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megamike 5 hours ago [-]
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.
karmakurtisaani 4 hours ago [-]
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.
iugtmkbdfil834 4 hours ago [-]
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.
urbsgpw 4 hours ago [-]
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.
sixdimensional 4 hours ago [-]
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.
andsoitis 6 hours ago [-]
> affordability, but growing anger over inequality
When it comes to wealth, the ceiling should be unlimited AND the floor should be high.
dietr1ch 5 hours ago [-]
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.
sethops1 4 hours ago [-]
The median net worth of an American adult is about $200,000, The net worth of Elon is roughly ~1 trillion. That's a factor of 5,000,000x. A wealth inequality gap of 10,000x would be a great place to be compared to where the US is now.
andsoitis 4 hours ago [-]
The vast majority of that 1 trillion is being applied to productive means.
bryanlarsen 4 hours ago [-]
Buying elections is a destructive use of wealth.
andsoitis 3 hours ago [-]
> Buying elections is a destructive use of wealth.
Of course, that statement sounds reasonable. However, to make it concrete, who do you think bought which election?
I'd be very curious to see your example demonstrate what you mean by "buy".
bryanlarsen 3 hours ago [-]
Doesn't matter if the attempt was successful or not, or who did it. Money spent on advertising is a zero-sum game and is thus destructive. Money spent on bribes is negative-sum.
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
I can agree that ideally the only permitted way to influence and election should be via your one vote. And that there should be guardrails to prevent, detect, and punish the instances that are not permitted.
coldtea 4 hours ago [-]
We would be much better off if a single person didn't dictate what productive means those would be applied to.
andsoitis 4 hours ago [-]
> We would be much better off if a single person didn't dictate what productive means those would be applied to.
To make it concrete, hHow do you think SpaceX should spend its resources differently than it does?
silverFork 42 minutes ago [-]
SpaceX is subsidized by public markets. Why do you think it was listed ? It was to extract cash from the markets. Its P/e is about 5000. It is operating via tax subsidy programs in billions of dollars.
coldtea 3 hours ago [-]
Not having any to begin with and instead hundreds of thousands of smaller businesses doing small business things with those would be a good start.
Hikikomori 35 minutes ago [-]
How is owning stock productive?
andsoitis 4 hours ago [-]
The wealth is generally applied to productive means, it isn't being hoarded or consumed.
_DeadFred_ 3 hours ago [-]
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.
lostmsu 3 hours ago [-]
> private equitization of dental offices
Owned in the end by the very same dentists, no?
Volundr 2 hours ago [-]
No.
Jensson 1 hours ago [-]
73% of dentists own their own practice, so you are wrong.
Volundr 48 minutes ago [-]
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.
lostmsu 52 minutes ago [-]
I referred to indirect ownership through owning stakes in the private investment fund(s) that owns their own practice.
silverFork 50 minutes ago [-]
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?
anon291 4 hours ago [-]
why do we care though? If everyone has a high base standard, what does it matter
asib 4 hours ago [-]
Because of inflation. If there are people with astronomically more wealth than the rest of the population, they will push up prices. There is no such thing as a "high floor" in a system where there is extreme wealth inequality.
eudamoniac 4 hours ago [-]
I don't see why that would happen. The money is being spent whether it's distributed to the masses and spent on food, or spent on a yacht. If anything it should be deflationary because the rich mostly don't spend their money, else they wouldn't be rich.
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
Because the 0.1% have an also-outsized influence on politics, and in making our world a better place in general (and they repeatedly fail all of us in both cases).
dietr1ch 4 hours ago [-]
outsized? That vastly understates the direct and indirect influence they have
asxndu 4 hours ago [-]
it makes people jealous
ashkankiani 4 hours ago [-]
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?
bryanlarsen 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Except for power.
andsoitis 4 hours ago [-]
> 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
You allocate it to productive means, you don't consume it.
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
Or you can spend it on elections.
andsoitis 4 hours ago [-]
> Or you can spend it on elections.
Many people spend a portion of their wealth in elections. Even middle class voters.
ashkankiani 4 hours ago [-]
Are you seriously trying to compare half a billion total spent by a single man (just Elon) to middle class people contributing $50 to an election?
