption and maladaption (for example vendors getting better at navigating the bidding processes than they are at delivering outcomes), but that’s the tradeoff that we (and most democratic) governments make.
Medicare fraud is often portrayed as beneficiaries defrauding the government. In reality nearly all of it is committed by healthcare organizations, and the vast majority of it is committed by the mega pay-viders like UnitedHealthGroup.
That has nothing to do with bureaucracy and everything to do with private money in politics.
We have a class of people voting to get anything that reduces the taxes on their ultra wealth and then a class voting to get anything that keeps the free money from the government flowing. Not a surprise it's not working out.
The vast majority of tax take by the us government is tax on income (person invoke tax and payroll tax), not wealth, thus the wealthy can’t be paying the vast majority of tax
This is the root cause as to why fast food and other companies do not care to keep raising prices, and why fundamentally, even things that "rich people" can enjoy are getting worse, be it media or video games or anything else.
A destruction of the middle class results in a worse society for all, not just the people that earn less, that's not a hard concept to grasp but whatever... I don't think many people will want to change their ways until it is too late.
The wealthy pay more than their share of taxes, if you define "their share" as a percentage of income, but they do not pay the majority of taxes, let alone the vast majority.
The top 1% (which includes a lot of people we'd consider to be merely quite well off rather than wealthy) paid 23.9% of all taxes and 25.5% of federal taxes in 2024. That's while making 20.1% of all income, so it's not a massively unfair burden on them.
Even if you only look at federal income tax, which is more progressive than other American taxes and thus exaggerates how much the wealthy pay, the top 1% pays 40.4% of the taxes.
Healthcare.gov was widely discussed in the tech community at the time. People were constantly incredulous at how bad it was and how much it cost. Maybe you forgot, or weren't there, or expect people to still be talking about it over a decade later.
In any case, that's not where the money goes. That kind of waste is almost incomprehensibly large to an individual, but it's insignificant in the federal budget. Social Security was $1.6 trillion last year. Medicare was another trillion, Medicaid was two thirds of a trillion. Nearly all of that spending is paid out to recipients/providers. Overhead is low single-digit percentages of the total. Defense is another trillion. Interest on the debt is another trillion. You could wave a magic wand and make every single project similar to Healthcare.gov free and it wouldn't make a noticeable difference in federal spending.
Technically true, but I think it's misleading. It's replacing money that recipients would have to spend either on insurance or on bills from providers, or both. Well, money is fungible, and the net effect is that it goes to recipients (or at least much of it does).
During what people like you would generally refer to as the "golden age of the US" during the 50s -> 80s, the progressive tax on the wealthiest was around 91%. And they still managed to be insanely wealthy, and the country had lots of burgeoning social programs that benefitted from it.
Why exactly do you feel the need to defend the right to hoard money? What does that extra money do? Buy you a yacht? Buy you a media empire to control propaganda? Buy you a private island for your wealthy friends to "party" on? A measuring stick to satisfy your own incomplete metric of self worth?
The CEO of XYZ corp might pay more than a worker on food stamps. But they benefit massively by the food stamp program allowing them to pay workers unlivable wages and allowing them to keep margins higher. On net they are benefitting more as an individual than they are paying into the system.
America has some of the lowest tax rates for the ultra wealthy. And since I can tell you're in the "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" mindset. The delta between you and "them" is not even close. Even with a tech job even with options and bonuses. 50 million dollars a year is a nearly absurd amount of money.
I support Elizabeth Warren's "2 cent" tax on income above 50 million dollars.
> if we don't have a better way to spend it.
I agree that DOGE was disastrous and ended up costing us money. A pound foolish and a penny wise is not the way to run the government.
Middle class culture, any culture, can only stand if it is rewarded. In prior times middle class culture was fundamentally supported by the upper classes, who invested in America, creating vast wealth.
They modeled sobriety, hard-work, risk and reward. The working classes modeled the behavior through church and labor guilds, standing together for each other and the nation.
