Edit:
"We need to attack the universities in this country"
"The professors are the enemy"
Specific clip https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/1ichg58/ya...
If you want the full speech it's on YT so if you reply with "context" you should back that up
> Current universities are openly anti intellectual.
RFK jr., really?
It’s pretty impossible to make any kind of argument if your position is “people I disagree with don’t mean what they say, they mean whatever I say they mean”
Edit: My comment was that the admin is anti intellectual and I provided quotes from JD Vance on all universities and professors.
How is this anti-intellectual?
That is before we even get into the explicitly racist hiring and admissions policies.
How do you know this happens?
Evidence
https://archive.is/UeZ2A#selection-5289.442-5297.27
> Chavous and her colleagues did not collect demographic information from applicants. Instead, they were asked to submit statements addressing how they would advance D.E.I. goals, whether through research into “race, gender, diversity, equity and inclusion,” “significant academic achievement in the face of barriers” or “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.” Departments were invited to nominate candidates from an application pool created by the diversity center, which then oversaw further vetting.
https://archive.is/i6Gv9#selection-1183.358-1187.413
Ohio State Reports: DEI Litmus Test
https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/ohio-state-reports-dei-lit...
I don't agree with Ohio's diversity statements being used as part of the selection criteria. It's wrong.
What about every other university though? JD Vance's statement called universities the enemy. Most universities aren't connected to each other, they aren't a single organization and aren't responsible for what each does.
1. If only a few were using diversity statements as a part of the hiring process, which is wrong, what's the justification in calling all of them the enemy?
2. What about the professors? Most aren't responsible for setting hiring practices. Why are they the enemy?
> That is before we even get into the explicitly racist hiring and admissions policies. [ from your original comment ]
Same as the above for this. A University is a large insinuation of students, teachers, researchers, and various employees. Harvard employs 19k people and has 23k students.
#----------------
My opinion is that Vance is attacking universities not because he cares about merit based hiring or the quality of students but for selfish political reasons.
Why I think this:
1. As previously stated not all universities are doing what you claimed. Ohio for one, and the first link says "some" but there are thousands.
2. There are private schools that receive public money but discriminate against LGBQT [1] However nothing has been said or done about this by Trump in the past or now. These religious schools are more conservative and attacks would likely anger the base.
3. Republicans perform better with non-college educated voters [2] 2024 election:
No college 36% D , 62% R
Some college or 2yr degree: ~44% D, ~53% R
4-year degree: 53% D, 45% R
Graduate school+: 59% D , 38% R
Therefore reducing the number of people who go to higher education could benefit Republicans in elections.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-09-01/when-p... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
Not all, but most. It may have decreased as some universities have started to abandon it now that it is falling out of fashion, but it was a large percentage, I'd estimate 90% offhand, but it's not like there's a lot of sources on this. It is a movement led by an aggressive and militant minority who silences and drives out anyone who disagrees. Most professors, who just want to do their research on 19th century French poetry or the mating habits of dung beetles or whatever they care about just shut up and try to keep their heads down so they don't get denied tenure or have students protesting at their office because they said the wrong pronoun. If you know people in academia and they trust you they will tell you off the record that it is nearly universal and so, so much worse than what is publicly reported. Sorry, I can't provide sources for this. You can trust me or not, but I know what I've seen and what people have told me.
> There are private schools that receive public money but discriminate against LGBQT [1] However nothing has been said or done about this by Trump in the past or now. These religious schools are more conservative and attacks would likely anger the base.
There is a religious freedom issue, because religion is also a protected class. I don't know, religious schools are not that many and they are not a big factor in academia. If you really care about that religion, then you go there, if not there are lots of other places. I don't know why an LGBQT person would want to force their way into going to a school where everyone thinks they're sinful and destined for hell. Seems like masochism to me.
> My opinion is that Vance is attacking universities not because he cares about merit based hiring or the quality of students but for selfish political reasons.
Well, neither of us can read his mind, but he benefited from a system that espoused meritocracy and used it to improve his life from growing up very poor to becoming vice president of the United States. I think it's reasonable that he would want to preserve that so other people could also have that opportunity and not get denied because they were the wrong race.
>I'd estimate 90% offhand, but it's not like there's a lot of sources on this.
What is your estimate based on and what is your basis for claiming "most"?
It's true they also said they want viewpoint diversity quotas and audits. I agree that goes too far. I think they would probably give that up if the university pushed back. This is what Trump does every time - make outlandish demands so you have something to give up in negotiation. He even wrote an entire book telling you exactly that's what he does, yet somehow the "intellectual elite" cannot wrap their heads around a very simple negotiating tactic. Every plumber, electrician, and carpenter that ever worked with Trump figured this out decades ago.
Harvard rejected the demands and Trump pulled funding. What negotiation happened?
Also, if everyone knows you're just demanding more than you'd accept what's the value of the negotiation tactic? Everyone would just reject demands initially knowing this
No, they had issues with some of the demands and wanted to open a dialog.
Harvard's response says they changed policies to protect Jewish students, made other changes to related to the protests, etc.
It also states
"It is unfortunate, then, that your letter disregards Harvard’s efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms ..."
#----------------------------- Finally they said:
"Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community. But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration. "
This is extremely disingenous. Throughout this thread you've been arguing on the basis that hiring people simply to fit a political viewoint is wrong, but when it's pointed out that that's exactly what your team wants as well you fall back to name-calling.
1. You can get an education while advocating for causes
2. The letter doesn't only say advocating for a terrorist group.
"International Admissions Reform. By August 2025, the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism."