According to the data I could find, on average the middle class donate <$100. At least 55% donate <$100, with most being small donations.
Let's be generous and use $100. That means one person exerted the equivalent pressure of 5 million people.
What the fuck are you on about at this point. What is this stupid technically correct "but many people spend on elections" nonsense? Are you being purposefully obtuse?
andsoitis 3 hours ago [-]
> Are you seriously trying to compare half a billion total spent by a single man (just Elon) to middle class people contributing $50 to an election?
Yes, I am.
It is a policy failure to allow ANYONE to spend money to influence / support elected officials. Your only influence should be voting.
logicalmind 3 hours ago [-]
But, the wealthy use their wealth to influence policy. Policy that benefits them. Like policy that allows them to spend infinite money to influence elections. How do the non-wealthy stop that?
Jensson 1 hours ago [-]
You do realize more money was spent on the party opposing Trump? Money can lose. Money apparently doesn't like the right wing but the right wins anyway without money.
JKCalhoun 1 hours ago [-]
Agree.
It feels odd that you would point out the little guy when there is kind of this elephant in the room.
You could have just said we need to get money out of politics.
ashkankiani 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
silverFork 4 hours ago [-]
Productive means! is that what you want them to do or $100M wedding to show off their wealth? Or may be productivity is a giant boat to party on? Or $Trillions invested in gold?
The zillionaires buy thinktanks to push their agenda by claiming this nonsense. Infinite wealth = erosion of democracy when few people try to change the world to their liking.
andsoitis 4 hours ago [-]
> $100M wedding to show off their wealth?
Who do you think got that $100m spend? Didn't it go to all the service providers? The caterers, the people who worked the function, hotels, food distributors, the musicians, the travel agencies, cab drivers, coffee shops, etc.?
Or do you think it was just thrown into the water?
Heck, I know middle class people who spend $50k on a wedding and I think that's obscene, but their right.
silverFork 55 minutes ago [-]
Do you know what the velocity of money is? And why is it that velocity of money is going down in USA if the wealthy are spending are their cash on services? Look it up.
Monies from infinite wealth can not be spent on services in totality. It is mostly accumulated slowing down the velocity of money. In fact there don't use their own money to grow their business. The wedding was expensive because it was for a VIP and they charged more. All those guests would have eaten dinner if they didn't eat the food in the wedding.
ashkankiani 4 hours ago [-]
Oh, so you believe you are the best judge of how to allocate resources, and that without the ability for a single person to decide this, we'll suffer... how exactly? Are you going to say we can't maximize productive velocity in tech development, or medicine, or something else where we need the maximum productive speed? How is all of that productive velocity going to benefit people? Will it regrow the forests that were razed for productivity? Will it unpollute the lead that was productively allocated to the air and the sea?
Do you see billionaires doing that right now? Are they the most efficient resource allocators? Is the $250 million that Elon is spending to influence the election the best use of that $250 million that he could've achieved?
I would like some more serious answers from you, otherwise don't bother allocating your effort to responding. I'm sure you, as an excellent allocator, will come to the same conclusion.
andsoitis 3 hours ago [-]
> Oh, so you believe you are the best judge of how to allocate resources
The person, our group of people, who have built the specific heap of wealth (e.g. a company) are the best stewards in my opinion. It does not mean that they WILL increase the wealth even more, they might run it into the ground, but they are the only ones who have the moral right and probably the experience.
ashkankiani 3 hours ago [-]
I'll concede to see where this goes. Fine, it's allocated, not consumed.
Then consumption isn't the dispute, and the yachts are a distraction. So the question is what unbounded accumulation buys that bounded accumulation can't. Not welfare, since you've just said it's all reinvested.
What's left is control: over which projects get capital, which technologies get built, which politicians get funded. $250M toward an election is the same capital, doing the same "allocation." Is concentrated control over allocation a good we should maximize? And is "they built this heap" a sufficient moral title to it, including when the heap was inherited rather than built (which is the majority of the time)?
Jensson 1 hours ago [-]
You should have a separation of money and politics, similar to separation of church and state. USA fails at both, the state is way too influenced by both religion and money. It should be illegal for churches or money to tell people what to vote for, it is in many other countries.
