301–310 of 1001 posts
I'm so tired of people painting the government as some "other". WE are the government. Your taxes provide services for your friends, family, neighbors, etc. Just come out and say you're greedy and don't want to help the people around you if that's how you feel.
There is a world beyond Mount Diablo.
goes out to imitate Johnson's Argumentum ad lapidem in my driveway
Being an expert in one domain (pg: startups, presumably) doesn't make you an expert in all domains (finance, tax systems). I'd be more interested to hear from someone who true expertise, as opposed to a guy terrified of losing a small fraction of his wealth. [Edit] "Even a .5% wealth tax would start to keep founders away from a state or country that imposed it. That's more than a quarter of your stock." Oh, the horro…
What about the millions of dollars of capital gains taxes they already paid to "support the society?" The actual cost to maintain a "society" is waaay less than the amount the US government takes in taxes; most US government spending goes to welfare and warfare. All they'd be supporting is greater welfare transfares to people who think they're entitled to other people's hard earned money.
First, the goal of a wealth tax (for many) is to diminish large pools of wealth... or curb their growth. Wealth taxes started gaining attention again in relation to Picketty, The 99% & such. PG isn't being disingenuous. This is goal of a wealth tax.
Second, a wealth tax has a floor. Most american proposals have been for a very high floor, and/or tax rate progression. If you have $100m and the floor is $50m, the wealth tax can only take half.
Third... there is money going in and out besides the wealth tax. Interest is the big one.
The table is correct either way, but the implication of a 2% wealth tax over 60 years, assuming a 6% average rate of return is that your $100m will become $1bn instead of $3.3bn. That's the 70%.
Maybe 6% is unfair. For the currently very wealthy (Zuck, Bezos, Buffet) they earned more in recent decades. Maybe 4% would be fairer. Maybe 8%. IDK.
Also, consumption is relevant... at least below a certain level of wealth. Consumption rounds to zero for Gates/Buffet/Bezos levels of wealth.
A point to note (for proponents) is that a wealth tax will not produce very much tax. It is much smaller than a VAT, income tax or such. Whether you are for it or against it, think of it more like tariffs. It's an economic policy. The tax itself is a side effect.
I do think it's over-the-top to represent these only as 60-year effects. The conclusion that a 0.5% tax represents 25% of your stock is... that seems wrong. Over 10 years that is just 4.5% and the founder will be paying taxes out of interest/revenue.
If it affects founders' country/regime selection, it would make sense to move after you make the money. Most of the tax is in the future.
Unpopular opinion: Near 50% of American pay ZERO tax whatsoever. The top 10% of all Americans pay 69% of all taxes currently. This is a point 'left out' of current discussions. How about instead of increasing entitlements and stealing more from people that created wealth - we lower the size of the government spending UNTIL it matches where most people pay for the services received in a more scaled manner. https://tax…
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-ric...
Improvements in our standard of living come from the free market and innovation.
I live in San Francisco and my taxes are higher than anywhere I've ever lived in my life. Interestingly, the government is run much worse than the small suburban town in Ohio where I am from. Every year in San Francisco, my standard of living goes down and local poverty increases. If there is a model the rest of the country should emulate it is not the California Government model.
California could take every penny from the rich, PG, Benioff, Jack Dorsey etc and they would still be bankrupt. Why?
Wealth is not money. Wealth is production. It is the flow of money. Wealth is efficiency. Wealth is production not consumption.
"Looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter." - Francisco D'Anconia
Perhaps notable: Switzerland has a wealth tax (of up to 0.3%), and there is zero evidence that this has any deterrent effect on wealthy people settling in Switzerland or startups being created in Switzerland. Other features of the tax system more than offset the 0.3% wealth tax. Personally, I am a bit disappointed by the lack of depth of the discourse: Wealth taxes and their effect have been studied quite a bit in ec…
You're cherry picking. France imposed a wealth tax and they repealed it. "At least 10,000 wealthy people left the country to avoid paying the tax; most moved to neighboring Belgium" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-14/france...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Wealth tax proposals I've seen don't kick in until $50 million or $100 million. This means that there is a floor on how "poor" the government can make you via a wealth tax. That’s just the starting point. Once people begin to figure out how to avoid it or have been tapped then the qualifier will be lowered to 40m. And then eventually 30m and do on until anyone above average is paying it. And then anyone above media…
Not that you're necessarily wrong, but I find it fascinating that the state of social trust is so low in the united states that the most powerful and resonant arguments against potential laws are even if the law is good, a future law in the same vein might go too far and thus even the good law should be shot down. You can see this on a variety of topics. Gun control legislation, immigration reform, healthcare reform,…
Because that’s exactly what’s happened in the past. We don’t just get ONE piece of gun legislation and that’s the end of it, every so many years we keep on getting pushes for more. For immigration reform, we didn’t just get ONE amnesty of illegal immigrants and then strict immigration control which was promised back during the Reagan administration, we got complete acceptance of continued illegal immigration and renewed calls for amnesty.
The smart money is always on not trusting the government.
This dramatically incentivizes short-term profit seeking and early exists (for founders and investors), over long-term tech/value development.
The US is the only country in the world that taxes their citizens who are residing in other countries. Even if you move to another county, you still pay US taxes every year.
If you'd like to renounce your citizenship to avoid that, the US has that covered. There is also an expatriation tax for people making above 120k a year or have a net worth over 2 million dollars. 30 percent of your wealth is much more than any of this being discussed.
The US is in a position to enforce this, too, because all banking in the world reports to the US on their citizens' holdings. This is unique to only US citizens. As such, it's hard to even get a foreign bank to accept you as an American holder knowing the amount paperwork that causes them.
Taken together, it's not a possibility for the rich to just leave if they don't like the way they are being taxed. Americans are financial prisoners of their country.