641–650 of 727 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you paid attention to proponents of a wealth tax in the US, you would be aware that they only ever suggest it for vast wealths of like $10 million+.
That’s like 2 pretty good houses in the bay area. Hardly “vast wealth”, and these sorts of things are rarely inflation adjusted over time.
> 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…
Is this situation so uncommon? Almost everyone who lives in a house in California, for example, is living primarily off the unrealized gains on their home equity. Very few have the wage income to qualify for a mortgage on what their lifestyle is worth now. California contains a lot of houses!
How is that paying for food? Insurance? Electricity? Gasoline? Health care? Gifts and charity? Or even taxes?
Anymore I think the question shouldn't be about some kind of economic fairness (the time value of money thing being discussed) but the idea that wealth accumulation is a disease that afflicts society. I don't think anyone should have the level of control or influence on others that having a billion dollars currently allows. If a millionaire gives $100 to a political candidate it probably doesn't require too much thou…
I know this is tangential to your main point, but in the US, you can only give a max of $3,500 to a candidate per election cycle, for each the primaries and general election. To give more financial support, you have to do independent, uncoordinated campaigning for the candidate. So you can spend a million dollars on ads saying to vote for a candidate, but you can't give that money to the candidate's campaign and the…
(Lutnick donated $5M to House GOP super PAC ahead of Epstein deposition)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand, almost a majority of people already pay no federal income tax anyways. That's an irrelevant diversion though, because the measure that matters when discussing the fairness of taxes is how much people are left with at the end after paying whatever taxes they pay, including sales tax, income tax, and any other kind of tax. And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very litt…
That's not all that matters. The main reason to have taxes is to fund the government, not to make society a more just society. And thinking that billionaires will just take a wealth tax as served, and perhaps will ask "can I have some more" is one way to think about this, but probably not the best way. A better way to think is that action might be followed by reaction. There is no manifest destiny for California to b…
Both are important reasons for taxes.
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." (often attributed to Louis Brandeis, though he probably never said exactly the quote)
Taxation is one of the primary tools for avoiding destructive levels of wealth concentration.
Of course, the wealthy decry this as unfair wealth redistribution but all governments engage in constant wealth redistribution.
In the US we happen to have decided (since the Reagan era) that through increasingly regressive taxes the redistribution will almost always function upwards, ultimately resulting in the oligarchical dismantling of our government that we find ourselves in today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Boy, that's going to suck for people whose credit situation has shut them out of most traditional housing situations. Or people who rely on what other people don't consider food for sustenance, for whatever reason (protein powder? multivitamins? supplies to grow/produce your own foodstuffs?). Just as examples.
> Boy, that's going to suck for people whose credit situation has shut them out of most traditional housing situations. There are lots of apartments available with no credit check. They're more often of lower quality, but if your situation is such that you want to spend less on rent and have more left for something else (like paying off your debts), why is it a problem for people to be able to choose that? It's the s…
Van life, couch surfing, living in hotels: these are the options available to them. And it's obviously not so simple as "roughing it" for a few months, as they're essentially forced to sell or abandon most of their personal property.
What you're talking about it taking people in those dire straits and forcing them to pay MORE money just to keep a roof over their heads, while millions of wealthier Americans own multiple properties where they and their family are the only residents. It's ridiculous.
>Isn't this the opposite? If you give them a UBI then they can buy whatever they want. If you give them paternalistic micromanaged benefits like SNAP then they can buy carbonated high fructose corn syrup in a can but not vitamins or farming supplies.
I am, once again, going to state that you don't seem to understand the topic at hand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something. Yes, and that "somewhere else" is others' excess profit. That excess profit comes from (a) inventing or investing capital with a return or (b) paying less for goods / labor than they can be sold for. Capitalist profit has always been equal parts ing…
And in terms of real resources - who do you expect to have less and what do you expect them to have less of? Because "excess profit" is an economic concept, not a real thing.
> 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…