Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: poll • Hacker News Board

Re: Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: poll

#181

Post by makomk » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 11:05 PM UTC

lnanek2 wrote: post #159

akhilcacharya wrote: post #5

I don't really care about wealth inequality, but from a revenue perspective a wealth tax seems fantastic _if_ can be enacted and enforced. Bill Gates came out in favor of a limited wealth tax as well - I think a mild cost to citizenship for the uber-wealthy is a great idea. Feels like political malpractice to not attempt it. Sidebar: > Kathy Herron, 56, a Republican who lives in Santa Rosa, California, said her suppo…

> from a revenue perspective a wealth tax seems fantastic Amusingly, the current manifesto re wealth inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, pointed out that confiscatory taxes on the rich would be pointless re a revenue perspective. It turns out there are so few rich (e.g. the 1%) that even if you take all their money, it doesn't really dent our large government expenditures spent on the majority. E.g. if t…

Which is of course exactly why politicians are pushing the idea of a wealth tax so hard. You can't get the kind of money required to fund their projects just by taxing the income of the rich. In order to come up with plausible-sounding figures and push their narrative that their proposals would totally be affordable if only we could make the evil wealthy pay up, they have to suggest converting a substantial proportion of the ultra-wealthy's total wealth into immediate, actual spending every year.

Re: Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: poll

#182

Post by andrei_says_ » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 11:07 PM UTC

ohazi wrote: post #142

andrei_says_ wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t mind a tax on my bank balance over $32,000,000 for example. I would need multiple lifetimes to spend so much money. Most of my money comes to me from real estate ownership and investments. I do not exchange time and life force for it. My bank account just grows. It is ok some of it to pay taxes to make the lives of the less fortunate a bit less unbearable. After all I take 25-35% of their incomes in rent :) (…

I agree with you in principle on this particular example, but where is the cutoff, and how often will it move? Will it move accurately, or will inflation be used to sneak it downward?

I am so not worried if the ultra rich will have a cutoff allowing them 20 or 25 or 27.5 lifetimes lived in luxury without the need to work. This is not where my concern lies.

Re: Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: poll

#183

Post by skitout » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 11:23 PM UTC

sdinsn wrote: post #174

akdetrick wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average worker is 5x more productive than they were 30 years ago, but wages have been basically flat. In the last 10 years, the federal minimum wage has not risen, effectively reducing the minimum wage by about $1 due to inflation. The richest 500 people in the world grew their wealth by $1.2 trillion in 2019, a 25% increase over a period of one year. The minority build their wealth on the labor and taxes of the…

> The average worker is 5x more productive Productivity isn't due to workers alone. Most productivity has been gained through technological advances.

Sure, but how do we used to share the increase in productivity ? How do we share it now ? How should we share it ? ; My feeling is workers had been the "loser" those last 30 years in how are shared the productivity gain. Ethically I find it wrong. Economically this did not seemed to offer more growth or positive outcome...

Re: Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: poll

#184

Post by skitout » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 11:28 PM UTC

SkyBelow wrote: post #85

spamizbad wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A wealth tax, where a fraction of your bank balance is removed every month, is a totally alien concept to most people. If you haven't thought about it before, it can take a minute or two to wrap your head around what it would actually mean. Many Americans already experience a form of wealth tax: property tax. You are taxed a percentage of the value of your property, something not terribly liquid. Incidentally, a ha…

Car tax and land tax are two very common existing wealth taxes. I wonder why they are rarely described as a wealth tax.

Car and land cost money for the state, you get a "direct service" from your tax. And wealthy people have lower rate (compared to their revenue and wealth) than the average Joe

Here we talk about a tax without a "direct service" associated... but that would be paid only by the wealthy, not by the average Joe

Re: Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: poll

#185

Post by munk-a » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 11:31 PM UTC

ohazi wrote: post #151

spamizbad wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. It's not the same thing. You can choose how extravagant a house to live in relative to your total wealth and your income to make sure that you can cover the property tax bill while still meeting your saving goals. This isn't really true. Yes, I can control the value of my home at a single point in time but if my neighborhood gentrifies, even if I make no improvements to my home, my taxes will go up. You can tech…

You can move when it gets too unbearable. You wouldn't be able to do the same with your savings.

Moving isn't free, and it can be a burdensome expense. When the housing crisis a lot of people had personal financial issues because divesting from the mortgage they were engaged with and acquiring a more modest property would still involve being taxed on the full value of your house, expenses involved with the mechanics of changing residences, and then somehow affording a down payment on a new place - or else being forced to declare bankruptcy and re-enter the renting market with nothing but fresh income.

