391–400 of 727 posts
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Nobody is talking about a wealth tax on someone with a net worth of ~$200k or ~$400k.
We don't know, actually. If the threshold for "wealth" is set to be >100k, then we are.
> 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.
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Your argument must not be very convincing if need to refer to your opponents using slurs. Using a wealth tax to nationalize corporations sounds like exactly what we should be doing.
>Using a wealth tax to nationalize corporations sounds like exactly what we should be doing. You want Trump and company in charge of it all? Or are we finally back to "the next time Democrats win it will be forever!" wishful thinking? I mean, even if you want to nationalize everything, it's as if you dreamt up the worst possible way to go about doing that so that they've cratered first and started hemorrhaging all th…
We need a wealth tax, ONLY public financing of elections (no PAC money, no "I'm a billionaire so I can spend as much as I want on myself"), and many other reforms. Nationalizing critical industries and sectors is also something we should be pursuing.
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You seem to forget that given the way taxes work, eventually, anyone, with any amount of money, will be considered "wealthy" because we'll keep running out of other people's money. You're wealthy, or the definition will change to include you. The spice must flow.
Running out of billionaire's money would be a good thing[1]. If they don't have money then they can't buy elections and aren't insulated from the consequences of their actions. [1] Note: I don't really think we should literally take all their money. Just enough to reduce some of the power imbalance.
> 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 can't tell what's worse: intentionally obscuring the fact that the vast majority of people would pay ~no wealth tax or unintentionally forgetting that the vast majority of people would pay ~no wealth tax.
I think some relevant factors are missing. What is the polite way of putting it... Ah right! You are a clown!
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You seem to forget that given the way taxes work, eventually, anyone, with any amount of money, will be considered "wealthy" because we'll keep running out of other people's money. You're wealthy, or the definition will change to include you. The spice must flow.
>because we'll keep running out of other people's money. that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, for two reasons. For one, as even Paul points out in the piece, a wealth tax below what's practically a risk free return on capital (~5%) doesn't eat into the capital stock, it simply means wealth grows slower, but still increases. Secondly, there's no monotonous historical direction towards higher wealth taxes, in fact t…
But what does this mean? If you have a load of money in some companies, that's helping to fund their activities, and the companies' share price goes up a bit, you haven't gained any money. And you won't gain any until you sell some shares, which is already taxed.
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> an effective tax rate of 40%. It's not. That calculation would say that if you have $1000 of wealth and $5 of income your effective tax rate is 220%. It's bad math. Your conventional income is taxed separately. A wealth tax sort of stacks with capital gains, but capital gains is way too low anyway.
Yes it is. ($1,000 * 1%) + ($5 * 20%) = $11 tax due on $5 income. They are separate taxes but he's expressing them both in terms of an effective income tax rate. In this case, since you owe more taxes than income you've earned, you'll need to sell off some of your wealth to pay up. If you have no income at all, but do have wealth, then you get a division by zero error so I do get that it's maybe absurd to frame it th…
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"Buy, borrow, die" is a bit of a bogeyman of the Left; it's not a common strategy for HNW or UHNW individuals, and to the extent it is used, there are much better ways to close it than a wealth tax, which is coarse and rife with implementation issues.
The main implementation issue with a wealth tax is that it doesn’t at all interact with the capital gains tax. It’s easy to fix the implementation issue by integrating the wealth tax into the capital gains tax (call it unrealized capital gains tax for starters), make the tax refundable when an asset loses value, and netting it against the actual capital gains tax. With this framing, the wealth tax isn’t a new tax; it…
What's wrong with a 20% tax? We who make a living from labor instead of capital pay more than that. Paul tries to frame it as an increase of 20% in the tax rate, but in reality the increase is from 0% to 20%, and it's hard to see why that's unfair. The reason I say it's currently 0% is of course that for the wealthy most of these 5% gains are unrealized (e.g. inflation in the value of their assets) and untaxed.
> most of these 5% gains are unrealized (e.g. inflation in the value of their assets) and untaxed. The worst part is that even when they need to realize their profits, they have schemes that allow them to avoid taxes (guess how much taxes Musk paid for his $20B realized profits from his Tesla shares he sold to buy Twitter).
Instead, the are running straight for the full on land grab while distracting people with the details of technical loopholes of comparatively small consequence.