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California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

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Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#341
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Francisco spends $50k per homeless person. The problem doesn't seem like it's money

> San Francisco spends $50k per homeless person. A commonly repeated falsehood. Is totally incorrect. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...

You’re linking to an article from mid 2018, before SF passed the largest tax in the city’s history: 2018 Prop C, a gross receipts tax for homeless services expected to raise another $300M. Several other additional tax measures were also passed since then to raise funds for homeless services.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#342
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual cities can’t solve national problems. Due to migration there are no great solutions at the individual city level, other than being “blessed” with an inhospitable area.

In 2015 84% of Santa Clara homeless where from the county when they lost their home. Only 6% where out of state when they became homeless. Source: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/opa/nr/Documents/SantaClaraCoun... I live in SoCal so I thought you would even see more homeless migrants because of the weather. However, from speaking with homeless I would say in my experience most have lived in the area for a long time, wit…

It’s a complex topic, first homeless is often a temporary condition where people cycle through homelessness. Second only 37% of American homeless population is unsheltered. So, the people who moved a long distance while homeless is a small percentage of the overall population, but also a much harder population to serve.

Anyway, hospitality isn’t really a question of weather as Alaska for example has relatively high rate of homelessness and NYC one of the highest. Mississippi on the other hand has the lowest rate despite mild winters and significant poverty.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#343

>Taxing someone who spends only 60 days in the state in any single year—and extending that tax over an ensuing decade—would be something new under the sun. Wow. That's nuts.

If there are 60 jurisdictions with identical laws to this one and you try your best, you can be subject to the wealth tax in all 60 of them in the same year.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a percentage will, but I think when people are trying to guess and assume what these people will do as "rational economic agents", they miss the human factors. No one is going to pick where they go to college based on the taxes on the ultra-rich unless they are obsessed with money. Once rich, are you going to uproot yourself entirely from any family, friends, and connections in the US? You have to consider that…

You don't have to leave the US, just move back to the sanity that is called the "eastern seaboard". If we're comparing high-tax states, I think NY is better run, and more interesting overall than California. The only think Cali has going for it is tech (relatively unimportant to the super rich), and warm weather.

outside of the city, NY is sort of an odd proposition. beautiful place (much more so than the midatlantic, imo), but with surprisingly high taxes and overall COL for mostly rural areas.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#345
post #68

Well I guess I'll take the apparently bold stance here that this isn't the end of Silicon Valley or California and yes this is fair and further, good. When people are getting 5-6% returns on investments (minimum), 0.4% is still not even stopping the rich get richer effect. Not to mention that it's almost certain no one here will ever be touched by this tax. If you're going to move where you live or significantly alte…

Do you think California will never raise it above 0.4%? This is just a test, if it gets them money it'll surely go much higher.

This is a bandaid over Prop 13. We should tax land more instead of having high income taxes, economists agree the land value tax is the most efficient tax.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#346
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is we’ve done the experiment and it doesn’t work. France had a wealth tax (called the ISF, impôt sur la fortune) and it never actually garnered the expected revenues. This is because wealthy French people moved to Brussels, where you still have a pretty nice city and you can still speak French. Macron got rid of it and there was a mini-crash in Brussels real estate as people move back. There’s nothing stopping…

I think that's why they put in the provision that you have to keep paying the tax for 10 years after you move.

How is that possibly constitutional? It seems like giving states the right to tax the wealth of residents in other states is a really bad door to open.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#347
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Francisco spends $50k per homeless person. The problem doesn't seem like it's money

> San Francisco spends $50k per homeless person. A commonly repeated falsehood. Is totally incorrect. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...

If you read that article it talks about how some of that money is spent on prevention so it's a bit unfair to just use existing homeless as the denominator- it's still an obscene amount of money per person. So saying it's "totally incorrect" is a bit of a stretch.

San Francisco absolutely has a Homeless industrial complex that isn't trying to solve the problem but just keep their cash flowing.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#348
post #68

Well I guess I'll take the apparently bold stance here that this isn't the end of Silicon Valley or California and yes this is fair and further, good. When people are getting 5-6% returns on investments (minimum), 0.4% is still not even stopping the rich get richer effect. Not to mention that it's almost certain no one here will ever be touched by this tax. If you're going to move where you live or significantly alte…

because of 0.4% If California was well run, clean, and had otherwise lower tax, then .4% might be easy to ignore. But if you’re already on the fence, and not happy with things, and have been talking to real estate agents in Seattle, Austin, Miami, or Singapore, then this just the kick in the butt you might need to go through with leaving.

+ Nevada too

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#349
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument seems to make sense on the surface, but California already has some of the highest income taxes in the country. To make an appeal to extremes, if California had a 40% income tax they wanted to raise to 45% asking, “show me how you have demonstrated good stewardship in what you are already taking” would be, I imagine, somewhat common. Reasonable people can of course debate that percentage, and can do so…

California does have high income tax, but property taxes are some of the lowest in the nation, and a recent attempt to reform those taxes failed. That leaves California 12th in state tax burden. https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...

Only helps if you're a homeowner. If you rent California probably has one of the highest tax burdens.

Re: California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 days a year in the state

#350
post #68

Well I guess I'll take the apparently bold stance here that this isn't the end of Silicon Valley or California and yes this is fair and further, good. When people are getting 5-6% returns on investments (minimum), 0.4% is still not even stopping the rich get richer effect. Not to mention that it's almost certain no one here will ever be touched by this tax. If you're going to move where you live or significantly alte…

Ah, yes, threatening to murder people you're jealous of. This is the content I come to Hacker News for!

I can't say I have much time to engage today, but since this seems to have some support and a fundamental misunderstanding, I want to address this one.

Hatred towards the ultra-rich is not based in jealousy but in a moral stance. The argument is not "I want your 30M" it is that "people having this much wealth is bad for all of society".

See: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/opinion/abolish-billionai...

There's much debate to be had over where that line of "too much wealth that it can't possibly be moral" is, but this is where the cultural conversation is. You're missing the point if you think it's jealousy.

As an example, I never plan to have more than about 2M (in today's dollars) of personal wealth. I'm not supporting this tax because I want the 30M, I'm supporting it because I think it may have positive effects on reigning in the human instinct for greed by aligning societal incentives with personal ones.

I'm trying to keep this narrow as I'm not trying to claim I'm correct that this specific iteration of the tax will work, or even of the form, but hopefully my point about the targeted issue is clear!

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