How can someone as smart and interesting as PG publish such a short, one-sided, dumbified, unsourced and narrow-minded blog post ?
Modeling a Wealth Tax
531–540 of 1001 posts
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also 3 people own more the those 50% of Americans[0]. I find it hard to believe 1 person is responsible for as much as 50 million people, and these 3 richest people leveraged other peoples labor to create this wealth. With Bezos as an example would he have anything at all with out the internet (created by DARPA) or the transportation infrastructure maintained by our tax dollars? What you are calling stealing is simpl…
I'm not surprised by it, why would you? A few people in a generation have the spectacular combination of luck + 'wind behind their back' to accomplish more than millions of people I would suggest. How many people go through life accomplishing relatively little - holding themselves to subpar standards? A thought example is Einstein, Feynman, Bohr compared to 'common folks' - same thing, different domain.
by taxing and providing more services we can provide " the spectacular combination of luck + 'wind behind their back' to accomplish more"
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#533I'm all for wealth taxes. Its better at redistributing and over time ending inequities. In particular it'll organically redistribute generational wealth ('old money').
PG's analysis seems a bit pessimistic since it presumes the wealth wouldn't grow otherwise (with the stock market, real estate, or other investments).
There are practical problems though: how do you determine the value of privately held assets, and how would you deal with paying cash when taxing illiquid assets that may not be producing a cash profit?
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#534Perhaps notable: Switzerland has a wealth tax (of up to 0.3%), and there is zero evidence that this has any deterrent effect on wealthy people settling in Switzerland or startups being created in Switzerland. Other features of the tax system more than offset the 0.3% wealth tax. Personally, I am a bit disappointed by the lack of depth of the discourse: Wealth taxes and their effect have been studied quite a bit in ec…
> Switzerland has a wealth tax (of up to 0.3%)
Though the parts of Switzerland where the billionaire class settles have lower wealth taxes - they don't have their main residence in Geneva or Basel, but in canton Zug, ore even Obwalden/Nidwalden where the maximum wealth tax rate is 0.13% (and capital gains taxes are laughably low too).
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#535I'm highly skeptical of the claim that such tax would discourage startup founders. Wealth tax proposals I've seen don't kick in until $50 million or $100 million. This means that there is a floor on how "poor" the government can make you via a wealth tax. This has two implications: 1. Most "successful" startup founders don't break that threshold of personal wealth. 2. For most startup founders, the startup is the onl…
> Wealth tax proposals I've seen don't kick in until $50 million or $100 million. The very first U.S. income tax, imposed during the Civil War (the nation's bloodiest conflict), was 3% on income over $12,720, rising all the way to 5% on income over $159,000 (in 2020 dollars). This was unconstitutional at the time, and was eventually repealed. The first income tax imposed after the ratification of the 16th Amendment w…
The fact that the government taxes normal people at a rate much higher than they deserve seems to be an argument for a wealth tax and not against it
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a wealth tax is a percentage of the dollar value of wealth, not a percentage of the number of shares of stock you own. If I expropriate 5% of your wealth, and ~100% of your wealth is in shares of stock, what percent of your shares have I taken?
If the stock is public, none. Take a loan, and let the equity grow
Recent history has shown us that financing equity positions with debt (i.e. leverage) can be... risky. In any event, I consider leverage to be outside the scope of the parent comment's observation.
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#537The joke about paying taxes: put one more column with name ‘Romanovs’ and do calculations again.
When I came to US, my colleagues and friends did understand the joke. Now some of them they do.
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#538Perhaps notable: Switzerland has a wealth tax (of up to 0.3%), and there is zero evidence that this has any deterrent effect on wealthy people settling in Switzerland or startups being created in Switzerland. Other features of the tax system more than offset the 0.3% wealth tax. Personally, I am a bit disappointed by the lack of depth of the discourse: Wealth taxes and their effect have been studied quite a bit in ec…
There should be some ROI for the individual paying the wealth tax. How good is their infrastructure? how well do they handle social problems like homelessness?
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Wealth tax proposals I've seen don't kick in until $50 million or $100 million. This means that there is a floor on how "poor" the government can make you via a wealth tax. That’s just the starting point. Once people begin to figure out how to avoid it or have been tapped then the qualifier will be lowered to 40m. And then eventually 30m and do on until anyone above average is paying it. And then anyone above media…
Just for some historical context: US income tax rates started at 1% and ended at 6%, and applied to an extremely small amount of the population.
What does "ended at 6%" mean here? As far as I can tell, all income earners in the US pay at least 15.3% income tax in the form of Social Security and Medicare taxes.
Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Near 50% of American pay ZERO tax whatsoever. As stated, that is completely and unequivocally false. Near 50% of Americans pay no "Federal income tax" where "Federal income tax" is arbitrarily defined to not include payroll taxes despite them being a Federal tax on income. They still pay payroll taxes, state income tax, sales tax, etc.
Semantics, I believe. The meta-point to be derived is that the top 10% pay a majority of all taxes in actual dollar value.
It's not just semantics. Federal income taxes aren't even half of all the taxes collected in the US.