The technical concept is that housing is an illiquid asset - there is a friction in converting it to cash, that friction may be monetary (a fee, taxes, a loss of value, sale prices etc...) or it may be time (conversion may simply not be an action that can be executed at will, there may be windows or complex ownership hand-off processes that require weird timing) in the most common cases (including housing) the asset is liquidatable with value generally decrease relative to speed, offloading a property with a fixed window of a month will net you less revenue then having a sale posted for an extended period - having a sale window of a week or less would almost certainly result in a much decreased sale price.

Re: Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: poll

#186

Post by virmundi » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 11:34 PM UTC

txsoftwaredev wrote: post #92

Why would the ultra wealthy not just store their assets in another country? Businesses and individuals routinely move to different states to avoid higher taxes.

Because so much of their wealth are denominated in US equities. If your stocks are in the NY stock exchange, you can’t move them beyond the US government’s reach.

Re: Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: poll

#187

Post by munk-a » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 11:35 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #129

ohazi wrote: post #33

I'm skeptical that most respondents understood the questions correctly. Most people are familiar with income tax, because they know that money is removed from their paycheck every month. Many also file tax returns. A wealth tax, where a fraction of your bank balance is removed every month, is a totally alien concept to most people. If you haven't thought about it before, it can take a minute or two to wrap your head…

I don't think we should let politicians sneak this through unless we're confident that the public actually understands what is being proposed. We shouldn't let politicians sneak this through regardless of what the public understands. Taxation is theft.

That's a rather extreme viewpoint, I would counter with the view that actual theft is theft and taxation paying to apprehend criminals, recover stolen property and discourage crime is actually the only thing between us and rampant theft.

Re: Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: poll

#188

Post by munk-a » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 11:41 PM UTC

aazaa wrote: post #11

> A wealth tax is levied on an individual’s net worth, such as stocks, bonds and real estate, as well as cash holdings, similar in concept to property taxes. It is separate from an income tax, which applies to wages, interest and dividends, among other sources. One often overlooked issue with a wealth tax is the damaging effect on financial privacy. The income tax already has the IRS probing into nooks and crannies i…

A lack of privacy from the press is the cost of fame, a lack of privacy from the IRS sounds rather reasonable as an equivalent for wealth.

Honestly, the way the IRS mostly catches tax frauds is by checking self-reported income against wage expenses reported by employers, in theory we really don't need to be personally involved with tax calculations and a lot of countries (like Sweden) just tell you what they think is right and ask if they messed anything up... the only reason we don't do that in the US is because Intuit has a huge boatload of money.

As an aside, nearly all financial transactions are carefully reviewed these days under the excuse of anti-terrorism or child safety in an effort to try and detect money laundering (which, in an open system, is super hard - but becomes solvable in a closed system)... and I'm alright with that.

Re: Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: poll

#189

Post by munk-a » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 11:45 PM UTC

fatnoah wrote: post #41

aazaa wrote: post #11

> A wealth tax is levied on an individual’s net worth, such as stocks, bonds and real estate, as well as cash holdings, similar in concept to property taxes. It is separate from an income tax, which applies to wages, interest and dividends, among other sources. One often overlooked issue with a wealth tax is the damaging effect on financial privacy. The income tax already has the IRS probing into nooks and crannies i…

> similar in concept to property taxes All other merits aside, is it really similar to a property tax? I pay property taxes every quarter and I have just as much property as I started with. The value of the property also doesn't go down every tax cycle as a result. With a wealth tax, the person's wealth would decrease to a minimum at some point.

Just a clarification

> the person's wealth would decrease to a minimum at some point.

under the Warren plan (which is pretty representative) that minimum is $50M which is still a ton of money... and taxes do decrease your held assets, sometimes this decrease may be visible on the property itself (property taxes preventing you from affording a reno you think is necessary) more likely it's visible in the form of your debt (being a bit slower to pay down a mortgage because of the loss of revenue to taxes).

So I think you may want to re-examine your statement about having just as much property as you started with, also it might help to examine the corollary related to a reduction to a minimum - that statement is technically correct, but I'd consider it meaningless at scale.

Re: Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: poll

#190

Post by skitout » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 11:46 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #132

JohnFen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument for a higher tax on income above a certain level is that it helps prevent tyranny. In the US, anyway, wealth equals power. Great wealth accumulated in few hands shifts a great deal of power over the nation from the populace to those hands. Without some constraint, this poses a real threat to overall freedom and liberty.

You say that wealth accumulation poses a (vague, potential, in the future) threat to overall freedom and liberty... but arbitrary wealth redistribution poses an immediate, obvious threat to overall freedom and liberty _right now_.

Wealth accumulation and inequality poses problems right now, for example IMF says inequality Seriously Damages Growth...

Wealth accumulation also means other people does not have this money, with all the problems associated - including a lots of death by suicide.

Many free-marketeer are also against wealth accumulation (+ inheritance) as its gives unfair advantages on the market, ruin the meritocracy...

I don't see a tax that will have a little impact on the lifestyle of the wealthy as an threat to overall freedom and liberty...