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So you want to tax the rich? OK, let's start with Harvard

washingtonpost.com

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Re: So you want to tax the rich? OK, let's start with Harvard

#51

Post by yosamino »

What a warped worldview. I´m on board with criticizing universities and foundations that have so much money around and the elitism that promotes.

But this reads like someone desparately trying to point fingers.

Take this:

> That means America’s charitable foundations and billionaire universities hold at least $1.5 trillion in assets. That’s far more wealth than that of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the founders of Google and Oracle combined.

That is just cherry picking. Filtering the Forbes 500 by USA and then adding peoples´ net worth, I need to go down to like #17 (USA based) and sum up as I go along to reach >1.5 Trillion. #17 is still an individual who owns 47 Billion USD.

Not even taking into account that these are (with one exception) individuals, whereas "The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation" as the richtest of the bunch is valued around 47 Billion USD and Harvard sits at "only" 37.

Based in this argument alone, it makes more sense to tax "Individuals who own more than a Billion USD" instead of "Charitable organizations and Universities who own more than one Billion USD" if one were to be forced to chose between the two.

Re: So you want to tax the rich? OK, let's start with Harvard

#52

Post by chalst »

deepstack wrote: post #8

These endowment funds seems like an excellent idea to evade taxes. And a couple of years ago Harvard endowment fund has totally stopped their financial disclosure.

Their charitable status helps them accumulate a big stash of assets, but an effective tax evasion scheme will have a way to get at your funds when you need them, and that is hard to do without obviously breaking the law.

Re: So you want to tax the rich? OK, let's start with Harvard

#53

Post by machiaweliczny »

ajuc wrote: post #3
austincheney wrote: post #2

If people really wanted to tax the rich the majority of taxes would come from sales taxes and minority from property taxes. Eliminate income taxes including capital gains taxes. Capital gains taxes are at a laughable rate anyways. Income taxes primarily tax the upper middle class not the rich or poor who either make no employment income or an insufficient amount. Everybody buys things though. To be fair to the poor e…

> If people really wanted to tax the rich the majority of taxes would come from sales taxes and minority from property taxes Why not the other way around? If you can't sell but can hold - people will hold and rent to others. We all played monopoly and know what the endgame is, right? If you want to tax the rich simply tax the rich - let's say 5% tax on any property over 1 000 000 USD.

I think that property and land taxes + VAT should be sufficient. Also some easier way to short stocks would be good for economy.

The only problem is how to avoid capital outflow from country if you really decide to tax the rich?

I wonder how this proposed 40% investment income tax above $1M will impact US (if it passes)

EDIT: The best way to tax the rich is rising minimum wage actually (but also tricky due to global economy)

Re: So you want to tax the rich? OK, let's start with Harvard

#55

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

austincheney wrote: post #21
danpalmer wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales taxes aren't a particularly balanced way of taxation. Someone living paycheck to paycheck essentially spends all of their income, which means that they pay the full amount of sales tax possible for someone with that income. Compared to someone saving or investing who doesn't pay as much tax as they could. A little simplified because sales taxes typically don't apply to things like rent, but the point still stan…

Everybody makes purchases. Including the wealthy charities and endowments specified in the article. Get them all in a way they cannot hide. This is the most fair approach. The moment you invent a bunch of nonsense special cases to target the rich is where they can use special cases to hide. If you want to talk about how sales taxes disadvantage the poor what are some examples? School supplies, clothes, and backpacks?…

They are low cost items, but poor people also have less money to spend so that cancels out.

Here's an example: Sales tax of 10%, poor person has an income of $1000 per month and spends it all. 10%/$100 of income goes to tax.

Rich person has an income of $10000 per month. They spends $5000 and save $5000. 5%/$500 of income goes to tax. That's like a reverse progressive income, arguably very disadvantageous for the poor.

Re: So you want to tax the rich? OK, let's start with Harvard

#56

Post by aj3 »

sneak wrote: post #47
aj3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can apply building and safety and occupancy codes to the structure, you can apply income tax to the attendees, et c, but it says right on the tin: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". Arguably, that just means you can't pass laws that are directed towards / against religion. Not that religion is above the law. See Lemon Test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_v._Kurtzman#Lemon…

It's not that religious establishments are above the law, it's that congress (the source of laws) does not have the authority to make any laws that apply to religious establishments. It's a subtle difference. Churchgoers don't get a free pass to break the law. The establishment simply is immune to regulation of any kind attempted to be placed upon the organization itself by congress.

