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…
I never understood..what’s the fascination in turning one county into another? We have Switzerland, France, Belgium, Germany. Why force America to become one of these? Those countries already exist. Turning one country into another doesn’t make sense and isn’t what makes America unique. Imagine I moved to Germany and kept stating “Germany should be more like America because X Y and Z.” Can you imagine how offensive t…
Modeling a Wealth Tax
471–480 of 1001 posts
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#472When a startup was at the seed stage and worth say $5mm, a founder with a 50% stake would be paying $25,000 / year with a 1% tax. If the company grew and received a b-round of investment valuing it at $150mm, with the founder diluted to 20% ownership, the wealth tax on the $30mm in equity would be $300,000. As you can see the tax rate changes over time significantly.
There would likely be some unexpected consequences. Founders would re-consider sky-high valuations during funding rounds because of the effect on their tax rate. Startups may consider generating real cash-flow earlier on in order to issue dividends to their shareholders to cover the wealth tax instead of selling shares. If equity holders did sell shares to cover the tax, there would be a more liquid secondary market, which could make "house-of-cards" startup more apparent early on.
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#473Perhaps 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…
I'd also like to point out that we already have a wealth tax for everyone who would otherwise put their income taxes into savings. The lower the savings rate, the higher the effective wealth tax rate on the middle class. Assuming an absurdly high 25% savings rate on your pre-tax income and a 25% tax rate on that income, boom, there's your 50% wealth tax. So the 45% wealth loss over 60 years in PG's toy example that i…
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure european examples are a great comparison. First, most european wealth taxes (including recently defunct ones) have much lower floors than US proposals. $1m instead of $100m. That changes a lot. France did experience "capital flight," famously Gerard Depardieu. Second, "capital flight" has always been present in Europe. There's a long history of it, and practical realities make it relevant. I do agree abo…
Think about how hard Founders work to efficiently divide up the equity pool of their company in order to entice and retain top talent. Consider that the State and Federal government is already a silent partner to the tune of ~20% of the company profits, and then again ~20% on capital gains. Every little bit more carved out for the government is just reducing the portion left which has to justify the risk/return propo…
This avoids all the problem incentive structure, and even worse tax code structure dealing with the fact that some years you make a return and in other years you make a loss.
Liquidity is solvable, if we're actually talking about a super wealthy tax with a floor of $50m and above. At that point, you are dealing with people individually.
In terms of "reducing the portion left which has to justify the risk/return proposition..." I don't think this applies. You have $1bn. You owe $10m in taxes. You owe that tax regardless of what you invest in, conservatively or otherwise.
It even solves some of that problem, if it replaces CGT. A CGT without loopholes (doesn't exist, and won't) disincentivizes risk. If you win big, you pay big. But of you lose, the IRS doesn't pay you. That incentivizes playing it safe.
IRL tax credits exist, and those more than compensate big CGT payers. In some famous example (eg Trump) derivative policies are big money generators. IE, invest for tax credit, not market gains.
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
The rate of tax must have been very high if people chose to move to Belgium. Countries just need to find a level under the 'Belgium threshold'.
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#476I think a wealth tax sounds good, but the implementation scares me. What I worry about most with a wealth tax is calculating your wealth. Income tax is already hard enough. Now start adding up the value of your stock, your real estate, your personal property, etc. And are you committing tax fraud because you have a million dollar painting that was hanging on your parents wall for decades that you inherited and never…
How about: you're committing fraud if you bury a jar of gold coins in your back yard. What business is it of anyone elses' what you do in your own home? This idea of 'you have something; give it to us!!!' is very disturbing at some level. Its different from other taxes, that tax an interchange with another person or entity. That is supported by society and its mechanisms, for which government (e.g. all of us) have so…
But a wealth tax could cause gold to begin to "tarnish" like anything else.
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#477The right taxation tool for tackling inequality is Land Value Taxation [0].
