Is this Graham accidentally revealing his contempt for working people?
How to convert between wealth and income tax
171–180 of 727 posts
Re: How to convert between wealth and income tax
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current system without wealth taxes already largely divorces labor from equity stake. Unless you're one of the relatively few tech or office workers who get equity compensation or have a large savings rate, you currently don't have much of a stake in any means of production.
I'm not disputing the claim that few people are able to save and invest into having a stake in the means of production. However, if your goal is to increase stakeholdership, how would a policy that explicitly disincentivizes that behavior fix anything?
Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets.
But the point isn't to increase stakeholdership so much as to stop privileging stakeholders with very low effective tax bills relative to mere workers, which means that there's a lot less cause for concern about those workers not owning their means of production
Re: How to convert between wealth and income tax
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not disputing the claim that few people are able to save and invest into having a stake in the means of production. However, if your goal is to increase stakeholdership, how would a policy that explicitly disincentivizes that behavior fix anything?
Why do I get the feeling that you would never field the structurally identical complaint against disproportionately taxing labor and consumption, even though that's a much more prominent feature of our current tax policy? In any case, taxes do not go into a black hole, no matter how much the right likes to encourage this self-serving fiction. Taxes generally get spent down the economic ladder and move people up the e…
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Re: How to convert between wealth and income tax
#174If you are wealthy enough, you can live off of untaxed loans from your “unrealized” gains, and never pay taxes on that money at any rate. Meanwhile, I am paying an effective tax rate of around 35%. The principle is simple: if you are spending the money, your gains are realized, and you should pay taxes.
Loans against unrealized gains should just be taxed directly as income. Not indirectly creating more loopholes. Same way stock buybacks should be taxed at the same rate as short term capital gains.
Re: How to convert between wealth and income tax
#175I don’t follow the debate and situation in the US that closely but isn’t (part of) the point of wealth tax to offset the fact that rich people are routinely avoiding paying income tax and taxes in general? Thus even if we assume the simplistic conversion here, it’s not that they’re moved from 40->60 bracket but more like <30 ?
The idea that rich people don't pay taxes is a myth. The top 5% richest people in America account for 60% of all of the federal income tax. The bottom 50% on the other hand only account for a total of 3%.
When Elon sold a bunch of Tesla stock in 2021 he paid $11 Billion in capital gains tax on it... That's more than entire cities worth of people combined would ever pay for the rest of their lives.
Re: How to convert between wealth and income tax
#176The real problem is our politicians aren't representing our people. All these other issues of wasteful spending and money printing and inflation and whatnot are downstream of that main crux of problem. People don't hate wealthy perse but when laypeople aren't provided proper means of living, they will try anything as a solution, even throwing a wrench in the system. That's how we got Trump.
Re: How to convert between wealth and income tax
#177The thing that all these asshole billionaires don't want anyone to think about is that not taxing wealth means that a person who primarily accumulates non-income capital only ever pays taxes on what they spend while the rest of us pay taxes on approximately everything we get regardless of whether we spend it.
Re: How to convert between wealth and income tax
#178There are numbers in this post, but only in the technical sense.
My read of this is "the discussion of taxing wealth makes me anxious. i will do a tap dance, please become mired in watching / discussing my tap dance so that we can put off the inevitable and ultimately necessary a little longer"
To the "conversion rate": maybe, but who cares? The answer here is: apply the tax, see if we still have billionaires afterwards. If we do, then keep doing it.
Re: How to convert between wealth and income tax
#179> To convert between wealth and income tax rates, you have to divide by the rate of return on capital. The conversion rate of 20 comes from assuming that the risk-free rate of return is 5%. This seems to only be true for people whose income entirely comes from their wealth, rather than their labor. The math doesn't math for someone on the other extreme end of the spectrum who has zero savings or investments and obtai…
I'm retired. I hope to get a 3% per year income from my savings every year after inflation and taxes. If my state implemented a 1% wealth tax on savings each year, I would go bankrupt in 20 years. I am hoping that I will live 20 years.
Re: How to convert between wealth and income tax
#180I think the assumption that we're looking for an equivalence here is fundamentally flawed and with it the entire post. For most people income is tied to selling their time. It doesn't scale at all. Unless the income comes from wealth. The societal problem here is a group with self-reinforcing run-away levels of wealth. And to counter that you do need something more extreme than this nonsensical equivalency of income…
The big flaw in his argument is that a mere 1% which is actually 20% of annual return is still less than the average income tax rate on workers, levied on people who have a lot more money and in some cases don't do anything resembling work. It's trivially true that 1% wealth taxes represent something in the region of a fifth of the average annual return on wealth, it's rather less convincing when it's suggested that…
> There are arguments about wealth taxes inducing capital flight and investment disincentives
If the US and the EU introduced a wealth tax then it would be relatively difficult for the capital flight fears to materialise. But yeah, the trouble with wealth taxes is that wealth (i.e. capital) is mobile.
Which is why land and property taxes are probably the most effective way of taxing wealth.