Posted by JumpCrisscross 8/30/2025
Do you always speak in grotesque metaphor, or are you capable of referring to concrete phenomena? Congratulations, there is a part of my mind that finds your vague idiom disconcerting. Moreso I am resigned to take your entire cadre less seriously—if such a downgrade is possible.
No that you care; I am "beyond hope!"
https://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer%20-%20Theory%20of%...
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45079542 and marked it off topic.
Are there money games I am unaware of that means they are running brittle houses of cards and marginal percentage increases in taxes would topple their empires?
I just don't understand the fear or concern, but I am not ludicrously wealthy so I suppose I wouldn't.
If someone is truly strong then they have strength to spare for others. I guess I assume the same would be true of wealth, but perhaps you don't get ludicrously wealthy by being proportionally generous.
Capital class wildly different than wealthier working class. But in all honesty, bring the taxes all the way down to me at least. Anyone making a million a year could be taxed a lot more and still live comfortably. The capital class above me could afford a LOT more taxation and still live lives of unbridled luxury.
But if they do choose to leave, or at least stop expanding their businesses, you can’t deny the rational self interest
"If you tax the rich, they will leave" is a myth created by the rich so that you won't tax them.
In the middle of the 1900s, the tax rate on the wealthiest Americans was 91%.
Nobody is going to leave over Mamdani's extremely modest proposal.
You forgot to mention that only half of capital gains were subject to tax. So the highest marginal rate was 45.5%.
In any case, this is all a major deflection resulting from the lie that the low job creation rate is due to "the threat" of a possible future mayor rather than tariffs.
We've done fine without them in the past, and we'd be better off without them now. At the end of the day, labor and its fruits are the primary origin of value in an economy, not the handful of individuals that have had the immense luck and/or dubious ethics required to capture that value for their personal gain.
1) That we're at the threshold for taxes that the wealthy will accept. I would bet many wealthy folks feel attached to their homes as their identity, and it would take some amount to price them out. Like, clearly a billionaire would leave if the cost to stay was a 100% of their wealth, but would probably stay if it was $10 more in taxes. So there's a very nebulous line somewhere in between. I suspect we are not close to that line.
2) That wealthy people living in an area are storing their wealth or declaring that area as their home. Plenty of ways to shield wealth from local taxes, and plenty of ways to claim a place as your home without being taxed by it.
3) That having wealthy people in your community is a net positive for the community. Wealthy people tend to use a lot more resources and distort local politics for their personal gain rather than the gain of the community. Maybe we'd be better off if they weren't around, and several families moved in to take their place. Wealthy people don't ride public transit, normal folks do. Wealthy people can push city council positions to reduce transit, normal folks don't have that influence. Maybe we need more normal folks around.
4) That businesses owned by the wealthy are a net positive compared to, e.g., workers co-ops. Maybe we could be a bit more collective in our approaches and a bit less lionizing towards the wealthy person who got lucky. Maybe we need more community oriented businesses run by members of the community they live in and fewer wealthy business owners racing to the bottom.
Oh good. Then we can ignore your baseless assertions / talking points / propaganda and outright [non-truths].
Is it though?
For many of our current societies I would say that we have failed to distribute the available resources. And even more so if we look at how we have failed distributing resources between societies and countries.
> Capitalism is a morally reprehensible way to distribute resources
Agreed!
Also, on a purely pragmatic note, capital is mobile. If you penalize the rich, they just move, and then the new system will stop class mobility.
This is a myth created by the rich so that you won't tax them.
Also keep in mind the US is a winner here. The UK loses the most millionaires and it's had an observable impact on their economy.
It’s also due to the lack of investment in heathcare, education and other public services over the last 14yrs
Britain still has very many extremely rich people - London has more billionaires than NY - Serious Money by Caroline Knowles is an interesting exploration of the subject
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
the US has the highest class mobility among western nations
Social mobility has very little to do with increasing your economic welfare in any absolute sense. It strongly favors countries with highly compressed wages and doesn’t imply much about ease of increasing income since it is only weakly correlated with that.