The wealthy have abandoned America, and the working classes have abandoned faith, guilds, and each other. Into that void steps cultural anarchy.
Society requires hard-work, and discipline. It requires accountability, primarily of the wealthy. I tire of prose that lament the loss of culture without holding those accountable who have abandoned their responsibilities.
Zero disagreement. In fact, I may push it one step further. The wealthy did not just abandon America. They sold modular pieces of America by outsourcing what they could ( China, Taiwan, India.. you name it ) and eroding existing structures at home. There is still not nearly enough hate present for that. OWS was an interesting moment, but it got quietly dismantled as society's opinion turned on it ( by itself a fascinating story in how big banks funded its demise ).
But yeah.. hard work is not rewarded. The funny thing is. The kids see it. They are not dumb ( as much as TikTok trends would suggest otherwise ). The ronin-like approach to working relationship is very visible now and, as a corporate drone, I can't help but be impressed given the near constant propaganda onslaught.
Probably requires incredible amounts of energy to maintain an equilibrium like that over any prolonged periods of time. Maybe a feature of human societies that makes it improbable for any one society/state to dominate over longer stretches of time. Or it could be I just have the US, the UK and the roman empire in mind because I'd need more attention and I'm hallucinating the most probable answer based on my training data and your prompt. Very Cartesian, I know.
I appreciate your sentiment but I have personally observed and been part of a quiet group that is somewhat abandoned now, and was "middle class", and I can say cultural anarchy is not a given.
In fact, if we were to look at the abandoned as an economy of its own, minus the upper income levels, it actually still has a lot of members, and money is a part but does not have to be all of it.
The quiet group to which I refer is a group of people who believe in working together to support each other, and not making a big noise about it. We are finding ways to live working around the current system, and I do think it is gaining support. It takes a mix of support, room/space to experiment and a spirit of partnership first over domination.
FWIW, I'm not anti-capitalist. But I am pro-good life for everyone, and I think the extremes, market failures and inequalities of our current system - well - we can do better.
I think you're missing the mark by putting the blame on morals while ignoring actions such as Reagan dismantling unions and removing accountability from news reporting (IIRC, there used to be a law that news networks have to present a balanced view on any topic). Super PACs were not possible until 2010.
You cannot morally impose the wealthy to support the rest. It has to come through legislation and organization of labor.
> I think you're missing the mark by putting the blame on morals while ignoring actions such as Reagan dismantling unions and removing accountability from news reporting
Also cutting tax rates and encouraging 'pass-through' S-Corps, the latter of which really helped many people skirt taxes:
In the late 1990s, under Clinton, the US was in a fiscal position such that people were worried about US Treasuries (bonds) not being available anymore because of surpluses. Then there was Bush (wars, tax cuts), the GFC, Trump 1.0 tax cuts, Trump 2.0 tax cuts: and people are wondering how the US can solve its fiscal mess? How about you go back to 1997 (tax rates), the last time this was a non-issue.
The worst part about inequality is that it creates communication barriers which create total deprivation of opportunities. These days, I can't communicate with anyone who might have any opportunities for me. If a person is a good match for my skills and might be a source of opportunities for me, I simply cannot email them, cannot call them, cannot connect to them on any platform. It feels like there are AI bots working behind the scenes maintaining filter bubbles air-tight.
On the other side, literally all the emails I receive, all my social network connections are spam. Like completely irrelevant, generic spam sent by a bot, but not even tailored to me; just generic template 'Dear sir'; my name is not even mentioned.
Isn't that due to the cheapness of communication? When your options were a long-distance phone call or a letter, incoming communication could be treated as if it had some value. When a message costs an amortized fraction of a cent, incoming communication is on average valueless and gets treated accordingly.
This outlet is so transparent. The reasons for the rise in inequality since 1980, and the insane corporate profits that are going to the people who own equity and capital are not ACA subsidies, the Iran war and fucking tariffs.
