These types of selective moderation make HN seem like the typical hive-mind that shouts down and uses abusive moderative tactics to prevent any diversity of opinion from sticking around.
Two posts in violation of a policy regularly broken makes it so if I complain about this bad behavior someone else is using against me, such complaints are not relevant, but I may be banned from your website.
There is a common misconception of the Laffer curve that is based on trying to interpret the data. However, what the Laffer curve demonstrates is that there is a curve, nothing else.
Please note that I do not consider anything from Wikipedia as evidence of anything, so if you are trying to get me to respond to something to do within a Wikipedia article, it just isn't going to happen. The number of times I have discovered serious issues with those articles, especially on political, philosophical, and academic topics is, frankly, disturbing.
There is a theory within some economic schools of thought that savings generates production, but this is not directly to do with tax rates or the Laffer curve, nor even rich people.
Yes, the primary focus of a business owner must be on tax planning, because this generates efficient operations, undoubtedly.
Also, laws change all of the time. My impression, every time I dig down with real people, IRL, is they have the same general opinion as you and others like you here, but have no actual exposure to the actual laws, as they implemented. The only occasion I come across this and I see that the business owner, with a small team tax attorneys and CPAs, can't seem to spend enough money to escape huge taxes.
I can only assume that the business owner is clueless and the Internet anons are the experts he should have hired.
Okay, there is no formal concept or hypothesis of trickle down economics. (However, most PhD economists use the phrase "economic theory," but you may have some insight into this that they have not yet been exposed to.)
The one direct exposure I have had to the issue of inheritance tax was with a small Midwest-based distributor. The owner was very old and wanted to pass the company to his daughters, who had actually been running the business for decades (and when I came along, his granddaughters were working the office).
His issue was that what the government decided his business to be worth could only be paid with more cash than his business generated in 5 years. This meant that his heirs would have to mortgage their shares to cover the inheritance tax, which places ownership into a different category of investment.
In all seriousness, the problem is incredibly simple: there is nowhere near enough residential units to support the population, and this is entirely due to the various municipalities complete unwillingness to allow anywhere near enough new residential units to be built.
Even Plan Bay Area is at least recognizing there is a problem, but their "resolution" to the housing crisis was simply to have a reduced deficit between projected net new job creation and new residential unit construction. In effect, saying that more people should be living sharing rooms, living in their RVs, cars, or just living without any shelter, at all.
I genuinely fear that there is a potential for increases in property crime, violent crime, and even civil unrest. When people are denied access to shelter, they become desperate and more likely to engage in violence.
I have a friend who knows next to nothing about different OSs and other various technology thingaroos. He just uses whatever is in front of him. It's not that he can't learn more, he just doesn't care to.
Inadequate wages is not the issue. There simply isn't enough housing. In the most recent 6-year period for which there is data, 500,000 net new jobs were created in Silicon Valley, but only 65,000 new residential units were built in the same area.
I've been in Silicon Valley for close to 20 years, and I have been concerned about this for a long time. I want to say it was somewhere around 2010 that I began noticing a sudden increase in the number RVs I see in non-RV places, such as large parking lots and along industrial area roads. Now it seems like I hardly go anywhere and not see several RVs that are clearly out of place - they used to only be found in sideyards, RV parks, or driving down the highway.
Next, the homeless situation has truly grown to epic proportions. Take a peak into any of the inbetween areas, and you'll find a small encampment. How many of these exist, I can't say, but once I began to understand where the homeless go, I started to venture and take small peaks - they're everywhere.
Next, the homeless started showing up, en masse, in large public places. The most obvious is the parks near San Pedro square in San Jose. Yes, this area has always had an "element" to it, but that element used to live in the nearby housing. Now, the element is in the park.
I was talking with a friend who lives in a very expensive and beautiful home near this park, and this friend was really annoyed at how the homeless population around this house has really exploded. At the same time, this friend had not identified any link to the homeless population and crazy median home prices, now approaching $1 million for San Jose. I asked this friend to please consider the statistic of a $1 million median home price in a city with a population of 1 million, and what does that really mean for its residents?
My feeling is that, in time, this is going to be incredibly bad. The first problem is an increase in property crime. When people are forced out of their shelter, they will become desperate. Some percentage of any population is going to be pre-disposed to considering crime, so increasing the number of people who are desperate will increase the absolute number of people who will turn to crime.
Police forces do not exist to protect - they are really just for cleanup, and currently there is a new trend that will eventually get reported of how the nature of burglaries, especially in the San Jose area, have changed. It used to be that perps would case and then burglarize when owners were out for a weekend or vacation. Now, the owners are out for only a few hours and return home to find they have been burgled. Obviously they are using some more sophisticated surveillance or network tech of some sort. In at least one precinct, the police have yet to catch anyone performing burglaries in this manner.
With this new trend, a group of, say, five clever people can do 10s of millions in property damage annually. As these small groups are increased, the dollars in damage become very real, plus the emotional impact of feeling insecure in your own property will often push people over the edge to sell their homes or at least move away, converting their residence into a rental unit.
The second trend that I fear will begin to occur is the less clever criminals who simply mug, loot, and smash-and-grab.
Finally, there will simply be violence against the property owners. People are not dumb, as we can see by this article that even the politicians and bureaucrats are beginning to get concerned for their jobs. In San Francisco, there was the violent demonstrations against the Google buses. I don't know in exactly which way the violence comes out or is directed, but when you force enough people in to desperate circumstances, you will eventually have enough of those who are pre-disposed to violent "solutions" that they will find a target.
In all of this, people will begin selling and moving out. The property values will drop, not because of increased supply of housing, but because of an exodus of existing buyers coupled with a sharp reduction in new buyers. Eventually, companies start moving jobs or entire companies to other areas (owners, executives, and managers don't want to live in all of that), and demand for residential housing falls yet further.
As the prices drop, people will consider selling to get equity, so the prices drop further (selling encourages selling). Getting things to go up from here will be a serious problem. All of the governments are maxed out, credit-wise, and their revenues will tank.
At this moment, today, it seems like increasing housing is a bad idea for cities and property owners because they will lose at least some of the current equity in their homes, but depending on the property owner's time-horizon, they may well lose all of their equity.
You are twisting what people want to do. I don't think the goal is to force people out of the homes they own, but to allow property owners to build on the property what the property owner wants to build. If that ends up being a condo or apartment complex where there used to be houses, that is the choice of the property owner.
Enjoy your kingdom.