Some observations of our current situation:
1. The income gap between capital and labor that has been growing since the 1970s (as observed by, e.g. Piketty) is largely due to housing [1] 2. Economic growth and opportunity is increasingly concentrated in the the urban areas (and even within cities, a handful of them are responsible for most of the growth), however, zoning laws makes it very difficult to build new housing there and thus for rural labor to join the economic party. Thus, as we concentrate economic activity we explicitly exclude huge swaths of the population from participating in it. 3. With finite land, concentrated opportunities (i.e. no viable alternatives [2]), and overt house building restrictions, workers who do have the opportunity to work in urban areas are "willing" to pay the absurdly high rents that landowners ask. You can clearly see this in the Bay Area where, prior to COVID-19, the rents would just track the income level of tech employees. The current landowners are the main winners of the success of the urban areas. 4. On top of that (and specific to the USA), if a landowner decides to sell a property, the sale will be taxed as a capital gain which has a lower tax rate than the labor rate. We are literally incentivizing rent-seeking.
A Land Value Tax (LVT) taxes the value of the land (rather than that of the property). This has the following benefits: 1. It incentivizes more efficient usage of the land (a single family house and a high-rise pay the same tax if the have the same footprint and are next to each other). 2. Land is finite, so it can't "disincentivize" land production. 3. When land appreciates, it is rarely if ever because the owner invested in it, rather because the economy around it makes it more valuable. This tax captures that value and returns it to the community (rather than privatizing it and giving it to the landowner). 4. It is a progressive tax.
Instead of arguing whether and how to implement a wealth tax, we should pursue a national LVT.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax [1] https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall... [2] Technically, you can choose from a set of successful cities, but they all follow similar patterns.
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure european examples are a great comparison. First, most european wealth taxes (including recently defunct ones) have much lower floors than US proposals. $1m instead of $100m. That changes a lot. France did experience "capital flight," famously Gerard Depardieu. Second, "capital flight" has always been present in Europe. There's a long history of it, and practical realities make it relevant. I do agree abo…
The question if billionaires are bad for society is pretty much the same question as asking if the aristocracy was bad for previous societies. The existence of billionaires clearly undermines the core principles of democracy which is that all people have essentially the same political power. The existence of many laws which clearly aim to benefit billionaires only is enough evidence that this power balance does not e…
I'm very pro-democracy; but that isn't a principle that has ever shown to have massive success at scale. There are a lot of fools out there.
Notably, some of the most successful experiments in democracy (British, American & Indian traditions) all have pretty clear principles of not having people with equal political power. Eg, a judge simply has more political power than an ordinary person. Britain and India have appointed members of their upper houses and the US has several safeguards to stop power defaulting to a majority.
Democracy hasn't achieved success due to some rosy concept of equality, it achieves success because the insufferable can't hold power and it provides an excellent method for different interest groups to negotiate and play mock-battle to work out who is stronger. There is plenty of evidence that dictatorship would be a better model if there were some magic method of keeping the dictator focused on good results - and indeed the US political system has tendencies in that direction. The creation of billionaires as replaceable aristocracy is a potential strength.
Plus most of the top US billionaires are self-created. It isn't really comparable to aristocracy either.
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure european examples are a great comparison. First, most european wealth taxes (including recently defunct ones) have much lower floors than US proposals. $1m instead of $100m. That changes a lot. France did experience "capital flight," famously Gerard Depardieu. Second, "capital flight" has always been present in Europe. There's a long history of it, and practical realities make it relevant. I do agree abo…
> The most important nuance being that you control most of this wealth for most of this time and will be paying your taxes out of interest. Then a wealth tax boils down to a punitive tax on interest income. Which means billionaires will be incented to save or invest a lot less, and consume a lot more of their wealth since they're going to lose it either way. (See, e.g. Larry Ellison's yachts as an especially obvious…
A "punitive tax on interest income" is popular with the left because it is, on paper, very progressive and avoids taxing the poor. But in truth, I don't think people actually want fewer billionaires, they just don't want aristocratic billionaires.
It also doesn't help that it's so unclear what the money would be spent on.
[0] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/explore/public_figu... [1] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/explore/public_figu...
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#480I would like to raise a different point from the many valid points already raised in this thread. I understand this might depend on the definition of “wealth tax”, but if the founder uses the money they make in their 20s to, for example, buy a home; buy cars and other assets; invest in another company; give the money to charity... then the money remains largely intact. It is only by hoarding the wealth for 60 years t…
Or you consume all your wealth asap, and leave no residual wealth remaining for investment. This , however, is not a good outcome, since residual wealth is where investment money comes from.