Trump, Trump, Trump. Vote him out and we'll make sure that ACA continues, the Iran "conflict" is fought responsibly, and free trade will never be questioned again. This will somehow help income inequality in ways that I'm not going to tell you.
Partisan divide on the causes of inequality masks the true reason for widening inequality, and it's a simple matter of math. It's so goddamn simple, but fixing it is REALLY overturning the economy, so the socialists don't want it, and the rich people don't want it either.
Too oblique and vague. What are you trying to say?
The way I see it: Health insurance is actually getting more expensive. Tariffs are making imports more expensive. (Which also makes domestic production more expensive.) The Iran "conflict" was retarded. TFA wasn't really wrong about that stuff. It's obvious.
the thing is the trends to inequality have been happening for much, much longer than that. This shit that is happening in this administration is a blip, some of them (Iran, Tariffs) will probably regress. Imo, it's not even clear that Tariffs are bad; it's entirely possible that people will simply buy less cheap 差不多 shit from china that goes straight to landfills because it doesn't work or doesn't last. Domestication of manufacture could create income-inequality-lowering opportunities in the low end of income bands, and also cause people to, let's say, spend 2x more on a product that lasts 5x as long. That would be a net INCREASE in wealth, which is not captured by any of the retarded metrics that economists and policymakers obsess over.
While tech bros and Wall Street may get a lot of press of getting lots of money, the recent book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There seems to show (using IRS data, etc) a large portion of the wealth being held in private hands.
Interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots:
> In 2014, the economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick were asked by the Treasury to conduct a study on the tax burden of private business owners. It was tricky to figure out how much these sorts of business owners — auto dealers, contractors, the like — actually owed in taxes: After Reagan's 1986 tax reforms, pass-through businesses and other accounting tricks became widespread enough to obscure this class of wealthy Americans hiding in plain sight. The research they conducted led to their new book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, and one of their central findings is that there are about three million private business owners who have an average wealth of around $25 million. They call this group “Main Street Millionaires” and their influence on the economy and politics in the US is considerable. We speak with Zidar and Zwick today about how they measured the actual number of rich people in America by sifting through reams of tax forms, why income inequality started to rise in tandem with the growing number of pass-through businesses, and how it's possible that the collective revenue of the nation's dentists far exceeds that of the NFL.
(Lots of other interviews as well as the book just came out a few months ago, so the authors did a book tour.)
Some take aways from the books:
> According to Zidar and Zwick, Main Street Millionaires hold over 13x more wealth than the Forbes 400. And where do they hold it? In pass-through entities (like LLCs and S-corps) in various industries. Which industries in particular? Zidar and Zwick note that the top five are:
> 1. Legal services. This is mostly law firm partnerships.*
> 2. Financial investment activities. This includes venture capital, private equity, and hedge fund managers.
> 3. Auto dealers. These are the local, independently owned dealerships that sell new and used cars.
> 4. Professional and technical services and management consulting. This includes independent consulting firms and other specialized professional practices.
> 5. Oil and gas extraction. This includes fracking companies in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and other states.
An interesting observation: a radiologist working at a hospital may make much less if they're an employee of the hospital, versus something like a 'consultant' who use an pass-through S-Corp at the same hospital doing the same work.
The rich have greedily and selfishly opted out, and left a massive moral vacuum.
They must be held accountable. And the only way to hold the rich and powerful accountable is to stop them from corrupting the political process. Ban lobbying, undisclosed political donations and concentrations of private media ownership, and society will recover.
Many people I speak with in my generation (millennials) have a growing frustration with sending a large percentage of our paycheck to the already rich Boomers.
This is coupled with their self-centered politics which seem obsessed with them capturing as much wealth as possible and avoiding taxes at the clear expense of younger generations.
Redistribution is a left-wing policy. A lot of elected governments went right-wing recently. It's as simple as that.
The real driver here is not billionaires/governments/taxes/etc. This is what the voting public wants. When/If they decide they want lower housing prices, they'll stop voting for real-estate billionaires.