> congress (the source of laws) does not have the authority to make any laws that apply to religious establishments

It's not obvious that this is what was meant by 1st amendment. Other interpretation is that congress simply can't make laws that apply exclusively to religious establishments.

EDIT: I must add that the interpretation you mentioned is undoubtedly the "canonical" one in public's mind, so the situation is unlikely to change soon.

Re: So you want to tax the rich? OK, let's start with Harvard

#58

Post by austincheney »

ivalm wrote: post #6
austincheney wrote: post #2

If people really wanted to tax the rich the majority of taxes would come from sales taxes and minority from property taxes. Eliminate income taxes including capital gains taxes. Capital gains taxes are at a laughable rate anyways. Income taxes primarily tax the upper middle class not the rich or poor who either make no employment income or an insufficient amount. Everybody buys things though. To be fair to the poor e…

This is very backwards. As percentage of income poor people pay more than rich. If you want to tax über wealthy just tax wealth directly (let’s say 3% on all US citizens and residents on all things values above $10mil).

> just tax wealth directly

Wealth comes in many forms. Your comment is void of any such specifics that transform this from fantasy into something that can be taxed. The best case for taxing wealth is an estate tax.

Re: So you want to tax the rich? OK, let's start with Harvard

#59

Post by yosamino »

sneak wrote: post #47
aj3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can apply building and safety and occupancy codes to the structure, you can apply income tax to the attendees, et c, but it says right on the tin: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". Arguably, that just means you can't pass laws that are directed towards / against religion. Not that religion is above the law. See Lemon Test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_v._Kurtzman#Lemon…

It's not that religious establishments are above the law, it's that congress (the source of laws) does not have the authority to make any laws that apply to religious establishments. It's a subtle difference. Churchgoers don't get a free pass to break the law. The establishment simply is immune to regulation of any kind attempted to be placed upon the organization itself by congress.

Let´s say I had a religion that had a "Thou shalt sacrifice a non-believer being every Wednesday to appease Xantako the Moon God" clause.

Are you arguing that my congregation should be immune from any restrictions being placed on us for worshipping our god by slowly killing everyone around us who does not share our view , because we operate outside of the law ?

Re: So you want to tax the rich? OK, let's start with Harvard

#60

Post by yellowapple »

cameronh90 wrote: post #12
danpalmer wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales taxes aren't a particularly balanced way of taxation. Someone living paycheck to paycheck essentially spends all of their income, which means that they pay the full amount of sales tax possible for someone with that income. Compared to someone saving or investing who doesn't pay as much tax as they could. A little simplified because sales taxes typically don't apply to things like rent, but the point still stan…

Sales taxes aren't the most balanced, but they are very easy to enforce and don't distort the economy very much. Standard wealth taxes are easy to avoid and have weird effects - but land value tax would probably be great. Unfortunately, people tend to vote against it.

> but land value tax would probably be great. Unfortunately, people tend to vote against it.

Which is a shame, since it's about as ideal of a tax as you can get:

- You can't move land to an offshore account

- LVT penalizes land speculation, which is one of the main drivers of suburban sprawl and rising housing costs

- It targets the rich, and marginally (if at all) impacts the lower and middle classes (replacing all taxes with LVT would almost certainly reduce middle class tax burdens and entirely eliminate lower class tax burdens)

- All economic activities ultimately depend on land in some way, so instead of taxing (and thus suppressing) those economic activities, it's ultimately more economically efficient to tax land itself

- The aforementioned economic activities can't readily price LVT into their own prices for goods and services, specifically because land value itself is a function of the goods and services that land enables, and because if those goods and services could actually fetch a higher price without reducing profitability (per supply v. demand), then they would almost certainly already be priced accordingly, regardless of LVT

And this is just from physical land in the commonly-understood sense (i.e. some chunk of the surface area of the oblate spheroid we call Earth). There are myriad other sorts of things with the same characteristics as land; everything from geostationary orbits to intellectual property to radio spectra to IP addresses (and just about anything else with an inelastic supply) represents economic rent waiting to be collected.

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