Without that you will always run into these sort of issues. The problem isn't wealth inequality, the problem is that wealth buys political power.
eudamoniac 3 hours ago [-]
So if I found a company and it becomes worth a billion dollars, thereby making me a billionaire, I get the guillotine or what? Where is the cutoff for me losing the fruits of my labors?
deadbabe 4 hours ago [-]
If you merely want to afford a good life, you don’t need excess wealth.
If you want to ensure you have maximum power and control over others, there is likely no limit to the wealth you will be satisfied with.
Imagine for instance if you were a massive deca-billionaire, you could just pick a random person off the street and make them a multi-millionaire with the same ease that someone fills up their gas tank. In a society where money runs through everything, this is a god like power.
koe123 4 hours ago [-]
What's the benefit of infinite wealth? Elon is using his to disrupt democracy in my country
asxndu 4 hours ago [-]
Why should everything have a benefit?
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
You have to balance the downsides somehow.
Avicebron 6 hours ago [-]
If you are turning the floor to quicksand for everyone else while trying to reach the ceiling, the ceiling should not be high for you.
andsoitis 5 hours ago [-]
> the ceiling should not be high for you.
have you thought through how you would even operationalize a ceiling on the amount of wealth that someone might control or have?
even a rough heuristic from you would be interesting to consider.
4 hours ago [-]
fyredge 5 hours ago [-]
have you thought through how you would even operationalize an unlimited ceiling on wealth accumulation?
actionfromafar 4 hours ago [-]
How many governments should a person be allowed to own?
4 hours ago [-]
lovich 4 hours ago [-]
Higher progressive tax rates.
Closing up loopholes on realizing wealth like by taking loans continuously using your unsold stocks as collateral.
We don't even have to immediately jump to more extreme ideas like a straight wealth tax. We could try doing _anything_ instead of just shrugging our shoulders as we watch people like Musk and other oligarchs take us down the path Russia went in the 90s.
atq2119 4 hours ago [-]
A sufficiently progressive wealth tax does the trick. If wealth in excess of a billion is taxed 50% annually, multi-billionaires won't remain so for long.
There are only two operational challenges, but if the political will is there, they really aren't rocket science. One is having enough auditors to enforce the tax. The second is liquidity, which can be solved by allowing the tax to be paid in kind, i.e. by allowing it to be paid by transferring ownership to a social wealth fund instead of cash.
andsoitis 4 hours ago [-]
> If wealth in excess of a billion is taxed 50% annually,
So you would take that wealth away from productive application?
atq2119 3 hours ago [-]
The vast majority of this wealth is directly or indirectly in the form of ownership of large corporations. Those corporations are where productivity is. Who owns them doesn't matter from a productivity perspective.
More generally, I'd say the burden is on you to demonstrate the exact mechanism by which productivity would be affected.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
Your assume that it is currently productive, and afterwards it will become unproductive. That may be true, or may not be.
andsoitis 3 hours ago [-]
> Your assume that it is currently productive, and afterwards it will become unproductive. That may be true, or may not be.
If you have above a certain amount of wealth, it is usually tied up in investments, sometimes money you have lent to the government (bonds, treasuries) and other times equity. Those are productive applications.
testing22321 4 hours ago [-]
Quite the opposite, that wealth would be available for society to put it to use in productive application.
Building high speed rail, hospitals and schools. Paying teachers more, universal healthcare, better roads and airports and less free pipes.
Those are all fantastic things that benefit everyone while also creating jobs and spreading the wealth around.
Even Bill Gates has said his taxes should be higher [1]
Because money is zero-sum, there's no way for one person to have a lot of money without others having less. Power is also zero-sum. TVs are not zero-sum but they aren't the problem.
andsoitis 5 hours ago [-]
> Because money is zero-sum, there's no way for one person to have a lot of money without others having less.