Interesting theory. The consequence of such logic would effectively make it like like every commenter gets one (explicit, literal) upvote and unlimited (implicit via comments) downvotes.
Interesting take. I suppose it could be done, though I don't know if anyone has tried to use it that way. Let's say that an article has 50 upvotes and 20 comments. Posting 31 comments, without tripping any spam/bot detectors HN has, is going to be tedious, and may take several people. But with enough determination and people, it could probably be done - if the idea occurred to anyone else.
By the way, I think it's more than "interesting theory". I've seen dang comment more than once to the effect that comments > upvotes = off the front page.
> I think it's more than "interesting theory". I've seen dang comment more than once to the effect that comments > upvotes = off the front page.
The plural of anecdote is not data. I believe you. Also, I'm not going to set my priors on 0% chance it's not something else 100% of the time.
> Let's say that an article has 50 upvotes and 20 comments. Posting 31 comments
You're coming from an intentional actor angle. I was more thinking: people who are riled up and don't like something are more likely to post multiple comments (rage bait). So whether or not they intend to have that outcome, their emergent behavior has that effect. And if they're starting flame wars they only need N/2 number of comments if every comment draws a response. Fewer if multiple respond (which is usually true for the most horrible takes). I think it's cheaper and easier to do than you make out. If they can draw 5 responses per comment, they only need 7 comments total (round up).
The book "Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design" by MIT press for where my head is at.
How did you stumble on this comment thread in a nuked (for whatever reason) post anyway?
I found it by looking at the "comments" page to see if there's something interesting. It doesn't care if it's off the front page.
"People who are riled up" is exactly what this is supposed to detect. It's a flamewar detector. HN doesn't want to promote such a thing on the front page, because it's not an interesting discussion.
If a conversation is derailed by a bad actor, we don't that derailed conversation on the front page.
HN has other mechanisms for detecting and shadow banning bad actors, punishing everybody else by keeping derailed conversations on the front page is not productive.
The USA are an outlier in the developed world. Extreme wealth, extremely free market and a tiny social net seen only in the developing world. From that POV inequality reaches the expected magnitude like Argentina or Malaysia with the same political qualities. Nothing surprising here.
73 comments
[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 27.0 ms ] threadWhen it comes to wealth, the ceiling should be unlimited AND the floor should be high.
I mean, we can put you in the matrix and you can have that be true if you care zero about the rest of reality. Cypher.
also, social economics has demonstrated what most people care about is their wealth relative to their neighbors so you're going to create poverty whether you like it or not if there's no ceiling.
That's just not accurate. What people care most about is not losing what they already have. That will cause extreme reactions.
Sounds a bit like taxation.
The problem with inequality isn't just that extremely wealthy people exist or that they live really comfortable lives. It's that they use their power to try to control us all. If Elon Musk was just a trillionaire who messed around with cars and rockets and women, there wouldn't be a problem. But he got into politics, and his wealth means his political opinions count for far more than yours or mine, and that is a serious problem. You or I can't destroy a federal agency we don't like or make major foreign policy decisions as a private citizen, but he can.
If you have a gap of over 10,000x, then the most likely cause is that the system is broken rather than some humans make the world way better than other ones.
Owned in the end by the very same dentists, no?
But sure, keep imagining PE is pumping money into the industry to buy nothing.
"The percentage of dentists affiliated with private equity has nearly doubled over the course of six years"
I'm asking seriously. I've done this exercise for myself on what I want for my life, and the answer is that I can already afford it, and if we weren't so wasteful with our surplus of food, weren't so corrupted by regulatory capture as to allow companies to charge whatever for essentials, then most people would probably be able to achieve that same level of comfort.
What is it that you or anyone else needs an infinite amount of wealth for?
As your post implies, upper middle class Americans have already hit the point of marginal returns for most aspects of life. You don't get much better than an iPhone, a PS5, a standard dishwasher, standard fridge, a reliable car, et cetera.
But there are a few out of reach. The most expensive significant upgrade is a private jet. That's available to centi-millionaires. Nothing available to billionaires is a significant improvement, just a marginal one.