>Why is the US government expected to fund people who want to destroy the US government?
1. They aren't, Harvard does
2. Any federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so cutting them wouldnt
The US government gives money to people who want to destroy it all the time in terms of normal welfare, social security, etc for anti-gov US citizens.
>Should you be required to pay people who want to kill you?
No. How is that related to this? This is a vast oversimplification to try to catch me saying "no"
1. You can get an education while advocating for causes
2. The letter doesn't only say advocating for a terrorist group.
From the gov demand letter:
"International Admissions Reform. By August 2025, the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism."
>Why is the US government expected to fund people who want to destroy the US government?
1. They aren't, Harvard does
2. Federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so revoking them isn't a targetted punishment
3. Harvard can still operate without these grants, including bringing in international students who the current admin might disagree with.
4. The US government gives money to people who want to destroy it all the time. Welfare, social security, etc is given to anti-gov US citizens with no restrictions based on those views.
5. Although only proposed Trump wanted to set up a fund for January 6th protestors who he pardoned. Some of whom attacked the US capital to disrupt a Democratic election process.
>Should you be required to pay people who want to kill you?
No. How is that related to this? You just overly generalized the entire situation in order to produce a question where I'd mostly likely to say "no" as a argument manipulation tactic.
> 2. Federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so revoking them isn't a targetted punishment
> 3. Harvard can still operate without these grants, including bringing in international students who the current admin might disagree with.
Harvard funds them with the money it gets from grants. If Harvard wants to fund activist students with their own money out of their endowment, nobody is stopping them from doing that.
No, they can't unilaterally import foreign students though, the government has to grant them a visa to come here, and it really doesn't seem prudent to grant visas to people who hate our country and everything it stands for. If they believe the US is so evil and awful, they should be quite relieved that they won't need to come here. Maybe Harvard can open a satellite campus in Gaza if they really feel that these are the best students who are most deserving of a Harvard education.
The grants fund students regardless of views. Yes they can use their endowment (I think) it's quite massive but the point is the government attacking universities for what a small amount of students say which is wrong.
It's also quite hypocritical considering views on free speech and "big government"
"Shutting down free speech will destroy our civilization." - JD Vance
>it really doesn't seem prudent to grant visas to people who hate our country and everything it stands for.
Why? In the case of attacking Israel that's not even our country? What if they hate the current government?
What is "our country" to you because most probably hate the government, a very common attitude for many inside the country.
If they hate our values of freedom then punishing them only says that those freedoms aren't that dear to us because we're willing to compromise.
The rest of your comment is Facebook level of like "If you don't like it leave". I do think your other comments are professional so I hope we can move back
>they should be quite relieved that they won't need to come here
How is it a punishment to send someone away from a place they hate?
For all the people chanting “from the river to the sea” and then crying about their free speech when their visas are revoked, where is their passion for free speech when someone draws a cartoon of Mohammad?
These are not people who care about the ideals of freedom. They only want to use our indulgence as a wedge to promulgate their own, much less free ideology.
Or to put things in maybe more HN-friendly terms - suppose you have a public facing service that you intend to be very liberal and accepting of any inputs. Does that mean you need to allow SQL injection attacks? Cross-site scripting? Spam? Not all actors are acting in good faith. Some are deliberately trying to harm you.
Name a student who was deported that hated America and provide evidence.
Let’s say I want to come live in your house. Do you need to prove to me why I shouldn’t be allowed to do that, or do I need to prove to you why I should? If I make speeches and write articles about how you’re an evil person and we should burn your house down, does that make you think it’s a good idea for me to live with you?
Definition of anti-intellectual
"a person who scorns intellectuals and their views and methods" from oxford
Intellectual
"of or relating to the intellect or its use", "given to study, reflection, and speculation", and ": engaged in activity requiring the creative use of the intellect" from MW.
I didn't define anything. If I said the administration was anti-education would that be better?
> the University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.
In what way is hiring faculty and and admitting students based on merit instead of their identity anti-education? Is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
It's not. Calling universities and professors the enemy is. The government taking away funding because you want international students to adhere to an ideology is wrong.
>is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
How do you rank the quality of scholarly work?
In the case of hiring, typically a committee of other professors in the department would evaluate candidates, not a bunch of DEI bureaucrats. They would read what the candidates have published and see if the arguments they make are sound, and look at things like # of citations that indicate how prominent the work is in the field.
I don’t know if you’ve ever met any academics, but I promise you they have no problems forming opinions about the quality of work of other people in their field.
Like, if you were a physics professor and you were applying to a department where everyone was a string theorist, and your position was that string theory is a bunch of bullshit, you might not get that job. Or you might, if your work is otherwise solid, you never know.
But that's a disagreement about physics, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to evaluate a physics professor on. It's not about how enthusiastically they endorse some ideological dogma that has nothing to do with physics.
We're not talking about roughly equal candidates with similar qualifications and one getting the edge because of race. I'm telling you there are cases where PhD candidates with zero publications, people who have not even finished and defended their dissertation yet, are hired for tenure-track positions over other candidates who have had their degree for several years, published in top journals, won highly competitive fellowships, etc, because universities want someone of a particular race. It's not subtle.
You may not be able to say that one candidate is the unequivocal best when there are many qualified candidates, but you can definitely say that a particular candidate is unqualified or not even close to other candidates when, for example, they have not published at all.
None of these are objective measures of quality.
