Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ncallaway 1305 days ago
No.

I made a proposal above (though, you’ll also not that I said I thought my proposal was unlikely to be workable in practice).

But, if you review what I wrote, you’ll note I never proposed anything close to what you asked about.

My actual proposal would be this: we should invest heavily in a housing first approach to homelessness at both the federal and state level. We should invest in this as a priority, as if it will save lives because it will.

Along with that, we should invest in mental health and addiction treatment programs as a supplement.

We should tax the fuck out of the rich to do so in a revenue neutral way.

1 comments

> We should tax the fuck out of the rich to do so in a revenue neutral way.

That's what California does, and the homeless problem in CA just gets worse.

The combined state and federal top marginal tax rate is 75% or more?

Is capital gains taxed at the same rate as income?

Then we aren’t taxing the fuck out of the rich.

Does the Federal government and the State of California provide stable housing to every homeless person in the state?

Well, then, what’s why the problem is getting worse.

Actually tax the rich, and actually provide housing first. Until then, we haven’t tried my proposal.

Good thing we haven't, as it would crash the economy.

https://www.caltax.org/caltax-resources/california-tax-facts...

https://taxfoundation.org/publications/federal-tax-rates-and...

BTW, the government has built housing for the poor many times. They're called "The Projects". Usually they wound up being demolished after a few years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidized_housing_in_the_Unit...

Which is why the economy collapsed in the 1950s when the top marginal tax rate was 91%, and we’ve been living in a Mad Max wasteland ever since.
Very few people ever paid 91%. The reason was there were all sorts of tax shelters available at the time. This resulted in a lot of misallocation of resources. A lot of personal expenses could also be written off as a business expense, the most infamous of those was the "three martini lunch".

Reagan, in his deal to reduce the top marginal tax rates, also eliminated a vast swath of tax shelters and tax deductions.

More generally, the government consumed much less of the GDP in the 50s than it does today.

Taxes aren’t really bad for the rich in California. Ya, they are higher than normal, but most people who think they are excessive just don’t understand how marginal tax rates work.