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- Hacker News
- TIL about epistemic trespassing:
It occurs when an expert in one field passes judgment or makes confident claims in another field where they lack true competence or formal training.
by yomismoaqui - by rekttrader
- The eventual flagging of this post makes me so sad for our civilization, of which this website is a HUGE part.
I believe there was a very interesting conversation happening here.
by consumer451 - Just to play with this a bit, this proposal instantly and completely ends Republican power. Low-taxed rural poor and retiree votes are gone, entirely. Higher earning coastal white collar and professional workers get 3-5 votes, offset to some degree but far from entirely by the business-owning rich blue collar class. The middle classes get 1. It's fairly obvious what that would mean for representation in the USA.
Second fun point is that he and his oligarch colleagues would find themselves with no votes: I guarantee I pay more income tax than this guy and anyone else in the multiple airplane owning class. Marvelous.
It is of course a fairly revolting idea but one which has some interesting unintended consequences, not least that we might suddenly find the rentier class figuring out how to declare income of $500,001 instead of a loss every year.
by scrumper - You are a lone voice of reason in these comments, presumably because you checks notes read the article.
I will add that voting blocs do shift. In fact, in the last two US presidential elections, retirees actually broke for the Democrat. That could have something to do with Trump or be an actual trend.
Additionally, these rich people do pay a lot of tax, they just do it through different parts of the tax code and at a lower overall rate (by avoiding social security and Medicare taxes by way of earning through long-term capital gains). On the other hand they also own more real estate than you (probably) in desirable locations and pay a lot of property tax they can't avoid.
All that notwithstanding I sense that the root of this discussion that this guy's getting excoriated for, was exploring how to short-circuit the phenomenon wherein older people, voting at higher rates (and holding office long into their old age), secure for themselves preferential benefits at the expense of struggling younger generations. The thread took off in a strange way from there, but... I guess I like where it was trying to go at the outset.
by oldandboring - The very rich have forgotten the lessons of the past.
They have forgotten that they also live in the very same physical world as the poor. Most of them don't even live that far from the poor.
Perhaps they don't consider the implications that nobody can fight a mob.
If they were as smart as they want people to think, they would think about these things and perhaps shut up (at least in public!) about making things worse for the poor.
by runako - It's an interesting idea only if you've never studied how democracy came to be.
The best definition of democracy that I've ever heard is that democracy is war by other means.
When you take away someone's right to vote, or make their vote less important than someone else's, you take away the only non-violent means they have to affect change.
Democracy is an agreement to put aside our weapons and resolve conflict peacefully. Take that away and you end up with violent revolution.
- Shouldn't it be the reverse? The vote of people who earn less (and are therefore more disadvantaged in society and rely on fair laws the most) should count more.
Tax and "money paid to the system" is a red herring only an entitled super rich person would think is relevant.
by tpoacher - Lutke is a German who has lived in Canada for decades. Why comment on American tax policy ? Seems out of his lane .by jchallis
- There’s no such thing for the billionaire class.by adamors
- Multiple Canadian billionaires are pro trump and wouldn't mind becoming a 51st state.by boelboel
- Maybe he's suggesting it for Canada?by taybin
- The guy is a massive asshole but I don’t see the issue commenting on other countries policies, that’s what we all doby dgellow
- These people almost universally believe their opinions and thoughts are uniquely special and always worth bowing to.
They are egotists. It’s one of the biggest parts of who they are.
by Lord-Jobo - Oh boy! Can I play too? My system, which I call an expansion of antitrust, requires all people to keep their net worth under one billion dollars. Anyone approaching that number must give away assets to stay under. If you go over that, you must be broken up, by, say, beheading, or being drawn and quartered.
I'm not married to that number, if people think it should be half a billion, or 100 million, or whatever, I'll go along with it.