1. The more papers you write the more likely you'll be published more. This is connected to time and desire.
2. Judging yhe quality of a journal is subjective therefore can't be used as an objective measurement for something else
3. If you write a paper that more people have access to, is about a more popular subject, is the only paper for a subject, or is published in more popular journals it would increase your citations outside of the paper quality.
4. Awards are a subjective judgement
Of course all of these increase the probability of quality but it's not a guarantee.
> for example, they have not published at all.
I don't think anyone going for a position as a professor hasn't published since most PHds require it. This point probably adds more weight but I think it would be rare between candidates for job.
Whereas going by who can write the most enthusiastic essay about diversity, as judged by the blue-haired gender studies major in the diversity center, is a system that will only select for rabid ideologues and disingenuous bullshitters.
Why does this matter?
What does gender studies have to do with this situation or DEI ?
> is a system that will only select for rabid ideologues and disingenuous bullshitters.
Why?
Pretend you are an investment banker. You've spent the last 10 years living and breathing investment banking. You've worked 100 hour weeks. You can point to a long list of successful deals you've done. You have glowing references from every client and colleague that has ever worked with you.
Now, you're applying for a job at a major investment bank, but before your resume is reviewed by any of the investment bankers, you have to write an essay about how much you love baseball. This essay will be reviewed by a panel of baseball superfans. They will judge it on how much you know about baseball and how much you love baseball. If they feel you know enough about baseball and you sufficiently express your love for it, they will then pass your resume on to be reviewed by the investment bankers.
Now, maybe you like baseball, maybe you don't. Maybe you have no particular strong feelings about it. Mostly, you didn't have time to think much about baseball because you have spent your time obsessed with investment banking.
Do you think this is a good system to hire investment bankers? If someone said "hey, we should hire investment bankers based on their track record in investment banking and not how much they love baseball or if they are baseball players", would you call them "anti-investment banking"?
> The more papers you write the more likely you'll be published more. This is connected to time and desire.
Yes, someone who writes more and spends more time doing research and has more desire to do research is objectively better at research than someone who produces less. There is a possibility that one person writes lots of low quality papers and another person writes a few high quality papers, but in asserting this you are admitting that there is some objective measure of the quality of a paper (which there is). Since the reviewers would be reading the papers, they could also objectively assess the quality of the papers too.
> 2. Judging yhe quality of a journal is subjective therefore can't be used as an objective measurement for something else
No, the quality of the journal is not subjective. If journal A publishes anything they are sent without review and journal B rigorously reviews everything by sending it to other experts in the field, then journal B is objectively higher quality than journal A.
> If you write a paper that more people have access to, is about a more popular subject, is the only paper for a subject, or is published in more popular journals it would increase your citations outside of the paper quality.
If you write the only published paper on a subject, then you are objectively the world's leading expert on that subject. If the university wants someone who knows that subject, the only person in the world who has published on it is objectively the best choice.
Part of a professor's job might be to communicate about their research and bring it to a wider audience, and convince e.g. grant committees that it is important and deserves funding. Someone savvy enough to get published in popular journal is objectively more qualified to do this than someone who hasn't been able to accomplish that.
> Awards are a subjective judgement
The awards can be subjective, but whether you have won an award or not is an objective fact. If the job involves doing the kinds of thing that impress the people who give the award, then someone who has achieved that is objectively better than someone who has not.
Give me examples then because how could you know this?
- "quantity of publications" is a problem and directly leads to bad science, so is on aggregate a measure of anti-quality
- "quality of the journals published in" is all in the mind; prestigious journals with high impact factor have been repeatedly found not to have the best research. The rigour of the editing process is more important, but few researchers know that, and importantly they are heavily incentivised by funders to go for high impact factor, completely muddying the waters of who's a good researcher by that metric.
- number of citations would be a better measure, but unfortunately is directly linked to impact factor, in practice and in perception.
- awards won, books published - too niche and random to matter much.
- "every academic could tell you the top 5 journals in their field" haha, no, you'd be as surprised as I was when doing that research.
Academic publishers have been considering the measuring problem for decades, and no one has found a solution yet.
There is no good measure of the quality of a paper until many years after publication. It's easy to identify some true positives (high impact, no retraction), it's quasi-impossible by definition to identify false negatives (unfairly ignored papers), and most importantly this emphasis on prestige research is terribly harmful to Science. Science needs researchers who are happy to replicate studies, people who publish disappointing results, and people who study otherwise unglamorous topics, otherwise Science fails.
TLDR: measuring how 'good' a researcher is by their prestige is extremely destructive to Science. You can't do that.
I’m sure they would do just as good of a job. Because nobody could ever possibly objectively tell whether someone with a PhD in math is going to be better at teaching and researching math than a high school dropout, right?
For those who need spoonfed, here is the full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FR65Cifnhw
It's JD Vance's keynote speech at the 2021 National Conservatism conference. The speech, which I've just skimread, is mostly well-worn US conservative complaints about US higher education. He also talks about red-pilling because he's down with the kids, and he adds Jesus sprinkles in case you forgot he's Christian.
The speech is dull but it's bookended with two spicy statements, both of which you mostly quoted. The latter statement is not his words but a quote from Nixon.
Opening statement: «So much of what we want to accomplish, so much of what we want to do in this movement in this country, I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions - specifically the universities which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country and so I'm excited to close this conference with this particular set of remarks, because I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.»
Closing statement: «I really want to end this on an inspirational note [...] and the person whose quote I ultimately had to land on was the great prophet and statesman Richard Milhous Nixon [...] there is a season for everything in this country and I think in this movement of National Conservatism, what we need more than inspiration is we need wisdom, and there is a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40-50 years ago. He said, and I quote: "the professors are the enemy".»