Except for power.
Is this a global cap? If so, can we just have a global world peace treaty first, just to prove you can get 200+ states to all agree on something easy, before trying one where it’s in their extreme economic interest to not agree? If not global, it’s just a game where the wealthy will hire lawyers to move money around and structure it in ways that escape the trap.
And the level at which it triggers will be subject to constant fuckery by politicians, depending on their budgetary needs. Once it’s low enough, and it will be eventually, it’ll hit normal people who just own a couple of McDonalds franchises. And they won’t be able to do the fancy maneuvers that Bezos, Musk, Zuck will do. In the end you’ve solved nothing and driven a ton of tax revenue out of your country.
If we're going to tax wealth, then we should probably tax it to just below the level of growth, so that it doesn't spiral towards a singularity.
Unlimited wealth means political power and means to further it.
The floor should also be comfortably high but not to the detriment of the environment for example.
We should have plenty of money to pay for services, but government officials are never held accountable when they piss it away on inefficient programs and sevices.
Healthcare.gov cost a billion dollars. I've managed projects much bigger and more complex for a fraction of this. Nobody in the tech community talks about this for some reason....
The blame is always shifted to the wealthy by these politicians. It still won't fix the problem, if we don't have a better way to spend it.
Completely hilarious argument because the more asymmetrically wealthy the richest get, the larger proportion of taxes they’ll pay. Then they’ll whine some more about paying such a huge portion of taxes.
Anyway, the US government is designed to be inefficient. It is a purposeful safeguard against autocracy and more pedestrian corruption. It will not be as efficient as private enterprise because private enterprise doesn’t need to be accountable to everyone.
Surely government services can and should be more efficient than they are today, but “I’ve managed things more complex than healthcare.gov” is only true in a world of frictionless spherical cows and a bureaucracy-free government of 380 million people — that is to say: not reality.
I get how inefficiency is a safeguard against autocracy. But how is it a safeguard against pedestrian corruption? Seems like inefficiency is a perfect cover to spin up a 501(c)3, bid on some social contracts and underdeliver. In our city, an audit was performed and homeless services contracts underdelivered by at least 60%. There's good evidence that medicare fraud nationwide is rampant.
How do you combat a culture where people can scam the government under the cover of inefficiency?
When a business finds a vendor they’re happy with and trust, they just keep going with that vendor.
For a government official, “vendor I’m happy with and trust” can be either an excellent, efficient vendor — or the official’s cousin. So we require bidding processes for almost everything. This process is a cost, risk, and delay that gets baked into the “cost of doing [government]” at every level. And yeah, it does open up new avenues of corruption and maladaption (for example vendors getting better at navigating the bidding processes than they are at delivering outcomes), but that’s the tradeoff that we (and most democratic) governments make.
Medicare fraud is often portrayed as beneficiaries defrauding the government. In reality nearly all of it is committed by healthcare organizations, and the vast majority of it is committed by the mega pay-viders like UnitedHealthGroup.
That has nothing to do with bureaucracy and everything to do with private money in politics.
See: Rick_Scott
https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386....
"LARGEST HEALTH CARE FRAUD CASE IN U.S. HISTORY SETTLED HCA INVESTIGATION NETS RECORD TOTAL OF $1.7 BILLION"
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/09/17/top-10-of-earne...
This is the root cause as to why fast food and other companies do not care to keep raising prices, and why fundamentally, even things that "rich people" can enjoy are getting worse, be it media or video games or anything else.
A destruction of the middle class results in a worse society for all, not just the people that earn less, that's not a hard concept to grasp but whatever... I don't think many people will want to change their ways until it is too late.
