511–520 of 589 posts
> There are many complexities, but one popular technique is to put assets into trusts that allow the returns to accrue for heirs without taxation. Nike founder Phil Knight, for example, put his company’s stock in a series of trusts to benefit his children. The trusts pay him a modest return, but the rest of the gains avoid incurring estate tax, including Nike shares that were worth $6.1 billion in 2021, Bloomberg rep…
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> We (almost) invariably tax money when it changes hands. Like if you own something and then I own it, there's a tax [..] But that's the general premise. I appreciate HN is USA-centric, but over on this side of the pond it's nowhere near as simple as that. > If you pay taxes on your income and then use it to buy something from me, I have to pay taxes on it too. That's my income now. Except that companies - even one p…
All companies almost everywhere absolutely pay taxes on revenue, in the form of sales tax / value-added tax.
- an indirect tax on the vast majority of goods and services
- borne by the final consumer, not by businesses
- charged as a percentage of the sales price and collected fractionally at every stage of production and distribution
- neutral, as the tax borne by the final consumer is the same regardless of the length of the supply chain"
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The asset has not moved outside the family, has not been sold, no profit on sale has been realized. You think a profit transfer has been made, because you think in terms of atomized individuals with no family.
Citizens are taxed as individuals, not families. A person did not have assets, and now they do. I don't care that the land was "in their family." If they are even decent at managing their assets, then they will have more assets when they die than when their parents did. And if they don't, then it's not my concern. I don't believe in government policies to perpetuate generational capital wealth, and I will vote agains…
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Please everyone read this comment. Any disagreements should come with relevant references showing how it's wrong. An additional point to add is the mechanism by which taxation controls inflation. Tax serves to suppress demand in the private sector, freeing up resources that can then be bought at non-inflated prices. This is why super wealthy people are irrelevant to a sovereign government's ability to spend; their ma…
I will provide a set of example critiques to begin. MMT alone may not provide sufficient guidance on how to adjust outlays and receipts to manage employment and inflation. MMT may not be politically feasible. Politicians may not be navigate politically unpopular but economical necessary. MMT may be domestically sound, but challenging to implement regarding international trade. It may result in devaluing compared to o…
The primary policy prescription of MMT is the job guarantee, which explicitly addresses the question of how to manage employment and inflation. The job guarantee defines the value of the currency, with other spend floating relative to that, whilst simultaneously providing full employment. In any case, the current model is pretty broken in which fiddling with interest rates is assumed to have a direct casual link to both (and depressingly in opposite directions).
> MMT may not be politically feasible. Politicians may not be navigate politically unpopular but economical necessary.
Insomuch as descriptive MMT is what happens in most sovereign currency areas, this is just a problem of communication. You are right that getting the politics correct is both hard and important. I'm not sure the policies will in aggregate be very unpopular though once a non-made-up description of what limits spending is understood better by the population.
> MMT may be domestically sound, but challenging to implement regarding international trade. It may result in devaluing compared to other currencies.
A floating exchange rate is a feature not a bug. Current attempts to maintain a soft peg are deeply damaging domestically for many countries. In any case, countries that are confident in their monetary and fiscal policies and that have a sound economy seem to be more robust than those that try to maintain a soft peg (see Japan).
> MMT may suggest that interest rates can be kept low indefinitely. It's unclear if this would result in excessive risk taking.
Excessive risk taking needs dealing with at the political level with actual laws and regulations. Interest rate policy is a crap tool to deal with such problems.
> MMT may not be applicable to developing economies.
Why not? It explains what their actual constraints are and the risks of taking on foreign debt or pursuing an export led growth strategy etc.
> MMT may work in the short term to manage employment and demand but fail to cultivate long term economic development.
I'm not sure what this has to do with MMT. The post war period with much higher employment and stronger government intervention had much higher growth than the following monetarist/neoliberal era, so perhaps the status quo is the problematic position.
> MMT's implication as having a larger governmental impact on investment may crowd out private sector investment.
Far from crowding out, it crowds in in practice:
https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=12022
Again, the historical evidence shows when governments stop spending, private investment collapses.
