@rysiek You have a point, but at a certain structure of wealth disparity — which, AFAICT, is common in wealthy countries right now —, setting the threshold according to a median rather than average means, a zillionaire will not be rewarded for doing something that doubles, say, the revenues of one percent of the bottom-earners. And if we're stuck with trying to convince the zillionaires implement measures to support the poor people instead of doing it via a functional government, such an incentivi might actually be valuable.
All in all, I do freely admit that picking a good set of rules for taxation is more complicated than just picking something that should work. The simplistic example that I brought was meant more as an illustration of the way to probe rather than as an actual, fully formed, tax policy proposition.
@rysiek You have a point, but at a certain structure of wealth disparity — which, AFAICT, is common in wealthy countries right now —, setting the threshold according to a median rather than average means, a zillionaire will not be rewarded for doing something that doubles, say, the revenues of one percent of the bottom-earners. And if we're stuck with trying to convince the zillionaires implement measures to support the poor people instead of doing it via a functional government, such an incentivi...
@riley@rysiek
fun fact, I jotted some notes about this, sadly in Italian, about a year ago, when I heard one time too many the expression “extraprofit” http://wok.oblomov.eu/appunti/extraprofitti/
(Looks like I'll have to work on an English version!)
This discussion on taxing the rich has much of the similar feeling about those discussions. What we want is a system where you don't need to think of fancy values to define “rich”, you can go simply by statistics on the distribution of wealth, with a fiscal regime >
@riley@rysiek that “aims” towards a very tight distribution around the median, and is otherwise progressively more aggressive as you move up from it, and it becomes more aggressive faster the more dispersed and skewed the distribution of wealth is.
@oblomov My current hunch is, the primary problem of socioeconomic stratification, the one most important to neutralise and prevent, is development of a sort of 'monetary event horizon', with people on either side of it having near-zero probability of ever finding themselves on the either side. To that end, I'd argue that it's important to review the sort of schemes zillionaires use to poverty-proof themselves, and convert them into something that could poverty-proof everybody. As a part of it, I believe that broader public awareness of zillionaires' schemes of defence against risk of poverty could help neutralise a whole bunch of pro-poverty-enforcement talking points.
@oblomov My current hunch is, the primary problem of socioeconomic stratification, the one most important to neutralise and prevent, is development of a sort of 'monetary event horizon', with people on either side of it having near-zero probability of ever finding themselves on the either side. To that end, I'd argue that it's important to review the sort of schemes zillionaires use to poverty-proof themselves, and convert them into something that could poverty-proof everybody. As a part of it, I...
Gregory's Server
@rysiek You have a point, but at a certain structure of wealth disparity — which, AFAICT, is common in wealthy countries right now —, setting the threshold according to a median rather than average means, a zillionaire will not be rewarded for doing something that doubles, say, the revenues of one percent of the bottom-earners. And if we're stuck with trying to convince the zillionaires implement measures to support the poor people instead of doing it via a functional government, such an incentivi might actually be valuable.
All in all, I do freely admit that picking a good set of rules for taxation is more complicated than just picking something that should work. The simplistic example that I brought was meant more as an illustration of the way to probe rather than as an actual, fully formed, tax policy proposition.
@rysiek You have a point, but at a certain structure of wealth disparity — which, AFAICT, is common in wealthy countries right now —, setting the threshold according to a median rather than average means, a zillionaire will not be rewarded for doing something that doubles, say, the revenues of one percent of the bottom-earners. And if we're stuck with trying to convince the zillionaires implement measures to support the poor people instead of doing it via a functional government, such an incentivi...