411–420 of 727 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
It is less amusing how many of our brethren think the Landed Gentry got there by merit and deserve to live in their castles untroubled by the rabble.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't, because the ultra rich have no capital gains. They get ultra low interest rate loans against assets so they never have to sell assets and trigger capital gains. Google "Buy, Borrow, Die" if you don't understand this strategy.
They have to sell eventually to pay off the loans. And if they die, their estate has to sell the assets to pay off the loans, and then their heir will pay inheritance taxes on top of that. Unless their spouse is still alive. In the US, assets' cost bases are reset when a spouse dies. That is the main way that rich people avoid capital gains taxes. I'd much prefer simply stopping that cost basis reset instead of imple…
Re: estate taxes - almost no ultra rich pays them, even without surviving wife. According tom Garry Cohn (former big kahuna at Goldman Sachd and former treasury something or other in the first Trump admin) only morons pay estate taxes : https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/only-morons-pay-the-estate-t...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would be an extremely regressive tax regime, effectively a flat tax rate. Worse than a flat tax rate, actually, since consumption rates do not scale linearly with income or wealth.
I think he meant that you'd have the brackets apply to types of consumption instead of income level, so no tax on food, low tax on restaurants, medium tax on high-end electronics, insane tax on planes and yachts. I mean it sounds like it would be easier to maintain/enforce such tiering system than constantly fight with people trying to not technically be wealthy. Downside of course is that some people's luxuries are…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i hate when people bring it up. everybody that works pays payroll taxes which is around 25% when you count both sides.
Federal payroll taxes in the US are 15.3% (7.65% for each side).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of the people I mention wealth tax to give me the same two counter cases: Grandma and Elon. I think there's no reason why a wealth tax can't be progressive. Just making up numbers here, it could be zero for your first 30 million, and rise to some palpable amount for your first billion. This would protect granny from being taxed out of her house, and in fact would affect relatively few salary earners. I'm not over…
Sure. The issue I’d see is in 20 years inflation might mean that applies to almost everyone, like AMT, but that is a future us issue. The biggest personal complaint I have is why should the government be getting more tax money when all they seem to use it for is blowing up random countries in the Middle East and spying on law abiding citizens for whatever random reason.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
So let's not even think about how to build a better world because the administration we have right now is garbage? 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.
To me, that would seem extremely difficult for Congress to pass a law restricting individual speech in this particular way that would pass First Amendment muster, and I don’t think we should be at “let’s just set aside the Constitution when it clearly says something we don’t like” because I don’t think that ends well in today’s political climate (or any other, but it’s especially bad now).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Billionaires gonna billionaire, I guess.
[flagged]
I think it's a bit ridiculous that these individuals feel the compulsion to min-max their capital at the expense of pursuits that could better be fueled by it, specifically for the collective good. I think it is shameful behavior and not something we should be promoting in society.
Currently the country with the highest marginal income tax rate is Denmark, at 60.5%. The top US federal tax rate is 37%, and the median state income tax rate is Oklahoma's, which is 4.75%. So in the median case, a state adding an additional 20% in income tax would have a total marginal tax rate of 37% + 4.75% + 20%, or 61.75%. [3]
In the median case, US state politicians talking about adding a "mere 1%" wealth tax are talking about causing the residents of their state to have the highest taxes in the world. That's not the sort of decision you make lightly.
It should be noted that the marginal tax rate for high earners in the USA was higher than 60% from the 1930s through the 1970s.
Chart here: https://www.hrblock.com/tax-center/newsroom/income/the-histo...