But yeah, some statistics indeed are just likelihood that the ranking order changes, or even self-reported...
It's like the definition of "middle class". Everyone thinks they're middle class. The OECD calls anyone with 75% to 200% of the average income "middle class". Classically the term means you are above the labour class but not noble.
AFAIK class mobility is measured by class at birth compared to adulthood (i believe as measured by net household wealth)
Also most easily available statistics are from 2020. The US economy has been a massive winner post-Covid and has diverged a lot from some countries.
This website should be a good example. The typical Sr Software dev in the US would be in the top 1% to 0.1% of earners in European countries and Canada. The US has more millionaires than many entire European countries have citizens.
A top 10% earner in the US would be in the top 1% in Canada. An AVERAGE earner in the US is about top 10-15% in Canada.
Class mobility (or social mobility) indicates ability to go from lower to middle class, working class to generational wealth, etc... All income statistics show the US as having a particularly large amount of high income earners, self made millionaires (and billionaires), etc...
Fine, then we can safely ignore anything you write.
> HN is beyond absurd
Because not everyone agrees with you.
My priorities do not align with your postulating
Support ambition all you want - just don't come crying to us when the B2C market dries up entirely.
Mississippi has a GDP per capita of $53k.
11% of Mississippi's population has no health insurance.
Mississippi is one of the highest inequality states in the US. Its median income is $30k. It's Gini Index is 49%.
It has poor physical and social infrastructure by advanced country standards.
Spain has a GDP per capita of $35k. Its median income is $20k.
Everyone in Spain is covered with modern healthcare.
Spain has a nationwide high speed rail network. A lot of its infrastructure is top-notch compared to Mississippi and even wealthy parts of the US.
This is despite Spain having some of the highest inequality in Europe, and undoubtedly a host of other problems, including decreasing affordability for average people. Yet it's inequality is far lower than Mississippi, with a 31% Gini Index.
So perhaps GDP per capita doesn't tell the full story. Also, I'm being fair by comparing Mississippi to one of the poorer countries in Europe, not one of the middle or wealthier countries.
I have excellent 0€ out of pocket 0 paperwork healthcare. I walk to my 35 hours per week job. I have about 50 days of vacation each year. I have a small second home down in the beach to enjoy them. In my 150k people hometown some years there is a murder or two, and most years there isn't one. When people rob a business they might threaten with a tiny Swiss Army knife, or maybe just yell very hard.
I'll stay thanks.
Statistics might not be ideal, but making policy decisions based on anecdotes is far, far worse.
So you reject mathematics in favor of a few cherry-picked experiences.
As do I. They all seem to have moved to cosmopolitan places with advanced economies, not Mississippi. I also have friends and relatives that have migrated to Spain. Overall, there is no mass migration in either direction.
> The situation you describe is… one of statistics and not reality
A high speed rail network and universal healthcare are not statistics, they are as real as it gets.
But I definitely agree that Spain is probably not a good place if you want to make an absolute shitload of money.
Quality of life, by a number of metrics like HDI, is higher in (Western) European countries compared to the US. And even while total salaries might be lower, healthcare infrastructure, life expectancy, food quality etc are better.
Pure take-home money doesn’t tell you the entire picture.
And for pure anecdata, I have friends who migrated to the States and then moved back to EU when they had kids because EU seemed like the safer and better place to raise them.
You can find anecdata to tell pretty much any story you want to tell though.
The nation V. nation median ranking of class mobility is hardly the Nation V. {many nations} average of wealth.
>Individual studies have estimated absolute mobility rates for recent cohorts of roughly 50% in the US (Chetty et al. 2017), 53% in Canada (Ostrovsky 2017), 70% in Germany (Bönke, Harnack, and Luthen 2019; Stockhausen 2018), and 77% in Sweden (Liss, Korpi, and Wennberg 2019).