EDIT: And for the context of the Nixon quote, it comes from a private conversation Nixon had with Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office on December 14, 1972, recordings of which were released in 2008: «Henry remember... we're gonna be around and outlive our enemies. And also, never forget, the press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.». It's worth noting that Nixon was already keeping an "enemies list": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon%27s_Enemies_List
Posting the entire speech only bolsters my view. For example
"[To accomplish goals].. I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions - specifically the universities..."
I'm confused about your argument. I don't consider it a smoking gun just a concise example of what Vance and MAGA Republicans belive. There's no context confusion, it's on video, and it being dull only shows how comfortable he is exposing insane views.
The speech they're from doesn't.
The speech defends and praises universities and their role in society. Vance even claims some academics prefer to ignore evidence that refutes their positions, and he's against that; that would be a valid pro-intellectual position if true (but it's completely nebulous and unsourced)
The thesis of his speech was he doesn't like the content of what academics profess and he thinks they ought to teach his political views (and his audience's political views) instead. That's not anti-intellectualism, i.e. "don't trust those book-learning types, look to the common man for answers". This guy still wants ivory towers provided his cronies are in them.
Also it's interesting to see where his quote came from. He clearly picked an on-theme Nixon quote just to appeal to his audience, and he seems to miss the context of the Nixon quote in that Nixon is a paranoid nutter saying it, not coming from a rational place like Vance thought he just did.
Which part ?
Very relevant in startup ecosystem as well (look up exchange funds, opportunity zones etc.)
For one thing, many plumbers do make it to the 1%: Trades are a profitable line of work for the industrious.
But the median 1%’er is paying 3-4X the effective rate of the overall median earner.
You have conflated the tax rate with the tax amount.
I suspect you're using a different definition of "income" than the IRS. What is it?
I hear that sentiment a lot, but it doesn't seem right to me. My salary is pretty close to the median plumber's income, and my family's effective tax rate last year came in at... 1.6%. And that's with all retirement account contributions going toward Roth accounts. If we'd chosen to contribute to traditional IRA/401k accounts instead, the EITC and child tax credit would easily turn our tax bill negative.
It might also result in even more spending. I don't think that there is any "natural ceiling" when it comes to willingness of politicians to spend other people's money. The only ceiling is external - how much will the system bear.
Edit: it's an honest question. Maybe the top 1% paying 40% of all income taxes is too much tax. Maybe it's not enough. Without knowing how much of all the income they make it's a meaningless number.
My personal opinion is that income tax should be more progressive, but I know that plenty of smart people disagree on that.
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
It is also true for many “normal” one percenters. For example there is a service for incorporated anesthesiologists where you tell them where you plan to go on vacation and what dates, and they create a bullshit anesthesiology conference, including the brochure and other artifacts, that meet the letter of the law IRS definitions for a valid business expense. None of this stuff ever hits AGI.
It's a progressive system overall - but it wasn't designed for the purpose of wealth redistribution, hence the payroll tax ceiling.
* More precisely, their monthly benefit at full retirement age increases by 90 cents for each additional dollar of pre-retirement average monthly earnings, whereas yours only increases by 15 cents.
Anyone can borrow money against their stocks, house, or credit card. It's tax-free as well.
> They can do schemes like borrowing against equities and using the tax-free cash for expenses or purchasing other assets.
Um, borrowing money is not "income". You have to pay it back, with interest.
UHNW individuals can borrow until they die. Their assets pass to their heirs with a stepped up cost basis. The heirs can liquidate whatever's needed to pay off the loan and incur no tax.
Normal people can't do this. If I die owing money, my creditors will take it out of my estate before it passes to my heirs. UHNW estates can be structured differently and creditors can accommodate different payment terms (get paid second) because they know the money's there, and it saves taxes.
You can also read: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...
I might have gotten some things wrong. Or maybe the poster has.
LOL, the stepped up basis gets hit with the inheritance tax.
> The heirs can liquidate whatever's needed to pay off the loan and incur no tax.
The loan and the interest payments and dont forget the inheritance tax.
> Normal people can't do this.
Yes, they can borrow money, die, the inheritors pay off the loan with the stocks, and then pay estate tax.
I assumed you asked a question to learn something. If you're not interested in learning, please continue believing that everyone gets the same tax system. Otherwise keep reading.
> the stepped up basis gets hit with the inheritance tax.
There's no federal inheritance tax. Only some states have it. You're thinking of the estate tax.
If you read the link I posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...
it has a fairly detailed explanation of how it's a completely different ballgame above a net worth of $300m. Grantor trusts allow sidestepping estate tax and...
> The loan and the interest payments
"The loan" otherwise known as "income" because that's what it really was. Obviously it has to be paid back. The interest payments are lower than the income tax would've been on the same amount of income.
> and dont forget the inheritance tax.
You mean estate tax. Explained above.
> Yes, they can borrow money, die, the inheritors pay off the loan with the stocks, and then pay estate tax.
Not in the same way, and not nearly as effectively.
If there are specific inaccuracies with https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26... I'm open to learning.
They're the same as far as this discussion is concerned, as the amount that the beneficiary gets is (roughly) the same.
> "The loan" otherwise known as "income" because that's what it really was
Borrowed money is not "income" in any sense of the word. When I was on summer vacation, I decided to take a class in accounting. One of the most productive uses of my time. I recommend it. P.S. if your business tries to classify borrowed money as "income", that's called fraud.