- The Catan systemby imzadi
- Rather than a fixed amount of net worth, I'd rather it was linked to something like the minimum wage (e.g. minimum wage x 10 million) or the net worth of the poorest 10%. There should be some mechanism to prevent runaway wealth hoarders from stealing power and resources from the rest of us.by ndsipa_pomu
- > A reply from “Eric Thor,” who claimed to be a retired banking executive as well as “armchair economist and policy wonk,” proposed a sliding scale: zero votes for anyone who pays no income tax, one vote for those earning $1–100K, two votes for $100–200K, scaling up in that pattern to a hard cap of five votes for anyone earning $500K or more.
hell yeah, dude, I LOVE that I can lose my health insurance if my manager's manager decides he doesn't like the cut of my jib. Why shouldn't I lose my right to vote, too?
by pavel_lishin - The thing about this that's so distasteful is that it removes the basis of enfranchisement from being the inherent worth of a human life and moves it more to "what have you done for me lately". It's pretty gross.by taybin
- I don't know why you're being downvoted, gross is exactly the word for it.by mrwh
- It also lets my manager decide whether I get to vote or not.by pavel_lishin
- There's numerous examples of commune societies evicting people who refuse to contribute.
The distasteful thing is people refusing to contribute to society, especially for long periods of time. I know many people who have various mental and physical disabilities (some severe) who insist on working. Some able-bodied people can't even match some with severe disabilities. It's sick.
by 0xy - > one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax
It could be an interesting thought experiment to consider the second and third order consequences, even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.
First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income? What portion of them are poor vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structured their income in a way as to pay zero or near-zero income taxes? Would the latter be disincentivized from continuing those regimes?
Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that.
by andsoitis - We don’t have to go farther back than 100 years in history to know what this looks like. Poll taxes, land ownership requirements, etc. were pretty common. So were goon squads to beat and murder people who tried to change that. It wasn’t good.by kennywinker
- One possibly positive side effect is that by sidelining the working and middle classes, the political landscape would pit the rich against the fuck-you-rich.
It would be interesting to see the class of doctors, lawyers and small business owners fighting against the class of large cap c-suite and the billionaires.
by geremiiah - I’ve spent the last three days writing an inventory management system for a small store, using Codex and Claude Code. I realize that fully replacing online tools like Shopify is a lot more work than that (the payment integrations particularly), but: I sure wouldn’t want to be in the SaaS business right now.
- >First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income?
If you modify this slightly to the percent of people who are not net taxpayers, meaning you subtract transfer payments (including social security, medicare, medicaid) to them from the taxes they pay (including social security, medicare, and medicaid), it's about 60% of the country, which tracks quite closely to the percentage of Americans who could not afford an unexpected $1000 expense.
Most of the country is on a constant financial cliff.
by anonym29 - > even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.
This is a strange phrase - initially you had to either own land (therefore pay tax) or else if you lived in a city and didn't own land but paid sufficient tax[1], to vote in the early United States. Only taxpayers voting was our first principles! We only changed it later.
[1] I'm simplifying slightly because different states handled this differently
by simonsarris - > ...vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structured their income in a way as to pay zero or near-zero income taxes? Would the latter be disincentivized from continuing those regimes?
Oh, you know if something like this was implemented, those people would re-structure their income so they pay $1 in income tax.
Or they wouldn't bother, because they have far more effective ways of influencing the political process than voting. This would be purely about disenfranchising weaker people who could get in the way of them getting even more power.
by palmotea - In the U.S., it's about 28% of the populace which pays no taxes (or ends up netting to zero or negative taxation; for example, working families with children are often in a situation where they might owe $2,000 in taxes but also get a credit of $5,000, for a net refund of $3,000.) My 28% figure includes property, sales taxes, etc. but does not include taxes that employers, landlords, and so on pay.
This is all very beneficial for big business including Shopify: businesses can pay lower wages since the government steps in with benefits, including food, cash, housing, energy, medical care, and so on, for people with lower incomes, and then that means they have more money to spend as consumers (relevant to Shopify).
by trollbridge