A handful of super-rich families got together in the 90s, hired some people to put together a campaign to re-label the estate tax as the death tax and convince everyone it was causing families to lose their small farms, and we haven’t talked seriously about it since.

>However, we never talk about the laffer curve for dead people. I'd say that it could be about as high as you want to make it, and they're not going to work any more or less for an additional dollar.

Can you really not imagine that what happens to their wealth after they die, wealth they were presumably accumulating at least in part for their children, would have zero effect on how much they work before they die? Honestly, your argument here comes across as utterly unserious.

Yeah the graph is more for vibes than an actual analogy. The yellow slice represents the top 1%, purple 90-99%, green 50-90%, and red bottom 50%. It would make a bit more sense if those slices were labeled "1 person", "9 people", "40 people", and "50 people" respectively.

Sure. Hedge fund owners, VC firm owners, cosmetic surgeons, the Walton heirs, and Zuck/Jensen/Jeff/Elon own 97.5% of all wealth in the United States. The former three, while each representing cohorts, are very small cohorts. The latter are billionaire individuals.

If you're an American and not among those specific groups, your share of the remaining 2.5% is split with the rest of the US population in that slice (i.e., the overwhelming majority of the population). It's an illustration of our extreme wealth inequality. (Whether it's an effective or good one is a matter of opinion, but I do think it broadly conveys what it intends to.)

Musk and Bezos don't even own that percentage of Tesla and Amazon respectively, let alone all American wealth

compare to https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

rest of america == bottom 50%

hedge funders, fascist VCs, etc == 50-90%

walton children == 90-99%

elon bezos == 99.9%

I want to see the breakdown of fascist vs. non-fascist VCs, too!

They are voting it up because posing as 'champagne Marxist' has become popular among the demographics which frequent sites like HN so publications which seem to fit this narrative are gaining traction, factuality be damned.

Does this mean there is no problem when such a large fraction of a country's wealth is concentrated in so few hands? Nope, it certainly can be a problem and has been shown to be so when these few hands use their influence to further their own interests to the detriment of those of the country. The same is true for places where the narrative pushed by the armchair revolutionaries is enacted, the difference is that instead of a few monied interests pulling the strings there tend to be a few politically well-placed individuals doing so. Trying to solve the problems related to extreme wealth concentration with the dissolution of private property - which is what the narrative comes down to - is just as silly as trying to solve the problem with an ulcerated toe by chopping off your foot. That 'highly educated' 'intelligent' people keep on falling for this narrative time and time again notwithstanding all the evidence showing its corrupt nature is flabbergasting.

What comments like this does not realize is that moving 1-2k usd into the hands of the people is democratizing the expenditure.

Suddenly musk, bezos and friends do not decide what people work on - people do.

This misses the point entirely; wealth redistributive policies aren't intended to significantly boost the wealth of low wealth citizens directly, they're intended to dissipate the incredible concentration of political power that corrodes our democratic basis of governance. When individuals control more wealth and capital than a significant number of nation-states, barriers to regulatory capture and overwhelming information/narrative control (via media/platform ownership consolidation) effectively dissolve. We're seeing the consequences of that playing out in the US in realtime.

Adopting redistributive policy is the only way in which the US can return to an even remotely representative "democracy." We'll only see progress if we can disarm the campaign finance firehose currently wielded by private interests. Only then, with a subsequent government consisting of politicians more beholden to constituents than financiers, will we be able to return to enacting policies to close tax loopholes, tax more progressively, and improve consumer/labor protections; those would do the majority of the heavy lifting in terms of improving QoL of the lower income classes. This isn't a new idea, it was well understood by trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt.

You realize that Elon and Bezos are stealing from you when you invest and get taxed at 50% marginal, right? They certainly don't pay anywhere near that. The trick they play on you is by lumping you in with them in spirit (hard working go-getters) whereas by actual buying power you're closer to the homeless guy panhandling on the street.

You're looking at GDP when comparing Missouri to European nations. Bulgaria has higher life expectancy than half this country.

I wish we’d focus more on living standards than wealth as I think that’s what really matters. “How can we lift up the people with low living standards in the US?” should be the question rather than “How can we keep people from becoming ultra rich?” which I think is what happened in Europe. The only reason wealth should be checked is because of undue influence on politics/power. Otherwise I don’t care if there are 1,000 trillionaires as long as as many Americans as possible have a good quality of life. I think for many the obsession with redistributing wealth comes from a deep seated jealousy.

The poorest US states are wealthier through redistribution of wealth to them from other states.

I don't think there's a real contradiction between the propositions:

1. The economy is not a zero-sum game.

2. The new gilded age concentrates wealth in a way that is harmful to free enterprise, detrimental to the economy, and bad for the world.

And then there are people who use this argument against redistribution and as a pro inequality argument.

The pie gets bigger in more equal societies.

That is the real acid test.

The economy is not zero sum, so new wealth is being created. But that does not say anything about who receives that new wealth.

The data on the graph is real, but the labels are made up for vibes.

I love the reaction that I see when people are told they are responsible for their own outcomes and it takes work. Getting down voted for such comments is hilarious.

You don't have to wheel out the boogeyman of communism. The distribution of wealth in this country allows a person to have 1 MILLION TIMES the spending power of somebody who drives a bus, puts out fires or stitches up wounds. Crucially, the distribution is only getting worse.

I find the comment on the role of the government not being ensuring equality of outcomes especially laughable, because it is precisely that government that's been subverted to make the distribution more skewed. I guess the ruling class disagrees with you?

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