From https://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2020/wp-2020-11-tren...
Look at this chart: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Look at the divergence from the US.
Canada's GDP per capita is barely above 2013 levels (~4%), meanwhile the US' is 60% higher. Wages in Canada have been stagnant, there is NO social mobility at all, it's completely fucked.
Where I came up with this statement? Actually knowing things about economics and following the CURRENT numbers. Not a 2017 study (which probably took a couple years and using data from 2015 or earlier) which is completely worthless in 2025.
<meme>hahahaha no</meme>
There are countless places that are more than happy to accept capital with few questions asked. Including, funnily enough, the US itself.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-becomin...
What is the incremental value of having a rich person around? Increased yacht sales?
Notice your statement is a broad morale, and I'm presenting a consequence out here in the real world.
The math of booting wealthy people from the city doesn't play out well for the city.
It seems reasonable at first glance, but I’ve seen no proof of it. California, usually mentioned as having high taxes, still has a large percentage of the ultra-wealthy in the USA. Same with NYC. Sure some notable persons have changed their addresses, but overall, they are they hurting?
Is there any documented case of a rich-popular municipality increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy and seeing the tax levy go down?
So while I admit to not providing you with a study in this comment [1], it is pretty obvious they have been done and I don't see what there is to challenge on the topic. Obviously there is an optimal tax rate for maximising revenue, this is an area where there has been a huge amount of research done and if a municipality pushes their rates beyond that point (which will happen with some regularity) it'll see its tax take go down. There isn't much to document, anywhere with taxing authority would be feeling out limits experimentally all the time.
> Sure some notable persons have changed their addresses, but overall, they are they hurting?
They moved states for tax reasons, so yes. Otherwise they wouldn't have moved. If notable people are starting to move then the system sounds like it is very close to the critical point.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve (not that it'd be total tax burden that needs is the limit, not just the slice imposed by one area).
[1] Wikipedia has a lot of sources though if you actually want to look it up.
This is what I mean when I say I'm not sure if you're actually interested in the answer. The Wikipedia article is a pretty thorough treatment. This isn't some new or unexplored area, it is about as well trodden ground as the economists have. There isn't any need to gather more evidence to retest it yet again, the numbers are well known.
The income-maximising tax rate is between 60 and 75% and depends a bit on local conditions (probably mostly migration and language barriers). Lots of places have gone beyond it, happens all the time, and they generally lower their tax rates when someone points out they could make more money that way. You'd probably find the California tax people do studies on this sort of thing fairly regularly; not that anyone particularly cares or that I'm going to try and look it up. The real question is whether the government should even be trying to maximise the tax take.
Sort of but AFAIK nothing similar to this. There is some evidence of this occurring in Europe, notably France, but it was structural pretty different. Connecticut, NY, and Jersey often trade a small amount of residents depending on taxes year to year, but none of those individuals are really leaving the NYC economy.
NYC is also pretty unique in the availability of certain high-income jobs and amenities catering to the ultra wealthy. Like high-tax California (and America generally), the extra income and benefits from living there outweigh the costs for many. Massachusetts implemented a millionaire tax and saw a net increase in ultra wealthy individuals.
NYC is already one of the most expensive places in the country. People either live there because it’s worth the cost, or it’s the best place for them to make more millions. There is little evidence to support a minor wealth tax would change that meaningfully.
No, you're making baseless assertions / talking points / propaganda.
But! Once the prices go up because of some taxes, they never go as low as they were before. Thats no theory, thats life.
Say good bye, to the prices you see now, you will never see them again ;-)
A few corporations control most of the food you eat, even less control the food you eat in restaurants. Very few media companies control the "content" you can consume and you cannot even own it, let alone sell or even trade it, and it seems everyone just pays more whether they keep raising their prices.
You own very little, are you getting happier?
It's inflation, which is caused by deficit spending.
The US didn't have inflation before 1914.
