371–380 of 1001 posts
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…
This sounds absolutely absurd. The last twenty years of entrepreneurs not fleeing the "tax" of Bay Area salaries seems like proof that they are a lot more interested in maximizing the chance of their start-up's success than maximizing the equity they keep if it does succeed.
I'm not necessarily in favor of a wealth tax, but this essay is deeply flawed for the many reasons identified in other comments. What struck me is that I showed it to my partner who has no formal finance training and she quickly identified the major flaw that seems to have escaped Paul Graham: a wealth tax is a percentage of the dollar value of wealth, not a percentage of the number of shares of stock you own. The do…
> a wealth tax is a percentage of the dollar value of wealth, not a percentage of the number of shares of stock you own. If I expropriate 5% of your wealth, and ~100% of your wealth is in shares of stock, what percent of your shares have I taken?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_tax_on_wealth#Reven...
France's annual government revenue is easily above 100B euro, so the wealth tax -- which, as 'thomasdullien appears to have argued, was too high -- brought in around 2% of government revenue.
Maybe the antisocial effects of billionaires nonetheless justify a wealth tax -- maybe their ability to buy all of the best land and city governments justifies a tax that serves mostly to prevent their untoward influence on society -- but when considered as a way for the government to make money, I have yet to find an example of a wealth tax that works.
This is pg's privilege to be able to write such a shallow article and get this much attention. There has been so many studies on this topic. There are places with Wealth Tax. France experimented with it and kind of failed. Switzerland has Wealth Tax. None of that was mentioned. Just a 4th grader math and a basic HTML table. God damn it I wish I was VC. Anything I say would be gold. This is pure @VCBrags material
Paul Graham, as quoted in Maciej Cegłowski's blog post "Dabblers and blowhards"
It's important to note that leaving the United States to avoid future taxation is not an option for even upper middle class without serious penalty. 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…
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…
Wealth taxes are one solution. But in my opinion the only way to get extremely wealthy is to own a company that goes public. Personally I'm starting to think that when a company goes public there should be limits on what percentage of that company an individual can hold. Bezos being able to control 11.1% of Amazon given it's size seems a little ridiculous. The entire point of the stock market or "going public" was to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"the Silicon Valley crowd is strangely avoidant of examining evidence or explaining their opposition with real-world data. It's all 101ism and polemics." It's not strange at all. It's self-interest.
Wealth tax is majoritism and nothing else. And we all know how that ends.