Yes, there's been a fixed amount of money since the beginning of time!
dylan604 3 hours ago [-]
No, we are continuously digging more gold out of the ground. That's money that did not exist before then. That maybe less of thing that we're no longer on the gold standard, but for those digging the gold out of the ground it is money for them that did not exist until they dug it out of the ground
pokstad 4 hours ago [-]
That’s not true. Billionaires have most of their net worth tied up in investments. Those investments fund companies that employ working people. They expand the economy and create more opportunity. Mark Zuckerberg famously declined to play the collusion game with Steve Jobs and ended up starting the trend of ultra high salaries in tech.
dragontamer 4 hours ago [-]
Tech famously employs the fewest people, and now tech is the richest.
andsoitis 4 hours ago [-]
> now tech is the richest.
what do you mean?
dragontamer 4 hours ago [-]
I mean that Facebook employs very few employees. And now the top companies of the world seem to be tech.
So the idea that the wealth is going to workers (and using Mark Zuckerberg as an example) is extremely contrary to the facts on the ground and the cited reality.
andsoitis 3 hours ago [-]
The vast majority of people have pension funds and other investments that have a stake in Meta.
hdgvhicv 5 hours ago [-]
Money is also worthless. Money represents control over assets and control over people, and those aren’t zero sum.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
Control over people isn't zero sum? I guess you can force them to make more people.
anon291 4 hours ago [-]
Completely false. If I start a company spending $5 in capital and issue ten shares worth 50 cents each, and later on my revenue from that company reaches $10 through my labor (or the labor of the employees I paid), then the valuation of the company is at least $10 (certainly more) and money has been created because those ten shares are worth more.
Unlike central bank printing or even loan creation, this method of wealth creation is not zero-sum and not inflationary.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
The money wasn't created. It was transferred from your customers.
mejutoco 5 hours ago [-]
Money in absolute terms is not zero-sum. Central banks can print money without reducing money anywhere else.
cowlevel 5 hours ago [-]
This devalues the money, it's equivalent to a forced transfer.
iamnothere 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, but forced transfer or no, the money itself is not zero-sum. It’s the access to scarce resources (including time/labor) and the actual claims on those resources that are zero-sum. Money is a fungible proxy for these.
Technically, thanks to thermodynamics, the pie is constantly shrinking. We haven’t dug up or exploited all the useful stuff yet, so from our limited perspective there is still room to grow the pie. But we’re probably getting close to the limit, as the rate of consuming useful stuff is beginning to exceed the rate of digging it up or otherwise capturing it.
5 hours ago [-]
coldtea 4 hours ago [-]
The ceiling should totally be limited.
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.
sigmarule 4 hours ago [-]
The ceiling and floor should rise in tandem.
wat10000 5 hours ago [-]
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.
cowlevel 5 hours ago [-]
He can also use his ownership over X to push a political agenda more subtly. Half the X population sincerely believes X is unbiased.
cyanydeez 5 hours ago [-]
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.
andsoitis 4 hours ago [-]
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?
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
"…tally up all the "wealth" periodically, and then "distributing" it…"
Sounds a bit like taxation.
andsoitis 3 hours ago [-]
Yes. I'm all for taxation, including progressive taxation. But I'm against saying people should not be allowed to build wealth in excess of $x.
JKCalhoun 2 hours ago [-]
People with wealth in excess of "$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.
cyanydeez 4 hours ago [-]
yeah, it's almost like we have a shared reality that requires us to manage it in a way that doesn't imbalance the whole.
spwa4 5 hours ago [-]
> ... social economics has demonstrated what most people care about is their wealth relative ...
That's just not accurate. What people care most about is not losing what they already have. That will cause extreme reactions.
schneems 3 hours ago [-]
I think this got killed by the mods. It has 46 points over 2 hours and isn’t on the front page anymore.
The number four story also has 46 votes and is 3 hours old.
bryanlarsen 2 hours ago [-]
Not mods, the algorithm. If number of comments is greater than the number of votes, it gets a huge penalty.
4 hours ago [-]
somelamer567 4 hours ago [-]
The fish rots from the head.
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.
jongjong 5 hours ago [-]
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.
shearerp 5 hours ago [-]
But is this related to the distributional inequality discussed in the article, or something else?
jongjong 4 hours ago [-]
I believe so, because it seems like many other people are able to launch startups. Surely it means that some kinds of communication mechanisms are working for them right? They likely have more money/connections to people with more money than I do.