Also, prices spiking up from incompetent threats of tariffs and not coming down are categorically different than regular inflation. This is obvious and shouldn't need to be explained to you.
ETA:
Just realized that the source for the one I posted was pretty dubious (Bill Meridian is apparently a "financial astrologer", whatever that means), so here's a more reputable one: https://northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/the-war-of-1812/
https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-inflation-since-1775-2...
> It is probable that in 1913, while financial panics were not uncommon, high inflation was still largely seen by the founders of the Fed as a relatively rare phenomenon associated with wars and their immediate aftermath. Figure 1 plots the US price level from 1775 (set equal to one) until 2012. In 1913 prices were only about 20 percent higher than in 1775 and around 40 percent lower than in 1813, during the War of 1812. Whatever the mandates of the Federal Reserve, it is clear that the evolution of the price level in the United States is dominated by the abandonment of the gold standard in 1933 and the adoption of fiat money subsequently. One hundred years after its creation, consumer prices are about 30 times higher than what they were in 1913. This pattern, in varying orders of magnitudes, repeats itself across nearly all countries.
Not my area of expertise and no skin in the game, just wanted to point this out.
So when he makes absolutist statements like "there was no inflation in the US before 1914", which is a typical springboard for libertarians to start complaining about the federal reserve and propose some idiotic Ayn Rand nonsense, I have trouble not being literal here.
By the way, I have never read Rand nor quoted her.
Fair enough. I tend to use Rand interchangeably for libertarian stuff.
You're all waiting for Trump to claim it or something? It's already been announced.
Even if we do some phenomena that we cannot explain as of right now, that does not imply aliens, it only implies that there's something we can't (yet) explain. A lot of the videos that were being hailed as smoking guns seemed to be a combination of camera artifacts and just optical parallax and stuff like that. It doesn't pass my metric for aliens yet.
The thing is, I would absolutely love to be wrong on this. It would be insanely cool to be part of the first humans who found extra-terrestrial life, so if anything I'm biased in favor of these things being aliens, but as of right now I am not convinced.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/021115/how-long-has...
A lot of libertarian "bad guys" tend to be pretty reductive, or just outright lies.
See "Monetary History of the United States" by Milton Friedman.
What you may be trying to say is until about 1900 there was little secular (i.e. fundamental long-term) inflation, given price levels oscillated more than they moved [1]. But the change to steady inflation pre-dates the Fed. And the secular shift to constant inflation starts in WWII, not 1914 or 1976.
[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/s...
"The Federal Reserve System therefore began operations with no effectiye legislative criterion for determining the total stock of money. The discretionary judgment of a group of men was inevitably substituted for the quasi-automatic discipline of the gold Standard." pg 193
"The stock of money, which had been rising at a moderaterate through-out 1914, started to rise at an increasing rate in early 1915, rose most rapidly, as prices did, from late 1915 to mid-1917, and then resumed its rapid rise before the end of 1918, rather sooner than prices did. At its peak, in June 1920, the stock of money was roughly double its September 1915 level and more than double the level of November 1914, when the Federal Reserve Banks opened for business." pg 198
"The Reserve System was thus in an asymmetrical position. It had the power to create high-powered money and to put it in the hands of the public or the banks by rediscounting paper or by purchasing bonds or other financial assets. It could therefore exert an expansionary influence on the money stock." pg 213
"The large federal government deficits, totaling in all some $23 billion, or nearly three-quarters of total expenditures of $32 billion from April 1917 to June 1919, were financed by explicit borrowing and by money creation.30 The Federal Reserve became to all intents and purposes the bond-selling window of the Treasury, using its monetary powers almost exclusively to that end. Although no "greenbacks" were printed, the same result was achieved by more indirect methods using Federal Re serve notes and Federal Reserve deposits. At the beginning of U.S. participation in the war, Federal Reserve notes accounted for 7 per cent of high-powered money and bank deposits at Federal Reserve Banks for 14 per cent" pg 217
"The Reserve Board was aware that Bank discount rates were below current market rates throughout 1919, that this was contributing to monetary expansion, and that monetary expansion was contributing to the inflation." pg 222
As for inflation through the history of the US, see:
Then this is a lie: “Inflation started the year after the Fed was created. See ‘Monetary History of the United States’ by Milton Friedman” [1].
