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American Equity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: American Equity

#301

Post by rdtsc »

koolba wrote: post #20
jacquesm wrote: post #16

People already have a share in the GDP. That's what it is, the total domestic product, the sum of all the little parts. The problem is not that people don't have share in it (and this goes for every country, not just for the USA), but that they have a disproportionate share in it. Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that rai…

> Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end of the scale. That will have a lot more effect than some fiction where you get to do a bunch of make-believe bookkeeping. Or go a step further do what nobody has the balls to do: tax wealth That's what all the…

> Or go a step further do what nobody has the balls to do: tax wealth

Heard of this before. Have there been any attempts of that before and how did it fare?

It would seem to be as soon as wealth is taxed, wealth will morph or change shape to avoid being taxed. We'd end up with some new arcane tax scheme where wealth is held in a tropical island nation and the owner of the wealth gets a stipend or I don't know, rents all their possessions from that entity.

Re: American Equity

#302

Post by imgabe »

GDP, as I understand it, is the total value of all goods and services produced. It seems that in order to give someone something, it has to be taken from someone else who has it. But there is no single person or entity who owns the GDP, so how can a share of it be given to anyone?

It seems what Sam is suggesting is using taxes to redistribute wealth and provide a basic income, which, sure I think a lot of people are already on board with that and more will be as time goes on. But this idea of equity in a country is only confusing the issue.

A government is not a corporation. It does not exist to generate a profit. It should not be run that way. There is no "market" for governmental products or services. A government is necessarily a monopoly over a specific geographic area.

This seems like an extreme case of "If all you have is a hammer...". Sam clearly lives and breaths startups and business, so maybe he sees everything through that lens. It doesn't apply here and I don't think it's very helpful.

Re: American Equity

#304

Post by WalterBright »

koolba wrote: post #218
benmanns wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capital gains tax + inflation is a wealth tax. Each year you have to grow your money by inflation for it to maintain buying power. 2% inflation * 20% top rate LTCG tax means the wealthy pay a deferred 0.4% wealth tax yearly.

Inflation is only a tax on wealth that is not invested. Literally cash under mattresses. Investments in real estate, equities, commodities etc all increase in notional value to factor in the devalued currency.

And then it gets capital gains taxed when you sell it.

Re: American Equity

#307

Post by [deleted] »

vkou wrote: post #181
cperciva wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. And saving/investing is important! It's not a coincidence that the industrial revolution happened in a country with a secure established rule of law such that people could make investments without worrying about losing them at the whim of a dictator. Much better to tax consumption .

More importantly, it happened in a country which forced people off their land at gunpoint, into urban poverty, where they provided a huge supply of cheap, fungible, and utterly disposable factory labor. But that would run counter to the neo-liberal narrative... After all, the rule of law serves to protect investments , not the peasant forced off his land. Where was the rule of law to protect said peasants? Perhaps th…

[deleted]

Re: American Equity

#308

Post by dnautics »

ThomPete wrote: post #134
RivieraKid wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drawback of taxing wealth is that it distorts markets, it discourages saving. EDIT: Can't comment ("You're posting too fast, blah blah blah"). Here are some replies to the comments bellow: > It's encouraging people to make their money be productive instead of stashing it under a mattress. When you have money in the bank, you're effectively lending most of it to other people. Your money is "productive", which is e…

Discouraging savings is actually the point. We should tax money that sits idle and provides tax benefits to money invested. If you can build wealth around being active rather than just reaping the benefit of interest of interests then that should be encouraged rather than just grabbing and keeping.

You would force people to consume? There's diminishing returns to that. At some point there are fewer worthwhile things to spend on and you start creating an system of make-work with the attendant environmental destruction and resource exhaustion. Free markets are neutral on these questions, it's policy that distorts social preference away from conservation and towards unsustainable growth that exacerbate the situation we're in now.

Re: American Equity

#309

Post by [deleted] »

justinpaulson wrote: post #228
derefr wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the perspective of trying to get the budget balanced, taxing wealth is probably the single most efficient way to do it. From the perspective of the tax code as an incentive system , taxing wealth is a strange thing—it makes people feel less interest in becoming wealthy, and thereby causes fewer GDP-building things to happen! (This is also, for a similar reason, why economists don't like corporate taxes or trade…

I think becoming wealthy is incentive enough to become wealthy. No one is going to stop trying to be wealthy just because they might get taxed for that wealth. If anything, they will just try to hide it in another state. But the argument that a wealth tax would remove any incentive to become wealthy is not very strong.

[deleted]

Re: American Equity

#310

Post by pnathan »

koolba wrote: post #20
jacquesm wrote: post #16

People already have a share in the GDP. That's what it is, the total domestic product, the sum of all the little parts. The problem is not that people don't have share in it (and this goes for every country, not just for the USA), but that they have a disproportionate share in it. Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that rai…

> Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end of the scale. That will have a lot more effect than some fiction where you get to do a bunch of make-believe bookkeeping. Or go a step further do what nobody has the balls to do: tax wealth That's what all the…

I'm persuaded that wealth taxes and maximum income are the appropriate solution: after X million per year, you don't get more money, and after you and your family heap up Y million of _fluidly defined_ assets, you get taxed on what you hold/control/manage-via-tax-shelter.

Obliterate the tax shelters, obliterate the tax havens, bring the money back home under threat of criminal law.

I'm not saying you can't be a fat cat. But at a certain point (fluid and blurry, but distinctly present), it's just morbid obesity that is squishing other citizens.

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