301–310 of 380 posts
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Poor people pay payroll taxes, which usually is flat and doesn’t have a big deduction. At $50k, a single person is paying just as much if not slightly more in payroll as they are in income tax.
THIS 50K IS AFTER TAX AND TRANSFERS. READ THE POST.
You just pulled numbers out of...
A single person making $50,000/year is not tax negative in the US. You need a 4 person household with $50,000/year in gross income to get clearly tax negative to the point where their take-home income is $50,000 or slightly above. Even a 3 person household isn't tax negative.
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Potentially anyone you pass it on to, such as a tenant.
"get a roommate or move"?
You have the option to pass on such a tax burden, as do any other home/land-owner(s), which is relevant to the conversation.
What point are you making relevant to that?
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> losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income. Neither is true. The only asset class directly hit by inflation is cash. No high net worth person in their right mind holds substantial cash for a longer period of time. If they do, it's a conscious choice and it's not clear why the tax system should help in that situation. The risk of…
Capital gains taxes are assessed on nominal gains not real gains. If I bought $100K of stock in 1999 and sold it in 2026 for $200K, I gained no real wealth from that transaction. What I could purchase today for $200K could have been bought for $100K in 1999 because of inflation. Yet, I’d owe capital gains on the $100K of nominal gain I experienced. This is part of the reason that long-term capital gains are taxed at…
This is because you invested incredibly poorly. The S&P is up ~500% over that period, plus decades of dividends.
Long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate because rich people have more influence over the tax code than people who earn most of their income from working.
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Can you explain what you're saying? Do you mean that in 1999 fewer people worked low paying jobs?
That data is in the article, "true unemployment" was higher in 1999. The last few years are the best years on the graph.
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Is capital gains / wealth tax a fix here though? Definitely not saying it doesn't work, I have no idea. But I'd be curious to hear both sides of the argument.
How do you tax wealth on unrealised gains? Australia’s current federal Labor government proposed such a a scheme, but had to back pedal hard when everyone told them it ain’t gonna work. The same federal Labor government introduced changes to capital gains tax, after promising “50 times” they wouldn’t. All the while a not insignificant fraction of MPs and Senators of said party sold significant realestate holdings bef…
The US does this in most jurisdictions. Homeowners pay tax on the current assessed value of the property, even if that property was purchased when the property was much less valuable.
It would not be a stretch to do similar for other assets. In particular, assets held in stocks or bonds are more amenable to fractional sales than are the primary residences that we already tax this way.
No, people don't like it. They don't like paying any taxes.
Anybody who believes ~30% of the workforce was functionally unemployed in 1999 does not know what those words mean, or was not an adult in 1999. I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
Soo was it more or less than that? Don’t leave us hanging like that!
1999 was basically ~full employment in the US. Most people who wanted to work had a job.
Anybody who believes ~30% of the workforce was functionally unemployed in 1999 does not know what those words mean, or was not an adult in 1999. I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
> there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on. That may be the case in the US, but not so in other countries. For example in Australia minimum wage is $26.44/hr. But If you don’t have a job, you can get between $740 and $1047 every two weeks as welfare, forever. Employers know this. Employees know this. So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.
The subhead from the post: "The percentage of the U.S. labor force that is functionally unemployed"
Anybody who believes ~30% of the workforce was functionally unemployed in 1999 does not know what those words mean, or was not an adult in 1999. I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
Can you explain what you're saying? Do you mean that in 1999 fewer people worked low paying jobs?
The OP is trying to change the definition of "unemployment," and it's a fool's errand because then you have to explain that oh no, I mean people are employed but not in the manner I think they should be.
(That latter part, even if I personally agree with, makes the argument very weak. The former part makes discussing this very confusing.)
Would be more useful to just say that lots of jobs do not pay enough. Simple, true, easy to understand.
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Well, I (and most economists) disagree. I think you just have a misunderstanding of how taxes work. The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax. That burden is usually widely distributed throughout the economy. In the example of LVT, a landlord would pass on the LVT in the form of increased rents to their tenants. A power company that pays a carbon tax charge more their electric…
> The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax. As a homeowner, who else bears my tax?
If your cost of living is higher (due to LVT), the minimum wage you will work for is higher. The amount of discretionary spending (someone else's income) or investment you can make is lower. Obviously these effects on an individual level are small, but when aggregated across the entire economy are very large.
In a world of LVT, everyone pays LVT because everyone lives somewhere. You either pay it as an owner or its passed through to you in rent prices. It will be passed onto you in the food you eat (which was grown on land), in the products you use (which were manufactured in a physical place), in the internet services you use (which are run on data centers on physical land), and so on.
In this way, it is much like all other taxes. What is special about LVT, and not other taxes, is that LVT create a disincentive against land speculation (using land as an investment rather than for living or productive use).