The top 1% (which includes a lot of people we'd consider to be merely quite well off rather than wealthy) paid 23.9% of all taxes and 25.5% of federal taxes in 2024. That's while making 20.1% of all income, so it's not a massively unfair burden on them.
https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/
Even if you only look at federal income tax, which is more progressive than other American taxes and thus exaggerates how much the wealthy pay, the top 1% pays 40.4% of the taxes.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
Healthcare.gov was widely discussed in the tech community at the time. People were constantly incredulous at how bad it was and how much it cost. Maybe you forgot, or weren't there, or expect people to still be talking about it over a decade later.
In any case, that's not where the money goes. That kind of waste is almost incomprehensibly large to an individual, but it's insignificant in the federal budget. Social Security was $1.6 trillion last year. Medicare was another trillion, Medicaid was two thirds of a trillion. Nearly all of that spending is paid out to recipients/providers. Overhead is low single-digit percentages of the total. Defense is another trillion. Interest on the debt is another trillion. You could wave a magic wand and make every single project similar to Healthcare.gov free and it wouldn't make a noticeable difference in federal spending.
Why exactly do you feel the need to defend the right to hoard money? What does that extra money do? Buy you a yacht? Buy you a media empire to control propaganda? Buy you a private island for your wealthy friends to "party" on? A measuring stick to satisfy your own incomplete metric of self worth?
What exactly do you need all that money for?
America has some of the lowest tax rates for the ultra wealthy. And since I can tell you're in the "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" mindset. The delta between you and "them" is not even close. Even with a tech job even with options and bonuses. 50 million dollars a year is a nearly absurd amount of money.
I support Elizabeth Warren's "2 cent" tax on income above 50 million dollars.
> if we don't have a better way to spend it.
I agree that DOGE was disastrous and ended up costing us money. A pound foolish and a penny wise is not the way to run the government.
In a progressive tax system that's the way it is supposed to work. People pay what they can afford to is kind of the point.
Anything less than a progressive tax system means the poor pay more and the rich pay less. Is that what we're advocating for?
But yeah.. hard work is not rewarded. The funny thing is. The kids see it. They are not dumb ( as much as TikTok trends would suggest otherwise ). The ronin-like approach to working relationship is very visible now and, as a corporate drone, I can't help but be impressed given the near constant propaganda onslaught.
In fact, if we were to look at the abandoned as an economy of its own, minus the upper income levels, it actually still has a lot of members, and money is a part but does not have to be all of it.
The quiet group to which I refer is a group of people who believe in working together to support each other, and not making a big noise about it. We are finding ways to live working around the current system, and I do think it is gaining support. It takes a mix of support, room/space to experiment and a spirit of partnership first over domination.
FWIW, I'm not anti-capitalist. But I am pro-good life for everyone, and I think the extremes, market failures and inequalities of our current system - well - we can do better.
You cannot morally impose the wealthy to support the rest. It has to come through legislation and organization of labor.
Also cutting tax rates and encouraging 'pass-through' S-Corps, the latter of which really helped many people skirt taxes:
* https://archive.is/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/0...
* https://phys.org/news/2026-10-private-business-fortunes-reve...
* https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250378507/theeverywheremi...
In the late 1990s, under Clinton, the US was in a fiscal position such that people were worried about US Treasuries (bonds) not being available anymore because of surpluses. Then there was Bush (wars, tax cuts), the GFC, Trump 1.0 tax cuts, Trump 2.0 tax cuts: and people are wondering how the US can solve its fiscal mess? How about you go back to 1997 (tax rates), the last time this was a non-issue.
On the other side, literally all the emails I receive, all my social network connections are spam. Like completely irrelevant, generic spam sent by a bot, but not even tailored to me; just generic template 'Dear sir'; my name is not even mentioned.
Trump, Trump, Trump. Vote him out and we'll make sure that ACA continues, the Iran "conflict" is fought responsibly, and free trade will never be questioned again. This will somehow help income inequality in ways that I'm not going to tell you.
Partisan divide on the causes of inequality masks the true reason for widening inequality, and it's a simple matter of math. It's so goddamn simple, but fixing it is REALLY overturning the economy, so the socialists don't want it, and the rich people don't want it either.