> If you read the link I posted
I rely on my CPA for tax advice, not the internet, nor do I care much for misusing accounting terms. I've read too many articles that confuse income with revenue, wealth with income, and so on.
The estate's value is reduced by what it owes.
> if your business tries to classify borrowed money as "income"
sigh C'mon man, engage in good faith here. Stop saying things I didn't say.
If you can borrow cash against assets, don't have to pay principle until you die, and only pay low interest payments then it's functionally the same as selling those assets at a low tax rate. That's the principle.
And if you can use trusts to avoid estate taxes then there are no (or very low) taxes due ever.
> I rely on my CPA for tax advice
Ok ask your CPA what they know about using trusts to avoid estate taxes. Maybe it's BS but maybe it's true. Without some curiosity, how will you ever know?
> not the internet
More reputable sources than Reddit indicate it may be possible to use trusts to greatly reduce or eliminate estate tax:
https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/nam/en/insights/wealth-plan...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/grat.asp
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/wh...
2. Your own link contradicts you. It says explicitly that that site hasn't failed any of their fact checks and doesn't use loaded words that they say are typical of that category. It says the categorization is because the site promotes libertarian policies.
I keep here this “the rich should pay more”, but rarely do I hear a number.
By whatever measure works, eg old school gini coefficient or something more modern.
You're right though: food fights over decimal points and gaming the rules nicely obfuscates any constructive debate about what kind of society we want.
And if the Gini coefficient is calculated pre-tax and pre-benefit distribution, it’s not going to change with high taxes and high redistribution (and yes you mentioned it may not be the right measure).
And if the Gini coefficient is calculated based on income data from the US, do we know if the better Gini from 1960’s wasn’t just due to income not being reported to the IRS?
Realpolitik. Proper Nordic levels of (lesser) inequity is not likely in the USA. But selling the dream of our '60s era prosperity might fly.
> if the Gini coefficient is calculated pre-tax
Firstly, then pick a different different metric. Gini coefficient is merely the most familiar.
Secondly, you asked about proper income tax rate. In my pithy reply, I implied outcomes are more important than implementation details, but slap fights (like this one) about those details are used to distract. (I think the kids today call that "bike shedding".)
Also, I did not explicitly state that measures of wealth distribution is the central issue. I regret the omission.
--
While I have your attention: How do you think our tax regime should be structured?
Feel free to link to any prior explanations (posts) I may have missed, so you don't have to repeat yourself.
So in practice, if "fair" is used in politics the appropriate reading is often as a euphemism for "I think we have the numbers to push this interpretation of the world on people; it'll be good for us".
They very obviously don't make only twice as much money as the bottom 80%, so how is that equal in the slightest?
There are ~300 million people in the US who are not billionaires. If they earn, on average, $4 each that balances out a billionaire by income [0]. Since there are <1,000 US billionaires, the average american income would need to drop back to something around the $4,000 range for billionaires to be out-earning them.
This is why taxes tend to land heavily on the middle class, the billionaires don't control most of the money. If politicians want access to money, the biggest pot isn't the billionaires.
[0] And billionaires don't generally make billions in income because it is a wealth measure.
The suggestion is simply that the top 0.1% pay more - as they will be little affected by it.
Everything you tax away from wealthy people is removed from their investments.
For example, if all of Musk's income above $1m were taxed away, the following companies would never have existed:
1. Tesla
2. SpaceX
3. Starlink
4. Neuralink
Or to put it another way, if I make the same claim about millionaires; how do you expect to argue that they will be greatly affected by being taxed more? A 1% tax increase on someone's gross income is never going to "greatly" affect them unless, but if it happens 100 times they will be pennyless.
If you take money away from someone, they will have less money and do less because they have less resources.
If somebody cares about progress and is highly motivated, they should remain highly motivated to create incredible products and services, whether that buys them unchecked power or not. If some people would be less motivated and do less than they do now, it would be a lesser evil that creating oligarchs thirsty to dominate whenever they get the chance. As long as people can live a good and comfortable life, they do not have rights to more than that.
People who argue against progressive taxes tend to ignore the fact that modern capitalism is basically a game, one where the rules greatly favor the richest, who have virtually unlimited leverage compared to the average person. They make money exponentially more easily than others. It is absolutely right to correct this game through appropriate progressive taxes. Every once in a while an adult needs to step in to keep the game fun for everybody, and not just let the best player dominate others and make everybody else miserable. Maybe if we did this, the price gouging and constant turning of the screws would give way to a society where fair trade was the default cultural and economic norm.
Certainly hoarding more wealth than Smaug is a crime of grave injustice against humanity. For the mind completely sold to capitalism, this is impossible to understand. But people come before wealth and power.
If you tax their money away, they have that much less capital to invest.
> It is absolutely right to correct this game through appropriate progressive taxes.
Only if you don't like electric cars, cheap space rockets, cheap global communications, and enabling people with spinal injuries to need a lot less help.
> Certainly hoarding more wealth than Smaug is a crime of grave injustice against humanity. For the mind completely sold to capitalism, this is impossible to understand. But people come before wealth and power.
Nobody hoards wealth. They invest it. Nobody has a Smaug hoard. There are no Scrooge McDuck cash vaults.
I suggest you check out what happened under communism in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, etc., under communism where people came before wealth and power. Your ideas sound good in a textbook and in the classroom, but they just don't work in the real world.
What sort of things can our society do to ensure that the people who dedicate their lives to eliminating the suffering of so many are compensated for what I'm sure we can agree are absolutely amazing accomplishments?
