491–500 of 580 posts
So lots of people saying the ultra rich are hard to tax because they take out loans against assets to fund the day-to-day. This then results in an argument about the morality/viability/etc of a wealth tax. But... why can't we just tax the loans?
If you tax loans that means every credit card purchase or mortgage would trigger a tax. If you receive a $400k loan for a mortgage, that would mean something like $100k in taxes for an upper middle earner.
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(not OP) There is good evidence that when wages are public knowledge minorities and women get paid more too... https://time.com/5353848/salary-pay-transparency-work/
likely everyone else just gets paid less in the interest of fairness.. this already happens at tech companies like stripe. "Oh we dont care how many competing offers you have or how qualified you are. we pay everyone the same in the name of "fairness".
Economic prosperity is always most sensitive to what the bottom quarter gets paid, because they are who are obliged to spend what they get immediately.
The greater general prosperity that results benefits everybody else, in sum, more than the increased minimum wage. This was recently demonstrated in Seattle, in practice.
In short: no, you are 100% wrong. You should consider this good news.
In Finland, everyone's taxable income is a matter of public record. One theoretical benefit of such a policy is that it eliminates information asymmetries between workers and employers in wage bargaining.
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> I'm sure there's some rich people / families living in otherwise underwhelming houses, but they're generally a minority. There are more than you think. Pretty much every city has a nice neighborhood where the wealthy residents live. The difference between someone worth $10mm vs someone worth $100mm is not visible from the street.
Does that difference matter when kidnapping? Its not like the 100mm person has more money readily available, as they'll likely both have the bulk invested/tied up in some way. You can only get their fluid money which is probably quite similar in a time sensitive situation like that.
In Finland, everyone's taxable income is a matter of public record. One theoretical benefit of such a policy is that it eliminates information asymmetries between workers and employers in wage bargaining.
>eliminates information asymmetries between workers and employers in wage bargaining. WOW! Never heard of this as an argument. I think it is a very good one for working class.
Company earnings, turnover and profit, are easily found for all Finnish companies as well. It's pretty easy to weed out the companies on an unhealthy base.
I also saw the salaries as a sign that they're in it for the long term as they could've easily taken home more but they also didn't feel the need to 'save' the company money so they had trust in the current market position and I felt comfortable asking for a 25% raise, which I also got.
It's good to know where you stand among your peers and superiors.
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This has happened before. After the end of WW2, the Allies decided to repudiate the ReichsMark (the German dollar) and issue a new Mark. Everyone who held ReichsMarks saw it go to zero. To get the economy going again, everyone was issued 50 of the new Deutsch Marks. Within a couple weeks, the people who had been wealthy before were rapidly moving ahead, and the ones who had not been were again at the bottom. I.e. the…
I'm not familiar with this case study but was wouldn't that be due to retaining asset ownership? Even if the dollar became worthless, presumably I'd still control all my assets(the stocks in my brokerage/401k, my car, etc.). The companies I have ownership for would still be able to generate goods/services for Dollar2.0 People storing money under their mattress presumably were in trouble, but doing that already puts y…
The people that told me this story were in Berlin at the time.
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If you have $2b in wealth, and lose $1b of it, you do not owe taxes on $1b.
At some point they may have paid taxes on that $2B asset distribution, but of course they still have it, so maybe they took out a $1B loan to pay the IRS. Now they sell the asset, and they are lucky that it fetches $1B, enough to pay the loan. Now they have $0, and a huge sigh of relief. Could have been much worse. So you see, a lot of these equity-based billionaires would owe more than they have without these 'looph…
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That logic doesn't really apply when you scale up to the ultra-billionaires. Shares of stock are plenty liquid.
The rest of it still applies. It makes the numbers not work for starting a business. Besides, selling off pieces of it means making less and less money off of it. You wind up working for the people you sold it to in order to pay the taxes. You might as well kiss entrepreneurship goodbye with wealth taxes.
Though... even though things like estate taxes have these rules (either "first million isn't taxed" or "primary residence isn't taxed" etc, depending on jursidiction), most people tend to not actually read the details and assume that the gov't wants to take the family farm.
No, I don't think it's your god-given right to hand down a $2 million townhouse without paying taxes.
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They're getting capital gains any time they sell a stock for more than they paid. There's no magic threshhold of $500k.
>There's no magic threshhold of $500k. In the US in 2021 (aka, right now) the magic threshold for capital gains is $445,850-$501,600 depending on filing status. So you're technically correct that $500k isn't a magic threshold, but it's certainly in the middle of it. But more importantly, you're going down a technical rabbithole. The point of this comment chain is "what happens to people experiencing a one-time windfa…
Sorry, but capital gains taxes start at $15,000.
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The rest of it still applies. It makes the numbers not work for starting a business. Besides, selling off pieces of it means making less and less money off of it. You wind up working for the people you sold it to in order to pay the taxes. You might as well kiss entrepreneurship goodbye with wealth taxes.
There is such a stupidly easy solution to this, which is to set a lower limit for whatever rule applies. Though... even though things like estate taxes have these rules (either "first million isn't taxed" or "primary residence isn't taxed" etc, depending on jursidiction), most people tend to not actually read the details and assume that the gov't wants to take the family farm. No, I don't think it's your god-given ri…
Taxes should be extracted as needed to support things that only government can do. Taxes should not be extracted based on envy, or just because they can be.