The way I see it: Health insurance is actually getting more expensive. Tariffs are making imports more expensive. (Which also makes domestic production more expensive.) The Iran "conflict" was retarded. TFA wasn't really wrong about that stuff. It's obvious.
Interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots:
> In 2014, the economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick were asked by the Treasury to conduct a study on the tax burden of private business owners. It was tricky to figure out how much these sorts of business owners — auto dealers, contractors, the like — actually owed in taxes: After Reagan's 1986 tax reforms, pass-through businesses and other accounting tricks became widespread enough to obscure this class of wealthy Americans hiding in plain sight. The research they conducted led to their new book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, and one of their central findings is that there are about three million private business owners who have an average wealth of around $25 million. They call this group “Main Street Millionaires” and their influence on the economy and politics in the US is considerable. We speak with Zidar and Zwick today about how they measured the actual number of rich people in America by sifting through reams of tax forms, why income inequality started to rise in tandem with the growing number of pass-through businesses, and how it's possible that the collective revenue of the nation's dentists far exceeds that of the NFL.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh7A2VyveUw
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/theres-a-mind-boggling...
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/theres-a-mind-boggling-number...
* https://open.spotify.com/episode/3wFRjaeUQOiNmlYYTwhwRf
(Lots of other interviews as well as the book just came out a few months ago, so the authors did a book tour.)
Some take aways from the books:
> According to Zidar and Zwick, Main Street Millionaires hold over 13x more wealth than the Forbes 400. And where do they hold it? In pass-through entities (like LLCs and S-corps) in various industries. Which industries in particular? Zidar and Zwick note that the top five are:
> 1. Legal services. This is mostly law firm partnerships.*
> 2. Financial investment activities. This includes venture capital, private equity, and hedge fund managers.
> 3. Auto dealers. These are the local, independently owned dealerships that sell new and used cars.
> 4. Professional and technical services and management consulting. This includes independent consulting firms and other specialized professional practices.
> 5. Oil and gas extraction. This includes fracking companies in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and other states.
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/who-is-really-rich-in-america/
An interesting observation: a radiologist working at a hospital may make much less if they're an employee of the hospital, versus something like a 'consultant' who use an pass-through S-Corp at the same hospital doing the same work.
The rich have greedily and selfishly opted out, and left a massive moral vacuum.
They must be held accountable. And the only way to hold the rich and powerful accountable is to stop them from corrupting the political process. Ban lobbying, undisclosed political donations and concentrations of private media ownership, and society will recover.
This is coupled with their self-centered politics which seem obsessed with them capturing as much wealth as possible and avoiding taxes at the clear expense of younger generations.
The real driver here is not billionaires/governments/taxes/etc. This is what the voting public wants. When/If they decide they want lower housing prices, they'll stop voting for real-estate billionaires.
The number four story also has 46 votes and is 3 hours old.
By the way, I think it's more than "interesting theory". I've seen dang comment more than once to the effect that comments > upvotes = off the front page.
The plural of anecdote is not data. I believe you. Also, I'm not going to set my priors on 0% chance it's not something else 100% of the time.
> Let's say that an article has 50 upvotes and 20 comments. Posting 31 comments
You're coming from an intentional actor angle. I was more thinking: people who are riled up and don't like something are more likely to post multiple comments (rage bait). So whether or not they intend to have that outcome, their emergent behavior has that effect. And if they're starting flame wars they only need N/2 number of comments if every comment draws a response. Fewer if multiple respond (which is usually true for the most horrible takes). I think it's cheaper and easier to do than you make out. If they can draw 5 responses per comment, they only need 7 comments total (round up).
The book "Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design" by MIT press for where my head is at.
How did you stumble on this comment thread in a nuked (for whatever reason) post anyway?
"People who are riled up" is exactly what this is supposed to detect. It's a flamewar detector. HN doesn't want to promote such a thing on the front page, because it's not an interesting discussion.
HN has other mechanisms for detecting and shadow banning bad actors, punishing everybody else by keeping derailed conversations on the front page is not productive.