> for inflation through the history of the US, see
I’ve already pointed out how that source lies about the data it cites [2].
I will assume you’re misunderstanding what you’re reading. But it’s too close to willful dishonesty for me to continue to engage if you’re just going to double down.
I don’t believe you meant to speak inaccurately. But the chart clearly misquotes its source data. That was pointed out and yet we couldn’t get past it across multiple threads.
I pulled the source data and recompiled the true rates; they partly support your hypothesis (but not the chart’s). There was inflation before the Fed but, if those data are to be believed, very little of it was secular. The balance of inter- versus intragenerational stability (and how that may have changed with industrialization and computers) is a genuinely interesting question, and not one I’d have stumbled across in this context were it not for you.
https://www.visualizingeconomics.com/blog?tag=Inflation
Scroll down to "US Inflation 1790-2015".
"-0.2% Average Annual Inflation 1774-1912"
Visualizing Economics cites this source [1]. VE seem to lie about what it says.
Measuring Worth shows 1774 CPI at 7.8; by 1912 it is 9.4 [2]. That’s a low, low inflation rate of 0.1% per year, 20% over 138 years. But it’s not zero and it’s certainly not negative.
If we take 1790 (8.86) to 1914 (9.69), MW shows 0.07% annual inflation. That is the statistic you should be pointing to.
But! Within the 1790 to 1914 era we see inflation from 1790 to 1814 (2.75% annually; prices doubled over 20 years). During the Civil War, prices doubled in just five years; inflation 1860 to 1865 was over 14% annually. (CPI inflation goes to 2% annually between 1914 and 1944, 3.7% ‘44 to ‘76, 4.2% ‘76 to ‘08 and 2.4% from ‘08 to ‘24.)
We had inflation in America before the Federal Reserve. It was lower, long term, than it has been post Fed. But the common factor to our inflation is war. To the extent there is a link in these data, and I’m saying this having not noticed this before, it’s between inflation and war.
[1] https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/uscpi/#
[2] https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/uscpi/result.php
See where I quoted: "-0.2% Average Annual Inflation 1774-1912"
BTW, inflation measurements before 1900 are a bit difficult, as how does one compare prices from 1774 with 1912? Not only are records poor, but the goods being compared are wildly different.
I.e. I don't know what the error bars are on the aggregate statistics, and neither do you. 0.1% and -0.2% are realistically well within the error bars. In fact, even today, 0.1% is likely within the error bars, as measuring inflation is fairly difficult, and there's always going to be noise as market prices are a chaotic system.
You quoted VE. They misquoted MW. If VE is adding error bars to MW’s data, they—one—should not. But if they do, they should show how they manipulated the data.
There is no legitimate source showing negative annual inflation between 1774 and 1912; your source’s own sole citation disagrees with its claim.
> 0.1% and -0.2% are realistically well within the error bars
What error bars?! They’re the same data!
Your chart on VE says it is showing data from MW. I took those same data and calculated the same number your chart claims to calculate with the same data they link to. The answer is different. And this isn’t, like, I used CAGR and they did simple growth because the sign flipped!
> inflation measurements before 1900 are a bit difficult, as how does one compare prices from 1774 with 1912?
You really can’t. Not meaningfully. You’re integrating data covering the pound sterling, Continental Congress, eras with no federal currency, eras with state and wildcat currency, and a civil war to boot. You’re also trying to compare a basket of wooden teeth and suet with one holding smartphones, gasoline and antibiotics.