There are, unfortunately. [0] Though Putin's gold palace did have to be stripped for fungal problems, later.
Musk does go around with a large amount of debt, such as the 13bil he currently owes. So he's less likely to have a prepper vault. That does not mean that human greed doesn't turn to cartoons for inspiration, at times.
Most businesses are funded by taxpayers, either directly or indirectly. Elon Musk is a billionaire because of DOE funding, or there would have been no Tesla today.
By January 2009, Tesla had raised $187 million and delivered 147 cars. Musk had contributed $70 million of his money to the company.
In June 2009, Tesla was approved to receive $465 million in interest-bearing loans from the United States Department of Energy.
Personally, I think that we should tax wealth more in general, and probably make the income tax a bit more progressive (I currently pay 52% which sucks, but if I had to pay a few pp more to get rid of homelessness and poverty in my country then I'd be ok with it).
I know he's out of favor with a lot of people, but would Elon have created SpaceX or The Boring Co or Neuralink, or helped start OpenAI if he hadn't had the spare billions to do so?
I'd much rather have multi-billionaires investing in the economy, and in the future, than giving additional money to the government.
As for making lives better, Starlink was provided free to disaster victims in N Carolina and the LA fires. Something the government failed at. Enabled by cheap reusable SpaceX rockets, another thing the government failed at. Starlink is very popular, so it must be making peoples' lives better.
Money was funnelled to Elon, he has a knack for getting government contracts. My memory is Tesla was powered by many grants for whoever was willing to work on electrification of society. The issue with that is that people want to put more money under the control of the government, despite it being the entity that funnelled money to Elon. I don't really understand that perspective, it seems a bit crazy - it'll end up with Elon getting more and more power and wealth. If we assume de-powering and de-wealthing Elon is a good, why push more money into the system that is wealthing and powering him? One theme in Elon's companies is they are positioned to hoover up money the US government is wasting and make sure it ends up in Elon's pockets.
Less government spending is more likely to hurt Elon than help him.
Musk also sold those rockets to NASA for 10% of what NASA would otherwise have to pay.
> One theme in Elon's companies is they are positioned to hoover up money the US government is wasting and make sure it ends up in Elon's pockets.
Tell us how that works.
> Less government spending is more likely to hurt Elon than help him.
Are you suggesting that Musk is doing what's right for the country rather than what's right for his fortune?
No he didn't.
> Starlink is very popular, so it must be making peoples' lives better.
So is meth.
That rent went up over 10% last year. For contrast, the rent control people want to cap rent increases to 7%.
Corporations are persons, right? Why is their tax rate just half that of real people?
Why aren't all persons taxed equally?
Once the money is in stocks, it doesn't get taxed unless you draw on it, but the billionaires can use strategies like buy, borrow, die (which last I checked only really works if you're north of ~ $300M) to avoid personal taxes.
They also operate at a scale where many tax breaks become viable. CEO owners aren’t paying themselves nominal salaries because they aren’t getting paid. Creating a shell company to own your 50k car isn’t useful but it’s damn well worth it if you’re buying a 50+m dollar yacht for personal use.
Meanwhile people of lesser means get stuck with all kinds of crap like a 10% early withdrawal penalty on 401k plans.
for(;;)
citizens_property -= govTake;
Instead it’s mostly a question around who pays what share, and there’s some massive winners and losers.
That's the gist I got from reading https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...
There are finer points I don't understand such as:
1. Is the stepped-up cost basis available to the estate or only to the heirs? If it's to the estate, it's easier for the bank to trust they'll be paid back.
2. If the heir gets the stepped up cost basis, what legal guarantees does the bank have that the heir will pay the loan back?
And probably a lot else. I assume there's expensive lawyering and accounting involved in setting it up, so it isn't cost-effective unless you have a certain amount to shield from taxes in the first place.
Usually about the lowest rate you can get is a mortgage on your house.
Of course, if your credit is bad, you're not going to get a good rate.
Not to you or me. Giving powerful people who can send more business the bank's way a freebie on their personal accounts might make sense as a loss leader.
Anyone can install robinhood on their phone and trade using their credit card.
> Financial policy is very specifically against people saving their money
No, it isn't. People who save money are terrified of risk. There's nothing stopping anyone from investing the money.
> that's why a certain level of inflation is considered desirable to mainstream economists
That's the excuse the government makes to inflate the money. You'll never see a politician point out the real reason for inflation. It's so they can spend it without raising taxes, but it does cause inflation, and inflation has to be blamed on something else. Anything but the truth.
Buying a few stocks on an app is not anywhere near the same thing as being an accredited investor. Access to the most lucrative investment opportunities are not available to the average person, and that's almost entirely due to rules intentionally created to block anyone but the already wealthy.
The average worker in the US needs these sorts of opportunities to be self reliant. You don't need to be a billionaire to make money on the market, you just need a few dollars, some time, and the will to take a little risk. Stop hating on the average worker...
Second of all, at the end of the day it's other people money's they're using, and are entrusted to manage. You can't demand people to just lend money to anyone, any sort of free market of loans will quickly coalesce into a few capital allocators.
What? There is literally a class of people considered accredited or sophisticated investors.
To be considered an accredited investor by the SEC you must have a net worth of over $1M -not including- your primary residence, and you must have an annual household income of over $300K.
It is quite literally a wealth and income gate.
Low capital gains taxes aren't meaningfully encouraging somebody making 75k and saving 10k annually to continue with their saving plan.
And you earnestly can't understand why the poor want to increase taxes on the rich?
