If you have just enough assets to be "rich" but don't have enough to purchase tax assistance, you've become unprotected prey. Everyone that can afford this tax assistance has a lower cost of business than you, everyone poorer has a lower tax burden.

Very interesting concept. This happens with lawsuits. If you have enough money/assets to be an attractive target for a lawsuit, but you don’t have enough to pay to defend the lawsuit, you are also “unprotected prey”.

An example: in SF/LA (California), a decent civil litigator will cost about $400+/hr. And a lawsuit will run for 1-3 years. When you add all the legal costs up, it turns out that just to defend yourself, you’ll need to spend about $100-$200k. So, unless you have quite a bit of money, you’ll have to either default or settle in maybe not very favorable terms. Either way, you might end up bankrupt, in debt for a long time, or just with no savings at all.

I'd love to see some data on how big a deal this really is, because I would normally assume that by the time you've reached the levels of wealth we're talking about, "tax assistance" is a trivial expense.

I think at this level, tax protection isn't 'hiring a decent accountant' or 'donate $10,000 to charity', but instead is 'moving your base of operations off-shore' and things like that. Things you can do with a ten-million dollar income, but not a half-million.

Yes. And the reason for that is the cost of lawyers to setup and run the structure. Lawyers could actually charge less and open access to more people, but then it wouldn’t be as exclusive.

Please don't delete-edit your posts like that. It's not fair to the users who replied.

And needless to say, attacking other users like that will get your account banned here. We've had to warn you multiple times in the past about breaking the HN guidelines. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this, we'd be grateful.

> Your dollars saved are worth much less than they were a few years ago and now your taxes are high

Which makes me wonder why the general consensus about deflation is that it's not a good thing.

> Most of your gains are going to go to taxes, so you wait to sell or only sell a little

So basically you're hoping for someone to get elected who will give you a ton of money (via a tax cut for the wealthy)

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html