If none of the communication mechanisms work for you, how can you set up a meeting with an investor to raise money, for example? These people don't like cold intros and security risks means that they are harder to meet in person than ever before. It's also harder to network your way to a warm introduction because most of the people who know investors are themselves wealthy and also don't want to talk to you for safety risks reasons.
For me, things look completely different now than they did 5 years ago; it's like I have been shadow-banned from the entire internet and society.
I can't do anything in this society. My skills are mis-allocated, my time wasted. I'm just waiting for retirement. It's horrible. And I'm extremely ambitious; worked nights and weekends for 15 years straight.
wat10000 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jongjong 4 hours ago [-]
How do you obtain a phone number or a mail address? Almost impossible.
And most paper mail gets read by someone's assistant and never passed through.
The people who hoard ALL the opportunities are incapable of allocating them efficiently due to complete saturation of their bandwidth. Literally, if you are someone who are in a position to provide opportunities, you are saturated and unreachable.
These people turn down more life-changing opportunities in an hour than I get in a lifetime. And when I say 'turn down', I mean 'ignore'; because these people don't even have the time to say 'No' to an opportunity I would kill for! They don't even have the time to click on the email or perhaps even read the subject line!
bequanna 4 hours ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
throw0101a 4 hours ago [-]
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.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
3 million out of 300,000,000, sounds like one percent.
pessimizer 4 hours ago [-]
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.
edit: and I'll add a reminder here that no one ever projected that ACA would lower healthcare costs - only that it would slow the growth in healthcare costs, which it managed to do for maybe three years. The purpose of ACA was to get single-payer people to shut up, and to institutionalize a bunch of insurance companies by promising them a consistent income.
Another reminder that "The Conversation" is a website of completely shady origins and financing that was pushed into the conversation out of nowhere. It licenses all of its articles creative commons so they can be mirrored on multiple websites, and relies on being pushed by social media. They're written by no one with any reputation to protect. It's Radio Free Europe level propaganda, but without honestly announcing itself and with no loyalty to any particular country.
Last reminder, Sunday is when political propaganda articles get pushed on HN, because it is a low-traffic day. There is not a single interesting thing in this article; there is nothing "you might not expect" except the brazenness in trying to assign 50 years of neoliberalism to Trump in the end.
A_D_E_P_T 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Edited to add: You edited your post after I published my response. My original comment, which is that you weren't making much sense, is rescinded. Only now what you've written amounts to: "it's not Trump's fault and the outlet is crooked!" which is really just lol. lmao even.
dnautics 4 hours ago [-]
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.
A_D_E_P_T 4 hours ago [-]
Sure, but if you find yourself in a hole, you don't keep digging. This administration has been accelerating the decline.
> 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.
This take is out of date by about 15 years, I think.
dnautics 4 hours ago [-]
1970. WTF happened in 1970?
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.
elmer2 6 hours ago [-]
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.
estearum 5 hours ago [-]
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.
dnautics 4 hours ago [-]
> 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?
estearum 4 hours ago [-]
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 maladaptation (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.
kraken_cult 6 hours ago [-]
> 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 and the politicians are complicit in this. Take healthcare, wealthy insurance middlemen lobby to cripple any form of public healthcare initiative, politicians go along for some scraps and because their healthcare isn't affected. Suddenly, healthcare.gov is unaffordable and doesn't provide quality service even at unaffordable prices, no one is better off except for private insurers and politicians. Bring in the damn guillotines.
aliasxneo 5 hours ago [-]
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.
harvey9 5 hours ago [-]
That first class is probably lobbying rather than voting.
aliasxneo 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, I equivocated them for simplicity, but obviously one is more powerful than the other.
hdgvhicv 5 hours ago [-]
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
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
"The wealthy pay the vast majority of taxes in the US by almost every metric."
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?
dev1ycan 4 hours ago [-]
There is a fundamental issue when 50% of consumer spending is being done by 10% of the population.
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.
ashkankiani 4 hours ago [-]
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?
