American billionaires already face a minimum tax of 28 percent generally, but a wealth tax is a totally different animal. Just sayin’
Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says
51–60 of 98 posts
Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says
#52Let's first change the law to not let them borrow against their unrealized assets tax free. In fact the tax to get a loan should be higher then if you sold your shares at a company to discourage this crap. Or limit the total amount or forbid it outright.
Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says
#53The most scary aspect of unfettered accumulation of wealth would obviously be the consolidation of power. We're already seeing countries where the wealthiest citizens are saying "Screw this, I'll just move elsewhere, unless you fix those [tax] laws" - and the more powerful these people are, the easier it is to strong-arm politicians. Growth for the sake of growth, and all that.
Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says
#54Unrealized capital gains are not income. This article wants a wealth tax because they think this is "income" that is going untaxed.
Why is it unthinkable to make billionaires generate some income to pay taxes? I pay property taxes on the "unrealized capital gains" of my house, and somehow I make it work.
You don't pay property tax on unrealized gains in your house. You pay it on the appraised value of your house. If you don't like that appraised value, you can appeal it (and many people do), and it often doesn't rise nearly as much as the actual value of the house.
Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says
#55I think we need to start treating extreme wealth hoarding as a mental illness. If someone has a net worth of more than a $billion for an appreciable amount of time, then they should be locked up to protect the world from their malfeasance and prevent them exploiting yet more people. A possible exception would be when someone inherits a vast fortune, and maybe they should be allowed some time to demonstrate that they…
I think having stronger employee rights such that a company's leadership can't increase their own compensation disproportionately to that of the average employee. A CEO earning 350x the average worker in their company suggests that the worker isn't benefitting from the company's success the same way the boss is, despite them driving the company's value through their labour.
There's nothing inherently being wrong with a billionare, it's the gulf between the median income and their own that is a problem, so making an effort to prevent such people enriching themselves at the expense of increasing their staff's pay might help with that.
As it stands, workers don't have as much rights as they require, so the balance is skewed heavily away from them and towards an absolute minority of wealthy people.
Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says
#56Unrealized capital gains are not income. This article wants a wealth tax because they think this is "income" that is going untaxed.
The entire point of the article is about taxing the wealth of extremely rich people rather than income because the wealth is structured to not generate taxable income.
I think there are two considerations here: (1) fairness, (2) good economic policy.
It's certainly not fair to have such a large proportion of power concentrated in such a minuscule number of people.
It's hard to see how it's a good economic policy either. We want there to be capital available to be invested in further economic activities (I think we do, anyway; there are people who would debate that). But we don't want -- and certainly don't need -- so much of it in so few hands. A wealth tax is a way to drain some of that away.
Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says
#57I think we need to start treating extreme wealth hoarding as a mental illness. If someone has a net worth of more than a $billion for an appreciable amount of time, then they should be locked up to protect the world from their malfeasance and prevent them exploiting yet more people. A possible exception would be when someone inherits a vast fortune, and maybe they should be allowed some time to demonstrate that they…
I think we need to start treating indiscriminate internet commenting as a mental illness.
That is: You state that we should treat extreme wealth hoarding as a mental illness. Well, who are you? A mental health expert? Someone with input to the diagnostic manual? Do you actually have a basis for why we should take your opinion seriously? Or are you just some random person pontificating on the net, the same as I would be if I seriously proposed my first paragraph?
Then you advocate, not just treating it as mental illness, but committing them. Why? To protect the world from them. Um, not all fortunes come from malfeasance and exploitation. Save your outrage for the outrageous actions, not for the mere financial success. (Who did Warren Buffet exploit? What malfeasance did he do?)
But you have given us no reason to agree with your overheated characterization of the rich, let alone to agree with your proposed solution.
Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only because of how we've chosen to define income.
The proposal in the article is to tax wealth at an annual rate of 2%. Not realized gains. Not unrealized gains. Wealth. Under such a system — unless I've badly misunderstood something — if a billionaire's assets decreased in value over the course of a year, they would still pay 2% on their assets. I can't think of any sense in which a decrease in the value of one's assets would be defined as income. I have an opinion…
What happens if they are forced to sell stock in companies they founded and control, and after the sale they no longer have a controlling interest?
Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says
#59Let's first change the law to not let them borrow against their unrealized assets tax free. In fact the tax to get a loan should be higher then if you sold your shares at a company to discourage this crap. Or limit the total amount or forbid it outright.
But they eventually need to sell some assets to repay the loan, right? They'll pay tax when they sell them.
Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may be surprising, but wall street firms (for example) don't have a concept of "Unrealized capital gains". They mark to market on a daily basis and book the pnl and pay whatever tax. I know that at Goldman (where I worked) this is almost a religion, and I would expect it is the same at JPM and Morgan Stanley. One reason the author is probably suggesting this is that there are a wealth of schemes whereby income can…
> It may be surprising, but wall street firms (for example) don't have a concept of "Unrealized capital gains". This is just false in my experience, well atleast for how you've stated it. It may be true for some particular company but I don't know a single fund that doesn't track unrealized cap gains. Specifically around this time we start to look at how to defer realizing these gains till next year to push off the t…
To be clear I wasn't talking at all about buy-side. I was talking about big broker-dealers. They are all MTM as far as I know.
My point was that finance in and on itself doesn't depend on a concept of unrealized gains. It's perfectly possible to devise a system of taxation that just says you have to mark to market and then pay tax on that. There would for sure be complications around how you get valuations for illiquid investments etc.