Long-term investment is rightly seen as something to be encouraged hence the lower tax rates. You can make the argument that the rate should be more like 0% since the money invested and risked was already taxed most likely...20% is a reasonable value for the market regulating infrastructure provided by gov't entities.
The simple truth is that wealth beyond the ~$10M level in the US pays essentially zero "income tax". It just doesn't happen, no one does it. Short term gains are only taxed for small investors who don't know any better.
"Entrepreneur Elon Musk announced on social networks that this year he will pay 11 billion dollars, thus becoming the largest taxpayer in the history of the USA."
From Google: "For the 2025 tax year, individual filers won't pay any capital gains tax if their total taxable income is $48,350 or less"
If you've got a smart phone and a credit card, you can buy stock. See robinhood.com
You're just saying "Well, that's the way the tax code works". I'm saying "The tax code sucks", and your point is non-responsive.
If you bought a house, and it goes up in value, that increase will be a capital gain taxed at capital gains rates.
"Let them eat cake" makes for extremely poor federal revenue policy.
The middle class isn't taking advantage of low capital gains rates to earn more from their taxable brokerage accounts because they haven't even filled up their tax-advantaged accounts.
Rich get richer, poor never see this advantage.
How do we know whether they lie without a solid definition of net worth?
I'm not defending billionaires and I believe they should be heavily taxed, and huge inheritances should be outlawed, but what's Elon Musk's net worth, for example? He surely doesn't have $369 billion in cash. Can we tax him based on his Tesla shares? What happens if Tesla stock goes down by 99% next year? It's tricky.
They get to tell us what they are worth. Generally speaking, if you want to lie about your net worth you are choosing between tax fraud and insurance fraud. There are some areas that are tricky, like pre-market startups, but we have things like 409A valuations that help with that. Penalties should have no statute of limitations - if you lie about it, you get to look over your shoulder forever. It's not perfect, but as you have clearly recognized, there is no perfect system that allows for a reasonable degree of freedom.
> Can we tax him based on his Tesla shares? What happens if Tesla stock goes down by 99% next year?
Not really tricky! He gets taxed on the value of his shares in year 1 and he gets taxed on the value of the shares in year 2. If the value goes down 99%, you pay way less tax (or none if he's no longer wealthy enough to qualify). He can sell his shares to pay it, and I honestly do not care if he is not liquid enough to do that - that's a situation he put himself into. No he doesn't get a tax break on the loss - the rich have a sense of entitlement that their wealth belongs to them free of charge, and I think they should have to pay maintenance. Without public utilities (roads, electricity, air and sea traffic control, etc) and social stability, most of these billionaires would lose their wealth to warlords very quickly.
That doesn't make any sense. If I have $8B worth of shares and I have $2B in cash, and if the wealth tax is 20% I will have to pay all my cash this year. If my shares goes down to zero next year I'm broke. I couldn't just sell $2B worth of shares in the first year either because that would have affected the value of the shares. This is not how taxes should work.
Everyone agrees on income tax or capital gains tax because they are both cash, and the tax is also in the same currency. If we can find a way to tax wealth in the same "currency" (for example 20% of your share portfolio, plus 20% of your cash) then it might work. Obviously the state may not always be able to use shares to fund infrastructure, and cashing out those shares would diminish the value. Also it's still hard to do that for, say, real estate investments.
In any case, the whole thread about "net worth" is really besides my original point, which is that collateralizing stock for loans should be a taxable event. The only reason we got into net worth was because I said I'd only apply it to high net worth individuals, since they have almost exclusively benefitted from the economy over the last 10-20 years. This is also super achievable because to get the bank to loan you money, you have to declare the value of the assets and the bank has to agree with the valuation - super easy to determine tax on that number.
I don't feel that strongly about it if he is just sitting on the assets, but if he's leveraging them to buy Twitter, OpenAI or to donate money toward overthrowing the Democratic order, then yes, he should absolutely pay taxes for the privilege.
> collateralizing stock for loans should be a taxable event
I fully agree with this.
Disagree. We've been negotiating from the middle. We got the New Deal because the alternative for the wealthy was facing a socialist revolution.
Funnily enough there is (was?) legal activity about exactly this with our current POTUS.
Real estate assets when being accounted for tax purposes: "Worth: $x"
Same real estate assets when being accounted for loan collateral: "Worth: $10x".
But of course like most legal activity against POTUS, it's just been "abandoned".
It's not particularly hard. Just have enough collateral to not get margin called. And, like the margin interest rate better than the tax hit. Shop around for rates. Notice, you don't have to pay the entire down payment this way.
If you have amassed 6 figures of stock and are buying a house, you're qualified to educate yourself on these topics. It's usually worth reading up anytime you incur that sizable a taxable event.
I am not saying this is a great idea, BTW. Just, it's an idea within many people's reach.
I believe the GP is just cautioning rando HN readers that they should not rush out and make their down payment in the manner described, as opposed to liquidating some of their stock options for "real cash" like the GGP had to do.
They are just explaining a reasonable method that the (above) average HN reader could use to be in the same situation as Bezos of having a 0% tax on their down payment.
In the US, there's a pretty massive exemption (well, deferral) for capital gains tax on the sale of a primary residence, so once you have one home to work with, the down payment is (kind of?) tax-free anyway.
Never give absolute financial advice to anyone who's situation you don't fully understand.
It's not uncommon when people buy deals while traveling or in hot markets.
See also Mr Money Mustache's articles on this topic. He assuredly is not Bezosesque.
Another very rational reason for such a margin loan for a home down payment is if the stock you wanted to sell hadn't been held for a year and therefore its sale would not yet qualify for long-term capital gains rates.