But you brought the data and made the claim, and while VE is lying about what their source says, the actual data at MW is actually a legitimate attempt at the problem.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
Not really a question of that. More so how much will prices go up
Reality is simply that industries are locking in tariff increase price expectations because they can (Wal Mart is even already increasing prices and the tariffs may not and have not yet even started impacting prices). It's just like how everyone started expecting a tip everywhere at all times at 25%, 35% rates during COVID and that not only has not disappear, it got even worse for a while before leveling off and the tip expectation is now north of 20% on average.
It's a common human behavior, a kind of ladder, the realization that "wow, I got away with all the previous increase rates, let's keep up the price increase rates since everyone has come to expect them".
Another example, car dealership premiums; they're still trying to push those and there is clearly a limited market and an unspoken agreement to keep them going across the dealerships. If people expect certain price increase rates, they have normalized those increases in their minds.
It's also why the fed has always "targeted 2% inflation" because it's a small amount that can be normalized over 12 months and you don't even notice it. But it's a steady rate that can be siphoned off the whole economy without people noticing the theft by fraud. You didn't complain about the fed stealing 2% of your wealth every single year, compounded all your life before they started stealing 5-12% for the last 5 years, did you? Sure, they can't get away with increased rates forever, lest the whole system collapse, but without someone/something forcing the hand, why should they stop. We are STILL hearing how the consumer is strong, while various revolving credit balances are increasing and people are just squandering future/other people's money, why would they care if they have to pay more, so why would sellers care not to increase prices if people are just willing and able to charge more.
I will say this; different countries wield different powers at their disposal.
It’s unfair how China conducts business, but other countries can be equally exploitative.
I don't understand how any supporter can claim to love our country.
It is a global market. https://www.molsonhart.com/blog/america-underestimates-the-d...
If I go to a restaurant, wait an hour for a table, get very hungry, and then see on the menu that the restaurant has tripled prices, is the restaurant "negotiating from a position of power" ? Sure, once.
What exactly do you think happens to our power after Trump squanders it to extract one-time concessions that mostly flow into his own pockets?
The last vestiges of this world order was the TPP. The US negotiated a trade deal that would cement its top position in the Pacific region, while curbing China's growing economy and influence.
And then Trump axed it, because he didn't understand it.
China understood perfectly what an opportunity that was for them, and they have been quietly become less and less reliant on trade with the US since.
The current US regime is now hell-bent on dismantling the remaining alliances, relationships, and trade agreements that actually kept the US on top, the ones that actually kept the US powerful.
...while baselessly claiming that the existing world order was somehow "unfair" or "a bad deal", and that whatever the hell they're doing now is restoring some kind of lost power. They clearly have no clue what the source of America's power really is.
And here you are repeating their talking points.
What do you mean, exactly, when you're saying that the US shouldn't "let the world do whatever they want" ? What specific trade policies do you think are unfavourable to the US?
The world now: "oh wow these dirty Chinese thieves stole everything from us how did it happen?!?"
This whole situation really is a mystery... A single variable equation the globalist brain cannot comprehend
I guess they can't steal IP if we have no IP to steal, so there is that.
EDIT: You had years of corporate stimulus and ZIRP expanding M2, but the inflation floodgates only opened after a paltry return of a small fraction of the real wage losses the middle class and lower sustained over that period? Live by the macro grift, die by the macro grift. And I wrote-in Bernie both times.
Iwata took a paycut. The least our guys could do is take responsibility.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/13/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-sal...
If you want companies to invest in your country, the tariff has to make doing so make financial sense, and for the long term.
A lot of these tariffs are going on things that would require a whole factory to be built in the USA which doesn’t currently exist at all, and has no supporting infrastructure or workforce.
Companies can’t just decide right now, “oh shit there’s a tariff. Better but it in the USA right away!”
It’s great if you want to grant yourself the power to exempt those who please or pay you.
This is a Premier Cru Red Herring.
80% of economic activity imports nothing? 80% of economic activity doesn’t involve on oil, cars/trucks, or computers?