Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tim Sweeney: Tax bill would likely end founder control of independent companies

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 498 posts

Re: Tim Sweeney: Tax bill would likely end founder control of independent companies

#111

Post by zarkov99 »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #100
coenhyde wrote: post #72

Bad idea to tax unrealized capital gains. Proposal; How about we gut our entire tax code and replace it with a single tax that taxes when money moves from one entity to another. Let's call it a Transaction Tax. It would replace Sales Tax, Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax, Inheritance Tax, etc and introduce tax on debt creation (when the bank gives you the money). This would close all loop holes and put the entire tax in…

Because it fails to sate the emotional rationalization that sits behind so much of the rhetoric that has been used to justify such measures. The wealthy are evil, duplicitous, exploitative, and in the best cases, merely lucky... regardless of what a wealthy person actually did or didn't do to come to their wealth... and the not wealthy are blameless, innocent, unlucky victims that are unable to change their lot in li…

You are not wrong. The only thing I would add to that is the wealthy invariably means simply "much richer than me". In particular it is obscene to see that the people who most hate billionaires and agitate for their punishment are, for the most part, millionaires. The whole movement is rooted in envy, transparently disguised as virtue.

Re: Tim Sweeney: Tax bill would likely end founder control of independent companies

#112

Post by herval »

coenhyde wrote: post #72

Bad idea to tax unrealized capital gains. Proposal; How about we gut our entire tax code and replace it with a single tax that taxes when money moves from one entity to another. Let's call it a Transaction Tax. It would replace Sales Tax, Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax, Inheritance Tax, etc and introduce tax on debt creation (when the bank gives you the money). This would close all loop holes and put the entire tax in…

Brazil had such a tax for a long time. It was sub-1%, and was largely agreed as a bad model, since it led to lower liquidity, drying of credit markets, lower consumption, cash hoarding, etc. So not necessarily a great idea.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249882612_The_Econo...

Re: Tim Sweeney: Tax bill would likely end founder control of independent companies

#113

Post by nmfisher »

rsj_hn wrote: post #106

Some observations: 1. Whatever happened to increasing tax rates, like pretty much every other country? Why these weird gimmicks? 2. A much greater cause of elite wealth accumulation is running deficits. Deficits are when you want to spend on social welfare but don't have the courage to pay for it with taxes. So you make both sides happy and increase spending while running up deficits. The reason we've seen this astro…

> Any tax bill targeting billionaires is going to fail since they can give up US citizenship and offshore whatever they want.

But they'll also get taxed out the wazoo when they do so, so it won't really avoid the problem causing them to leave in the first place.

Re: Tim Sweeney: Tax bill would likely end founder control of independent companies

#114

Post by DennisP »

rsj_hn wrote: post #106

Some observations: 1. Whatever happened to increasing tax rates, like pretty much every other country? Why these weird gimmicks? 2. A much greater cause of elite wealth accumulation is running deficits. Deficits are when you want to spend on social welfare but don't have the courage to pay for it with taxes. So you make both sides happy and increase spending while running up deficits. The reason we've seen this astro…

I agree with a lot of that but regarding (3), there's already an exit tax, which is the same as the capital gains tax if you sold everything.

This is less of an issue for those who inherited wealth, since a lot of it might already be in offshore trusts. Company founders don't have an easy out.

Re: Tim Sweeney: Tax bill would likely end founder control of independent companies

#115

Post by UncleOxidant »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #91
coenhyde wrote: post #72

Bad idea to tax unrealized capital gains. Proposal; How about we gut our entire tax code and replace it with a single tax that taxes when money moves from one entity to another. Let's call it a Transaction Tax. It would replace Sales Tax, Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax, Inheritance Tax, etc and introduce tax on debt creation (when the bank gives you the money). This would close all loop holes and put the entire tax in…

It'd net out to a consumption tax which is strongly negative economically to nearly everyone.

If it leads to lower consumption that would be better for the environment and would probably lead to a more sustainable economy with less incentive to go into debt.

Re: Tim Sweeney: Tax bill would likely end founder control of independent companies

#116

Post by UncleOxidant »

herval wrote: post #112
coenhyde wrote: post #72

Bad idea to tax unrealized capital gains. Proposal; How about we gut our entire tax code and replace it with a single tax that taxes when money moves from one entity to another. Let's call it a Transaction Tax. It would replace Sales Tax, Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax, Inheritance Tax, etc and introduce tax on debt creation (when the bank gives you the money). This would close all loop holes and put the entire tax in…

Brazil had such a tax for a long time. It was sub-1%, and was largely agreed as a bad model, since it led to lower liquidity, drying of credit markets, lower consumption, cash hoarding, etc. So not necessarily a great idea. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249882612_The_Econo...

> cash hoarding

That used to be called saving and it was considered a good thing. Lower consumption would be better for the environment as well.

Re: Tim Sweeney: Tax bill would likely end founder control of independent companies

#117

Post by Ericson2314 »

rsj_hn wrote: post #106

Some observations: 1. Whatever happened to increasing tax rates, like pretty much every other country? Why these weird gimmicks? 2. A much greater cause of elite wealth accumulation is running deficits. Deficits are when you want to spend on social welfare but don't have the courage to pay for it with taxes. So you make both sides happy and increase spending while running up deficits. The reason we've seen this astro…

That's no true with deficits. The way we have historically choosen to do monetary policy has some bad distributional effects, but regular fiscal policy or a UBI does not.

This is, frankly, an extremely dangerous misunderstanding because it's austerity and slack labor markets markets that have immiserated the non-rich. Deficits themselves are never the problem.

Look mo further than the pandemic checks causing us to live in a time of renewed labor unrest rather than a second great depression.

Also debt financing is a charade. Read https://www.jstor.org/stable/40981939 which spells it out clearly.

Re: Tim Sweeney: Tax bill would likely end founder control of independent companies

#118

Post by Ericson2314 »

young_unixer wrote: post #98
cosmotic wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be in favor of this I think. It might force Elon, Tesla, or the shareholders to address the elephant in the room: Teslas market cap vs their revenue. Teslas market cap is 1030m on 31.5m of revenue. GM is 79m on revenue of 122.5m. That's 50x the market cap per revenue.

If a company is doing tons of R&D, and everything suggests that that R&D will give huge dividends in the future, then it seems perfectly normal for such a company to have a high market-cap/revenue ratio. If having too big of a market cap relative to revenue is wrong, then you're basically saying that companies should not invest too much in their future, just use their money to sell as much as possible right now. You…

If it's so perfectly reasonable, they should be able to take out cheap loans to pay this new Elon salary.

Re: Tim Sweeney: Tax bill would likely end founder control of independent companies

#119

Post by TameAntelope »

Okay, doesn't it feel crazy that we're just throwing ideas out there and if it seems to justify the spending for something totally unrelated, it'll have a reasonable chance of becoming literally the highest law of the land?

Maybe it's because I'm not in the room, but this feels incredibly slapdash for something so incredibly important.

Re: Tim Sweeney: Tax bill would likely end founder control of independent companies

#120

Post by varelse »

If the rate is too high, I suspect wealth will be transferred to assets like real estate with lower annual taxations. And this will lead to a new class of speculation. Or rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic because we haven't solved the fundamental problem that there are just too many bespoke deductions for the rich.
Post reply on HN