Modeling a Wealth Tax

You overlook the value of regional nexuses, and the positive externalities can dwarf the negatives of the taxes or regulations.

Ask yourself Nevada isn't Silicon Valley.

Since you need it spelled out again: unlike inflation, actual wealth tax will not take $16 from your Joe because in case of actual wealth tax, $800 is three or four orders of magnitude below minimum taxable amount of savings.

THIS! Most Americans just don't have many sitting assets, so even if you made the wealth tax apply equally to everyone, and we all had to pay an additional 1% on our net worth each year, for most of us that's either 1% of our house value or 1% of a small amount sitting in a bank account. For a billionaire that's $10M, which is about my city's whole budget. So another framing could be: "billionaires should annually pay for a small city's municipal expenses" -- it seems more than fair.

Even in the case of not-yet-wealthy-startup-folks, assuming shoddy implementation -- "my money isn't liquid -- paying 1% tax on $1M of monopoly money from a startup is going to be hard" it's actually just $10k. And marginal rates and floors can easily make it all work. I'm a spoiled tech employee, I'd pay 1% of my salary a year for the purpose of helping mitigate income and quality-of-life inequality.

I don't follow. The countries with the highest GDP growth rates are the ones seeing standard of living and poverty rates improve the fastest.

Within the developed world, those countries with the highest GDP growth rates are those that are producing the highest wage growth for their people.

>>I'd generally use HDI, happiness, life satisfaction, or similar, all of which correlate to higher government spending.

HDI, happiness, etc improve faster in countries with higher economic growth rates. A common pattern could be that countries institute sensible economic policies, based on what science (Economics) says works, and then when they get wealthy, become complacent, and adopt all sorts of anti-capitalistic policies that retard economic growth rates, which in turn results in all socioeconomic metrics stagnating.

Look at the Scandinavian countries: they attained the highest life expectancy and health outcomes in the world by the 1960s, after a century of very free-market oriented policies and moderate tax rates.

Then they adopted very socialistic policies, and subsequently saw both their economic growth rates, and their rankings in metrics like per capita GDP and life expectancy, suffer.

Hong Kong and Singapore for example caught up to and surpassed every Scandinavian country in life expectancy over the last 50 years. That is not a sign of superior policy in the European social democracies. That's a sign of squandering a lead, based on economically misinformed narratives favoring non-consensual income redistribution.

>>So your wealth (above the threshold) grows at an effective 3% instead of 4% (or whatever). PG's essay makes it seem like your fortune will dwindle away to nothing, which isn't true. It'll just grow more slowly than it could.

The essay explains how much you're losing over time, compared to what you would have had in the absence of the wealth tax, but okay, fair enough.

>>But this misses the point - other things aren't equal! California already has a higher tax burden than many other states, the US already has higher taxes than many other nations, and still they are among the richest places on earth. Higher taxes can create a society much more beneficial to all of its members, including the rich ones.

Being among the richest places in the world is a consequences of centuries of prior policy, not the policy in this one snapshot in time alone! The labor productivity and wage growth rates clearly show a stagnation since the high-social-welfare-spending policies were instituted.

California has consistently lost the middle class to Texas since becoming a very high tax rate state. This pottentially indicates that the latter has better policy than the former.

>>Enough to make sure every person has enough to eat, somewhere to live, universal healthcare, access to education, and the opportunity to succeed.

What if that means 99% tax rate? Do you really think that is better for the population in the long run?

Where do you think opportunity comes from anyway? Your assumptions on what leads to societal progress contradicts the findings of a century of economic scholarship, and with all due respect, are every bit as ignorant as anti-vaxxerism.

>>Unlikely. If there is such a stage, I suggest to you it's well below

Wait, you think it's unlikely that there is a point at which higher tax rates for more social welfare programs would do more harm than good?