[teachrdan]

Some cursory googling shows you have to make capital gains of between $185,000 and $250,000 to have to pay $37,000 in capital gains tax. This is between three and six times as much as someone in their 20s will earn in a year. I think you need a bit more perspective of what it's like to be a young person outside the extremely well compensated tech sector.

[saltcured]

Ironically, capital gains tax rates are essentially regressive as they are lower than the typical marginal tax rate for someone earning at those levels. They are a big handout to the capital class, not some special punishment.

So to whine about them shows a baseline belief that income should not be taxed at all, I guess?

[angelgonzales]

I wouldn’t call it “well compensated”, I work really hard for my money and it’s not like my company is just giving it away to me out of the kindness of their hearts. I also worked in food service while in college and know what it’s like to make ~$15 an hour which is one of the reasons why I went to college and learned the skills needed to create value for my employer. A big point of mine is that my grandfather went to a community college for $3 (the price of his ID card) and got a job as a machinist to pay for his multi-lot house in Southern California in 2 years. He was the sole earner so his wife could raise three children. Nowadays that house is $2M, AI didn’t exist the way it did in the 1970s when he bought the house and AI didn’t cause the increase in the ratio of home costs to wages, which is arguably the biggest issue of our time and is not hypothetical.

[wredcoll]

Housing to wages has been going up every year for like the last 20 years, I'm not sure we can blame AI for that?

Regardless of how hard you worked or what you deserve, having 30k in capital gains puts you into a very, very, verrry small minority of americans.

[angelgonzales]

I think you are understanding my point here. America has and has had plenty of problems. I don’t think AI is one of them. In the same vein, reporters and journalists are a very small subset of American population that are very vocal about AI because it probably threatens their hegemony.