What exactly do you need all that money for?
dnautics 4 hours ago [-]
there was an era when the tax on the wealthiest was 0%, and inequality went down, hell, we even freed the slaves, which is an economic-structure-overturning event if there ever was one.
wat10000 4 hours ago [-]
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.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
The only thing I'd add is that none of the Medicaid/Medicare money is going to recipients. It's all going to providers.
schneems 4 hours ago [-]
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.
You cannot morally impose the wealthy to support the rest. It has to come through legislation and organization of labor.
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.
When it comes to wealth, the ceiling should be unlimited AND the floor should be high.
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.
Of course, that statement sounds reasonable. However, to make it concrete, who do you think bought which election?
I'd be very curious to see your example demonstrate what you mean by "buy".
To make it concrete, hHow do you think SpaceX should spend its resources differently than it does?
Owned in the end by the very same dentists, no?
But sure, keep imagining PE is pumping money into the industry to buy nothing.
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.
You allocate it to productive means, you don't consume it.
Many people spend a portion of their wealth in elections. Even middle class voters.
According to the data I could find, on average the middle class donate <$100. At least 55% donate <$100, with most being small donations.
Let's be generous and use $100. That means one person exerted the equivalent pressure of 5 million people.
What the fuck are you on about at this point. What is this stupid technically correct "but many people spend on elections" nonsense? Are you being purposefully obtuse?
Yes, I am.
It is a policy failure to allow ANYONE to spend money to influence / support elected officials. Your only influence should be voting.
It feels odd that you would point out the little guy when there is kind of this elephant in the room.
You could have just said we need to get money out of politics.
The zillionaires buy thinktanks to push their agenda by claiming this nonsense. Infinite wealth = erosion of democracy when few people try to change the world to their liking.
Who do you think got that $100m spend? Didn't it go to all the service providers? The caterers, the people who worked the function, hotels, food distributors, the musicians, the travel agencies, cab drivers, coffee shops, etc.?
Or do you think it was just thrown into the water?
Heck, I know middle class people who spend $50k on a wedding and I think that's obscene, but their right.
Monies from infinite wealth can not be spent on services in totality. It is mostly accumulated slowing down the velocity of money. In fact there don't use their own money to grow their business. The wedding was expensive because it was for a VIP and they charged more. All those guests would have eaten dinner if they didn't eat the food in the wedding.
Do you see billionaires doing that right now? Are they the most efficient resource allocators? Is the $250 million that Elon is spending to influence the election the best use of that $250 million that he could've achieved?
I would like some more serious answers from you, otherwise don't bother allocating your effort to responding. I'm sure you, as an excellent allocator, will come to the same conclusion.
The person, our group of people, who have built the specific heap of wealth (e.g. a company) are the best stewards in my opinion. It does not mean that they WILL increase the wealth even more, they might run it into the ground, but they are the only ones who have the moral right and probably the experience.
Then consumption isn't the dispute, and the yachts are a distraction. So the question is what unbounded accumulation buys that bounded accumulation can't. Not welfare, since you've just said it's all reinvested.
What's left is control: over which projects get capital, which technologies get built, which politicians get funded. $250M toward an election is the same capital, doing the same "allocation." Is concentrated control over allocation a good we should maximize? And is "they built this heap" a sufficient moral title to it, including when the heap was inherited rather than built (which is the majority of the time)?
Without that you will always run into these sort of issues. The problem isn't wealth inequality, the problem is that wealth buys political power.
If you want to ensure you have maximum power and control over others, there is likely no limit to the wealth you will be satisfied with.
Imagine for instance if you were a massive deca-billionaire, you could just pick a random person off the street and make them a multi-millionaire with the same ease that someone fills up their gas tank. In a society where money runs through everything, this is a god like power.
have you thought through how you would even operationalize a ceiling on the amount of wealth that someone might control or have?
even a rough heuristic from you would be interesting to consider.
Closing up loopholes on realizing wealth like by taking loans continuously using your unsold stocks as collateral.
We don't even have to immediately jump to more extreme ideas like a straight wealth tax. We could try doing _anything_ instead of just shrugging our shoulders as we watch people like Musk and other oligarchs take us down the path Russia went in the 90s.
There are only two operational challenges, but if the political will is there, they really aren't rocket science. One is having enough auditors to enforce the tax. The second is liquidity, which can be solved by allowing the tax to be paid in kind, i.e. by allowing it to be paid by transferring ownership to a social wealth fund instead of cash.
