Paul GrahamVerified account

In a country where the top 1% have had massively escalating share of the ownership of the country and the bottom fifth don’t even have healthcare, how are *democrats* engaging in class war by saying that it’s obscene for people to be billionaires while others starve?!

I have to tell you, extraordinarily rich people declaring that being taxed at 70% for income *over $10 million a year* (not including capital gains etc) constitutes a ‘class war’ against them - this is a very, very, very bad look while a million people just missed two pay checks.

Of course higher tax rates per se are not class war, any more than deportations per se are culture war. But e.g. naming specific people you want to deport, in order to excite your supporters, is culture war. And naming people you want to tax, for the same reason, is class war.

You want to talk about false equivalences and logical fallacies - pointing out that the richest people in the world earn vast tracts of money and should pay more tax is not the same as attacking people’s basic citizenship rights.

Perhaps you’re arguing that someone saying that George Soros should be deported because he’s a Jewish mastermind attempting to deform democracy is the same as saying Jeff Bezos should pay more tax? One of those is a racist anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. One isn’t.

That's rather a straw man, don't you think, to take an extreme example of culture war and a mild example of class war, and propose I'm saying they're equivalent? Of course they're not. You don't seem to be even trying to argue honestly here...

You aren’t providing *any* examples *at all*. You’re arguing completely in the abstract saying there is an equivalence without providing any evidence. You’re letting people fill in the gaps with their own prejudices.

I was referring to Elizabeth Warren's recent tweet attacking some guy who bought an expensive yacht, and saying that he was the sort of person she had in mind for the new tax she proposed.