Earlier quoted context omitted.
I stopped reading when I hit: > wealth tax is a colossal privacy and administrative burden on _every single taxpayer_ I have not seen a single wealth tax proposal that doesn't have a gigantic cutoff where it would do nothing for 99%+ of the taxpayer base. Most proposals have a floor in the tens of millions.
You could've read the very next sentence, which makes the point the first sentence set up: > Assets must be accounted for when calculating wealth, so the tax service will be required to track and value assets including vehicles, homes, and material good etc. for every citizen to see if the wealth tax would apply to them -- if we didn't report material goods, the wealthy could sock money away in expensive cars, artwor…
Media Owned by Wealthy Are Quick to Tell You Wealth Taxes Are a Bad Idea
401–410 of 488 posts
Re: Media Owned by Wealthy Are Quick to Tell You Wealth Taxes Are a Bad Idea
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people are already hit by "wealth taxes", except they are regressive - it's called "property tax".
Surely property tax is trivially easy to justify? It usually is collected by the municipality and pays for things that have ongoing operating costs— roads, fire department, schools, etc. How else should those things be paid for?
Re: Media Owned by Wealthy Are Quick to Tell You Wealth Taxes Are a Bad Idea
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're mixing corporate income taxes an personal income taxes. Corporate income taxes are good because the business wants to avoid paying taxes so it will devise more ways to invest in the company. This is where investment capital will be coming from.
Why is investing in mostly flat or negative return projects assumed to be a net-good?
Obviously there are ways to break that, like tax evasion, but hopefully there are other ways to deal with that.
Re: Media Owned by Wealthy Are Quick to Tell You Wealth Taxes Are a Bad Idea
#404I will say that this article points out a CNBC article on "$400k in a big city...". And FAIR seems to be missing that both earnings _and expenses growth_ have been growing very fast for those in cities. Progressive taxation of someone earning $100k per year in San Francisco or NYC is hardly fair. At least prior to covid19 causing a crash in the rental market one could expect to pay ~$2500 a month to share a 2bedroom…
If people were taxed less, housing and rent would be even more expensive in SF. The solution to the problem is not taxing people in SF less. This is the same flawed idea that the solution to houses being unaffordable is to have a mortgage interest deduction and (previously) a property tax deduction for home-owners. All this did was make houses and land more expensive to make up for the tax deduction.
I full agree that housing costs should not be deductions.
Another way to think about it is that in a high CoL markets, not only does a marginal dollar buy you less marginal goods (such as a burrito), but you also are likely in a higher marginal tax rate making it geometrically worse.
Re: Media Owned by Wealthy Are Quick to Tell You Wealth Taxes Are a Bad Idea
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, you have to remember that taxes affect the expected outcome, as they reduce the upside of a positive outcome. Taxes do not mitigate the losses from a failure, and most people do not have the resources to sustain failures (without severe negative consequences). By reducing the expected outcome of a new venture, taxes discourage marginal entrepreneurs from starting businesses.
OP's point is that corporate taxes don't work like that. As a business owner, you can avoid taxes by reinvesting in your business, capturing the positive outcome by way of valuation. If corporate taxes are lower, owners are incentivized to extract profits rather than reinvesting them.
Re: Media Owned by Wealthy Are Quick to Tell You Wealth Taxes Are a Bad Idea
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inflation and property taxes are wealth taxes. Capital gains tax and tax on dividends is not.
Inflation is not really tax, more exogenous parameter of monetary system. It does not give much advantage to government (as expected inflation rate is accounted in bond rate). Property tax would make more sense as a tax on limited resource than as a wealth tax.
Re: Media Owned by Wealthy Are Quick to Tell You Wealth Taxes Are a Bad Idea
#407Re: Media Owned by Wealthy Are Quick to Tell You Wealth Taxes Are a Bad Idea
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
The expenses do pay for themselves. Assume you have profits in Year 1. If you pay for an expense with pre-tax income (i.e., in December, assuming a calendar tax year), that reduces your tax liability on your profits for the year, for an effective discount of X% on that expense (where X is your effective tax rate). If you buy that same expense with post-tax income (i.e., in January of Year 2), you don't get the effect…
A discount is of course not the same as paying for itself (e.g. a 100% discount.) Some people think of reduced taxes as being a dollar-for-dollar credit (not you, of course.) The forced spending by the end of a fiscal tax year is often offset by delivery or implementation contracts to mitigate the damage of having to time the purchase for tax purchases.
But the point is that a business with a higher tax rate has a greater incentive to spend money, and to spend more of it.
And as a practical matter, history has demonstrated that businesses actually invest less during periods of low tax than they do during periods of high tax, even though they have more cash to spend. It's counterintuitive but multiple major tax cuts have borne this trend out.
Re: Media Owned by Wealthy Are Quick to Tell You Wealth Taxes Are a Bad Idea
#409I just see tax dodgers as morally redundant people. I try hard to think about it another way, but I just can't. It seems obvious to me from reading extensively around this that we have very little basis for arguing the case for free will. Our entire existence: our personal lives, our business lives, our investments, our health, our wealth - are driven by luck. I run a successful small business in the UK. I can squint…
I'm from a working class family in the UK, most of whom are on benefits and half are immigrants. My sister is a single mum (by choice), because she wanted to move out and in the UK the only way to really do that if you're working class is to have kids and hope the government gives you a home.
