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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   2848 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 27, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Tax deduction or credit to those earning less than 160k a year. Why not? I understand this is functionally just redistribution from wealthy to less, but if you call it a tariff more people will be supportive than “we are literally going to redistribute money now”. It has a nice conservative tinge. But also, this isn’t my steel-man of tariffs per the OP.

I just have strong priors against "government gets all the money then moves it around" so I wanted to clarify.

Well, do you think that Jeff Bezos would not have created Amazon if he didn’t expect to gain hundreds of billions of dollars? Do you think Bezos would not continue to run Amazon if a competitor popped up which reduced his profit by tens of billions of dollars? We would still have Amazon if we literally took billions of dollars from Bezos, so those billions are genuinely just wasted. Inefficiently allocated.

”People rationally decide things” is much better than “the whims of economic chance are magically right about how much profit the founder of Amazon should get”.

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