So you would take that wealth away from productive application?
More generally, I'd say the burden is on you to demonstrate the exact mechanism by which productivity would be affected.
If you have above a certain amount of wealth, it is usually tied up in investments, sometimes money you have lent to the government (bonds, treasuries) and other times equity. Those are productive applications.
Building high speed rail, hospitals and schools. Paying teachers more, universal healthcare, better roads and airports and less free pipes.
Those are all fantastic things that benefit everyone while also creating jobs and spreading the wealth around.
Even Bill Gates has said his taxes should be higher [1]
https://www.investopedia.com/news/bill-gates-says-he-should-...
Yes, there's been a fixed amount of money since the beginning of time!
what do you mean?
So the idea that the wealth is going to workers (and using Mark Zuckerberg as an example) is extremely contrary to the facts on the ground and the cited reality.
Unlike central bank printing or even loan creation, this method of wealth creation is not zero-sum and not inflationary.
Technically, thanks to thermodynamics, the pie is constantly shrinking. We haven’t dug up or exploited all the useful stuff yet, so from our limited perspective there is still room to grow the pie. But we’re probably getting close to the limit, as the rate of consuming useful stuff is beginning to exceed the rate of digging it up or otherwise capturing it.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds a bit like taxation.
That's just not accurate. What people care most about is not losing what they already have. That will cause extreme reactions.
The number four story also has 46 votes and is 3 hours old.
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.
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.
If none of the communication mechanisms work for you, how can you set up a meeting with an investor to raise money, for example? These people don't like cold intros and security risks means that they are harder to meet in person than ever before. It's also harder to network your way to a warm introduction because most of the people who know investors are themselves wealthy and also don't want to talk to you for safety risks reasons.
For me, things look completely different now than they did 5 years ago; it's like I have been shadow-banned from the entire internet and society.
I can't do anything in this society. My skills are mis-allocated, my time wasted. I'm just waiting for retirement. It's horrible. And I'm extremely ambitious; worked nights and weekends for 15 years straight.
The people who hoard ALL the opportunities are incapable of allocating them efficiently due to complete saturation of their bandwidth. Literally, if you are someone who are in a position to provide opportunities, you are saturated and unreachable.
These people turn down more life-changing opportunities in an hour than I get in a lifetime. And when I say 'turn down', I mean 'ignore'; because these people don't even have the time to say 'No' to an opportunity I would kill for! They don't even have the time to click on the email or perhaps even read the subject line!
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.
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.
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.
edit: and I'll add a reminder here that no one ever projected that ACA would lower healthcare costs - only that it would slow the growth in healthcare costs, which it managed to do for maybe three years. The purpose of ACA was to get single-payer people to shut up, and to institutionalize a bunch of insurance companies by promising them a consistent income.
Another reminder that "The Conversation" is a website of completely shady origins and financing that was pushed into the conversation out of nowhere. It licenses all of its articles creative commons so they can be mirrored on multiple websites, and relies on being pushed by social media. They're written by no one with any reputation to protect. It's Radio Free Europe level propaganda, but without honestly announcing itself and with no loyalty to any particular country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation_(website)
Last reminder, Sunday is when political propaganda articles get pushed on HN, because it is a low-traffic day. There is not a single interesting thing in this article; there is nothing "you might not expect" except the brazenness in trying to assign 50 years of neoliberalism to Trump in the end.
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.
Edited to add: You edited your post after I published my response. My original comment, which is that you weren't making much sense, is rescinded. Only now what you've written amounts to: "it's not Trump's fault and the outlet is crooked!" which is really just lol. lmao even.
> 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.
This take is out of date by about 15 years, I think.
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.
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 maladaptation (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.
The wealthy and the politicians are complicit in this. Take healthcare, wealthy insurance middlemen lobby to cripple any form of public healthcare initiative, politicians go along for some scraps and because their healthcare isn't affected. Suddenly, healthcare.gov is unaffordable and doesn't provide quality service even at unaffordable prices, no one is better off except for private insurers and politicians. Bring in the damn guillotines.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.