My partner's mum is earning around £45,000 and lives in a £500,000 house. She's also a single mum and has never worked a day in her life. She has done pretty well though because she (reluctantly) had 5 kids and managed to get one diagnosed with autism despite most GPs believing he doesn't actually have autism – you only need one doctor to give you a diagnosis, so she just keep trying until she got it. A few months back she was thinking of getting a job (not because she needs the money, but because she was bored while the kids were at school). The guy at the job centre told her not to get a job because it wouldn't make financial sense given what she's receiving from the government. Another nice perk is that she gets free food from the food bank every week which she'll often give to us because she doesn't actually need it – sometimes she'll get some nice deserts from M&S so it's worth getting either way. In fact, most of my family go to the food bank despite not needing to do so because why not?
In contrast me and my partner live in a very small home, which we work full time to afford. We can't afford kids, but we hope one day we might be finically secure enough to have at least one before we turn 35. Not that we'd want to, but if I'm honest I'm doubtful whether we'd ever be able to afford 5 kids or live in a £500,000 house like her mum.
As someone from the working class I can honestly say I have no idea what my upper-middle class colleagues are talking about when they talk about wealth inequality. Apart from me only people I know who are my age who don't live with their parents are those that had kids. If fact most of the time those in my family who have had children live in much nicer homes than my middle-class colleagues. Thankfully I consider myself somewhat lucky that I'm weirdly good with computers which allowed me to get a middle class job despite the fact software development would typically be out of reach for someone from my background.
What upset me the most though is that when I lost my job a few years back I received very little government help because I had around £10,000 saved up to pay taxes (I had to fill self assessment at the time). Apparently if you have savings that disqualifies you from help. I recently found out the reason my sister blew all her savings on a BMW after having her kid is because that way she had a better chance of being given a house by the government.
Sometimes I wonder if our welfare state would actually help the working class more if it focused on incentivising people to make good decisions rather than having as many kids as possible and spending everything you get on cars and holidays. As far as I can tell the system right now doesn't actually help the working class, that is unless you're content living on welfare your whole life. In my experience the middle class is completely detached from how hard it is if you're from a working class family a want to simply make an honest living instead of following the more traditional working-class route of not working and having children. As far as I can supporting this system is just propagating a system that leads to further poverty and income inequality.
I see this reasoning bias in many middle-class positions though. For example, most of my middle class colleagues seem to think drugs are harmless and that's presumably because they do them now and again at parties, but they're not the kind of people who would allow drugs to consume their lives. Yet, just yesterday I had my partner crying to me because both her mother and brother are addicted and abusing drugs. I also have alcoholics and drug users in my family. There is a very clear reasoning fallacy going on here, specifically how the middle class just assumes that working class people act like they do. But they don't. Most working class will prefer living on welfare if you give them the option because they don't have many options and that's all they know. Just like many will abuse drugs if you allow them because these aren't people who make the best life decisions, especially if they're not incentivised to make the right decisions.
I'm sorry if this comments comes off as overly emotional, but it does upset me having to watch this cycle of poverty happen over and over again in my family. What the working class needs are good incentives to work and negative incentives to have children they can't afford or to abuse drugs. They also need good opportunities, so if you're a business owner I'd urge you to consider hiring some people from less well off backgrounds who may not having a university degree, etc but who you can train up and get on the right path. This push for more people to go to university has also done a lot of harm to the working class – you get automatically ruled out from a lot of jobs (including software development roles) regardless of your experience simply because you weren't privileged enough to go to university.
Re: Media Owned by Wealthy Are Quick to Tell You Wealth Taxes Are a Bad Idea
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is considered more tax advantaged method of returning capitol to shareholders. Dividends get taxed as corporate profits, then again as income downstream. Buybacks are not taxed at either stage.
Buybacks are taxed as capital gains rates (0%, 15%, or 20%), while dividends are subject to special dividend rates (0%, 10%, or 20%). Dividends are thus actually preferred by most investors, and buybacks generally only advantage the biggest investors. Additionally, corporations don't get special capital gains rates but do get dividends received exemptions for dividends from related company, so in many cases corporate…
Historical equities compound growth almost entirely comes from constantly reinvesting dividends to buy more shares which compounds to increase future dividends. So as an example, take a company that returns 5% of their share price and an investor pays a 20% tax rate allowing them to reinvest 4% after tax money to buy more shares. After 40 years, they'd have 1.04^40=4.8 times the proportion of the company. If the same company spent all of its money buying back shares, you'd have 1.05^40=7.039 times the company. Now you still have to pay that 20% on gains once you sell so after you'd have (1.05^40-1)*.8+1=5.83 after selling but that is still a 21% benefit for share buybacks in that example.
Also, I wouldn't call that "artificially inflate the stock price". They are reducing the number of outstanding shares thereby increasing the earnings per share which increases the amount that can be returned to each share such as through higher dividends. It is effectively reinvesting the dividends for you back into the company.