You might choose to pay margin interest for up to a year so that the stock sales become taxed at the much lower long-term capital gains rates instead of like income.
That might make sense for someone in the 24% federal bracket which ends at just under $200K of annual income, depending upon how much longer one needs to hold the position to achieve the more favorable taxation. Certainly far below the yacht-owning bracket.
I take it you haven't heard of property taxes.
If I own a house or condominium in San Francisco, at a fundamental level I do not own the land or space the residence is sitting on. "Ownership" is basically a lease of the parcel from the city. The house structure is an improvement on leased land; this ties the property tax calculation to the value of the structure. The property tax is the rent on the land/space. I believe this is the constitutional justification for property taxes (no opposition from me).
It's interesting to me that medieval European peasants "renting" the land they farmed had much stronger ownership rights than Americans who "own" land do today.
> I believe this is the constitutional justification for property taxes
It isn't. The constitutional justification for property taxes is that they're assessed by the states, not by the federal government.
The federal government is free to assess property taxes too, except that it must apportion them between the states: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C4-1/...
> An 1861 federal tax on real property illustrates how the rule of apportionment operates. Congress enacted a direct tax of $20 million. After apportioning the direct tax among the states, territories, and the District of Columbia, the State of New York was liable for the largest portion of the tax [...]
What this meant was that the federal government delegated tax quotas to the states and the states were responsible for collecting them as they saw fit.
https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
(I've read the book; it didn't strike me as related to this topic.)
But since you ask: the peasant's rights to land were exquisitely bespoke. No tax collector could figure out how much one family owed versus another in another county. The rules in one prefecture of one county may have been completely unresolvable with the rules of a county a hundred miles north. Everything was negotiated family to family over generations, with rights in one place having no corollary whatsoever with the rights in another area, making the tax man's duty a fool's errand.
So, I don't your first statement "European peasants "renting" the land they farmed had much stronger ownership rights than Americans who "own" land do today." is really meaningful. Because no generalization can be made about the rights of a European peasant. That problem is the whole reason for the systems of freehold tenure that prevail today: making the territory "seeable" by the state.
Landowners responded to that by adjusting the size of the units in which land rents were due, which is why a major demand of peasant movements was for standardized units.
The fact that rents were absolutely nonnegotiable led to other developments, such as the lord being so indifferent as to exactly who was renting from him that the renter was free to leave his status to whoever he chose in his will.
That's only true in a narrow and a relatively obtuse way. For starters that varied to a huge degree between regions and types of contracts.
e.g. in England freeholds were indeterminate and or more or less worked the way you are saying.
However most peasants didn't have those, before the plague the overwhelming majority of peasants were villeins (i.e. serfs), inheritance was customary and lords were not legally obliged to pass it to the serf's descendants (also there were all kinds of fees, fines and stuff besides the fact that they weren't legally free and there was no legal system to protect your rights).
Leaseholds and copyholds became much more common due to labour shortages after the plague. leaseholds were not inherited and market price based. Copyholds were inherited and rents customary fixes (but again lords could and would impose all kinds of arbitrary fees to get their cut).
Then you had the enclosures starting the 1400s (a lot of the land peasants relied on was common)
Article I, Section 9, Clause 4:
"No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken"
A wealth tax is generally considered to be a direct tax. If you wanted to enact one at the federal level, my understanding is that it would have to be done in proportion to the census. So, given that Mississippi is around 1% of the total US population, Mississippi would have to pay 1% of the wealth tax. Mississippi is the poorest US state, so that would be a very regressive tax.
An income tax is also considered to be a direct tax, that's why it took an amendment to the Constitution to enact one.
The Constitution applies to taxes at the federal level, not state. States could enact a wealth tax the same way they enact property taxes now (depending on their state Constitutions). The problem for them is that wealth is a bit more mobile than property.
And yes there are arguments about what a direct tax really meant in the language at the time the Constitution was written, there are arguments that the income tax should have been legal without an amendment. But that's not how it went down.
- as far as I know, double taxation by any given entity (Federal Gov) is unconstitutional
- a given dollar is taxed once as income. A federal wealth tax on the remainder of that dollar would be double taxation.
That does not prohibit the Federal Gov from taxing once, and your residential state from taxing you a second time.
There are other arguments about "direct taxation" I don't fully understand.
I make a W2 salary. I pay federal income taxes on it. I pay FICA taxes on it. My employer pays payroll taxes on it. I might pay state income taxes on it. One event, tons of taxes. I take that quadruple taxed money and buy a dinner with a beer. Sales taxes on the overall sale, additional taxes on the alcohol, additional sales tax riders because I bought it in the touristy night life area. Triple taxes on my quadruple taxes, good lord! Unconstitutional!
Worthless phrase, "double taxation".
> LoL - why it makes any sense to do this for universities and not billionaires is beyond me, but I'm sure half the country can explain it to me like I'm 5.
Because they already do it for billionaires: unlike university endowments, billionaire investment income is not tax-exempt by default, it's already subject to income tax [1].
[1] At least theoretically, ignoring the loopholes and tax-dodges billionaires can take advantage of with literal armies of accountants.
The other lens is simple as well: big fish don't go after the other big fish. That just ends in two hurt fish and no food. Trump thought he was going after a small fry and underestimated the response. just because Columbia folded doesn't mean all universities will.
lens #3: this clip explains it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLbWnJGlyMU
He's a bully but if everyone realizes they outnumber (and outmatch him) he loses his power).