> MMT if implemented could be constrained by international investors. If international investors dislike a policy, it may have domestic implications.
What domestic implications? If you're thinking about direct foreign investment, this is problematic in its own right. It might increase domestic employment and potentially increase local skills, but it is also extractive and drains the nations' equity. This possibly has stronger implications for low income nations that don't have a good education base and well developed industries, but MMT at least makes clear where the trade-offs lie.
> MMT depends on having a government effective enough to implement it. If a government is too dysfunctional, MMT may fail in practice.
True, but then so do all political systems. MMT "failing" is also a strange concept given MMT describes the system since the fall of Bretton Woods. What's remarkable is how stable (notwithstanding the obvious "shocks") the system has been despite most governments operating as though they were still inside the Bretton Woods system.
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I will provide a set of example critiques to begin. MMT alone may not provide sufficient guidance on how to adjust outlays and receipts to manage employment and inflation. MMT may not be politically feasible. Politicians may not be navigate politically unpopular but economical necessary. MMT may be domestically sound, but challenging to implement regarding international trade. It may result in devaluing compared to o…
> MMT alone may not provide sufficient guidance on how to adjust outlays and receipts to manage employment and inflation. The primary policy prescription of MMT is the job guarantee, which explicitly addresses the question of how to manage employment and inflation. The job guarantee defines the value of the currency, with other spend floating relative to that, whilst simultaneously providing full employment. In any c…
This $7B is enough to fund the US Federal government for about 8 hours
A single person funding a government for >330 million people even for only 8 hours is pretty impressive. Gives off malcador holding the golden throne for a short time energy
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This is something people love to rage about, yet it's not one with an obvious fix. The counterpoint is that this leaves money invested, which means others invest in other things, and still entails interest payments. It exists in part because you don't want someone who inherited his parents' house and wants to move in to go broke trying to pay taxes, or have to re-mortgage it, with an even stronger case with family fa…
These are just generic anti-tax arguments. Yes, if you pay your taxes you will have less money. And maybe you would have used some of that money to do good things. Oh well. I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting you shouldn't be allowed to borrow against assets. That isn't even the problem. The problem is that you can go your whole life without paying taxes on gains of those assets, then pass them on to your he…
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Eat rice and beans $50/month. Live in a $200 tent with a warm sleeping bag replace every 10 years. every year you get $100 for clothing at goodwill (walmart for underware) No other possessions. don't get sick as you don't have health care, but you should on average live to 70 or so [5-10 years less than average with health care], assuming you are not unlucky. so about $70/ month. I wouldn't want to live like that and…
You may want to revise the life expectancy estimate on a rice+beans diet, scurvy is a thing and based on my googling you would not get enough vit. C. I'm probably missing some other disease too, so "don't get sick" is probably also out the window on this diet. One can of beans is ~400kcal and costs ~$1.30+tax in my closest QFC, so you need around $4 per day just for beans (3 cans). 5lb bag of rice (50 servings, 160kc…
This is the most frustrating news I’ve read about taxes. As an American, I’d like to think that our tax system was designed to be fair. Yes, Warren Buffet’s secretary famously paid a higher tax percentage than he did, because all of his wealth was in unrealized gains. I’d accepted that - with the understanding that upon Warren’s death, estate taxes would be paid, and “fairness” would be restored to the system. But, l…
I am pretty sure that those 10-15% are more than enough to have a functioning government that is able to serve the public pretty well.
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Getting a loan against assets is another way of "using" it, so why not make that a taxable event? Just like now your stock value would not be taxed while it is invested. But now it would be taxed if you use it as collateral for anything. If you don't want to pay capital gains by selling the underlying stock then you can just get a bigger loan and pay the taxes out of that. There, now you don't have to liquidate but t…
This still leaves open ‘buy, don’t borrow, die’ as a way for the dynastically wealthy to opt out of paying capital gains tax. I think the sensible option is making death a taxable event, rather than borrowing (with perhaps exceptions for the family farm, but not for the family billion dollar business). And the second best solution is eliminating the step-up basis, which without deemed disposition at death is just a f…