That seems like a difficult position to make coherent. The comment seems to start by arguing that government spending should increase as much as is reasonably possible because it draws resources away from billionaires.

Then the second half seems to be a complaint that increasing government spending has created a resource for billionaires to draw from to enrich themselves.

It seems that if you believe the first, the second is hard to complain about. There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. They are. If they then pay a little extra tax and it goes in a circular loop back to them, which is weird but I'm not sure how you are arguing it to be a problem - clearly under this frame they are going to be worse off than when they started, so they have been taxed some amount. The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not, I suppose. But that has nothing to do with whether they have a custom of a ceremonial handing of some billionaire money to the government to be handed back to the billionaire on top of their taxes.

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scotty79 4 days ago | parent [-]

> There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government.

I don't think that's the contract. Government must be funded by citizens which all are consumers. What billionaires extract from consumers can't go towards funding the government. Unless it's borrowed directly from billionaires which is what got most governments in financial problems they are currently in.

> The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not

To asses that you only need to compare rate of growth of billionaires wealth to the rate of growth of the entire economy. Then you can see how much they suck out of non-billionaires.

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roenxi 3 days ago | parent [-]

> I don't think that's the contract. Government must be funded by citizens which all are consumers. What billionaires extract from consumers can't go towards funding the government.

I don't think you're articulating your point clearly here - what billionaires extract from consumers has to go towards funding the government in part, that is what they use to pay their taxes. Otherwise where does the wealth used to pay the taxes come from? Capital only generates a return in a context where there is someone to consume what it produces.

Just to put my view - I'm with you 100% that billionaires are sucking money out of the government. Look at any billionaire and a good chunk of their wealth seems to come from some combination of regulatory capture and government contracts. I'm just not seeing how you square that with "and therefore the government should grow at the same rate of the economy". It seems like a counter-intuitive position to take if you've identified that billionaire wealth is a key justification and the billionaires are very good at extracting money from the government. It seems likely to me that billionaire wealth would scale with the size of government.

The wealth of government is ultimately funded by the middle class. There aren't enough billionaires to carry the load. Eg, Elon Musk's net worth is estimated at $500 billion which isn't enough to cover 1 year of spending of the US military, for example. So he taps out after 1 year and then someone has to find funding for the 2nd year somewhere else. And you'd consume a few more billionaires (none of whom have Musk-level wealth) to cover the parts of the US government that aren't war-related. It wouldn't last long if billionaires have to fund it.

	▲	scotty79 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Otherwise where does the wealth used to pay the taxes come from? Consumers. > Capital only generates a return in a context where there is someone to consume what it produces. Exactly. If you don't tax the return sufficiently it amplifies the capital (lands in th pockets of billionaires in other words). > It seems like a counter-intuitive position to take if you've identified that billionaire wealth is a key justification and the billionaires are very good at extracting money from the government. It seems likely to me that billionaire wealth would scale with the size of government. What billionaires extract from the government in terms of subsidies and such is nothing compared to what they get as a result of tax cuts and being undertaxed in general. Basically we should tax billionaires more. Government getting richer because of that is just a side effect. Government growing with the size of the economy is not a goal. It's a gauge showing us that billionaires are adequately taxed. I'm using term "billionaires" loosely. 10 hecto-millionaires are fine too as a replacement for one billionaire. Again the goal is not to fund the government. It's to remove power from unelected oligarchs.