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by roenxi 1788 days ago
> Progressive taxation benefits society at large...

... claim the poor and the people who make their money off capital gains.

Who gets to decide what "good for society" means in context of taxation is possibly the most political question out there. It is not at all obvious that making the most productive people pay most of the burden gets to the best outcome.
2 comments
unethical_ban 1788 days ago
Being highly paid or at the top of a management structure does not equal being more productive.

It is one philosophy that there exists some line, some fuzzy DMZ that gets crossed between being merely "wealthy and more prosperous than others" and obscene. Colloquially that seems to be "billionaire" but I bet a lot of people on the farther-left would define is somewhere north of $10 million.

Especially in a country so far behind the rest of the developed world with regards to access to health-care and housing for so many millions of people.

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roenxi 1787 days ago
Billionaires don't generally pay progressive income taxes. They're part of the 'money off capital gains' crowd.
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dnautics 1788 days ago
the more people's lives you are affecting in a positive sense the more likely it is you are making a very high income.

the opposite arrow is not necessarily true, but one wonders if there isn't a 'baby with the bathwater' effect with progressive taxation.

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tluyben2 1788 days ago
As OSS dev this very often not true for instance: there is a lot of OSS having a positive effect on a huge amount of people and yet the authors scraping by. Paying for OSS should be a tax write off aka charity. Would stimulate more people to just open source it all.
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dnautics 1788 days ago
You assume that the value in this case is created merely by its existence but software in a vacuum is worthless. The value in software is also created by orgs that choose to use the software, by distribution networks. It must be reduced to practice.

As a software dev that can be a hard pill to swallow.

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tluyben2 1788 days ago
Yes, agreed. But does that change the case?
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dnautics 1787 days ago
Yes? I am asserting that you are overestimating the value of the programmer, which is one axis of the correlation I suggest.
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