This is WSJ red meat political controversy stuff. The story devolves into the usual "tax the rich" and anti-welfare state debate as any other political click-bait. I thought HN wasn't doing that for a week...
I actually agree with the premise and many of the conclusions, and if it popped up on Drudge or Breitbart or whatever I'd be fine with it, but why here? Why must every popular site devolve into either a virtual political cage match or another addition to the echo chamber?
Just a note: you _have_ to "tax the rich". Nobody else has enough money to pay the bills!
The question isn't whether to "tax the rich" or not - it's "How should we tax the rich" and How much should we tax the rich?" that we need to answer.
Meanwhile the correct answers are:
- Bring back heavy estate ("death") taxes to prevent wealth from being passed from generation to generation,
- Create heavy wealth taxes so that persons who are merely lucky don't monopolize the wealth.
Both the above should be done b/c goverment needs the money. Of course the other thing we need to decide is how much should the government spend, but that seems to have no limit these days.
I don't think you necessarily have to tax the rich. Their share of income should be reduced to the share they had maybe 40 years ago. Stronger unions would help for example. Having the owner class deciding they need more and more money can't work in the long run.
I don't know if it's true or not, but I've heard the claim that even pushing up tax rates to Eisenhower-era levels (without deductions) would still not solve the problem fully.
Instead, we simply have a demographics issue: Too many older folks with unpayable entitlements and not enough younger workers to pay for the bill.
We weren't, but since a week turned out to be longer than needed and I was worried about the cost of continuing, we ended the experiment early: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251. So it's back to the normal guidelines now.
(The worry about continuing was because there was evidence that some people thought the change was permanent, and that was not the intention.)
Yesterday I reviewed all the headlines and saw none of the usual political click-bait sprinkled among them with their inevitable 200+ post flame wars. It was wonderful; like having a cast removed or getting a tooth fixed. I hope your experiment leads to a similar policy.
I had the same impression that there were fewer inflammatory comments, but am trying to keep two things in mind: one is that I know that I'm biased and would like to see quantitative data, and that there were submissions flagged on which I would have liked to see discussion by those on Hacker News. I think the data would be interesting regardless, but I don't think it would be meaningful because it wouldn't represent the HN that I'd like to see. I'd like to figure out tactics that reduce inflammatory discussion that still permit constructive discussion on contentious submissions.
I actually agree with the premise and many of the conclusions, and if it popped up on Drudge or Breitbart or whatever I'd be fine with it, but why here? Why must every popular site devolve into either a virtual political cage match or another addition to the echo chamber?