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Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says

bbc.com

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Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says

#71

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Eumenes wrote: post #21
harimau777 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like venture capital, research, and urban renewal projects could produce new technologies and companies (which might help the economy). However, they wouldn't necessarily do much to address inequality. It's the difference between making a bigger pie and distributing the pie more evenly. As I see it, the best strategy is to try to balance both approaches.

The same governments that created this so-called inequality should receive billions to address the inequality they apparently created? I don't really buy that. And we all know that inequality, from a western perspective, means addressing "equity", which is a fancy term for wealth redistribution, likely along racial/ethnic lines, and not class.

> The same governments that created this so-called inequality...

1. Why do you say "so-called"? Isn't there real inequality?

2. How did the governments create it?

Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says

#72

Post by antisthenes »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #34
VikingCoder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wealth was $x one year. And $x + $y the following year. If I work my ass off doing manual labor, $y gets taxed more than if I merely own equity that got me the same amount. And people wonder why the middle class is dying.

In the US, the tax code is such that you pay taxes on capital when you've lost capital too, not just on the gains. This doesn't happen with normal wage income hence why it is treated differently. The lower tax rates on capital reflect the reality that you are paying taxes on the losses too. Tax rates ideally should be flat for all sources of income net of risk, loss, and inflation . To achieve this you either allow d…

> The lower tax rates on capital reflect the reality that you are paying taxes on the losses too

No, you don't.

You actually get a tax credit (e.g. you pay LESS taxes), if you incur certain types of capital losses.

Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says

#73

Post by tastyfreeze »

specialist wrote: post #24

The moral reason to tax wealth is because gross (and accelerating) inequity is unfair. We're way past the era of the landed gentry extracting rents from the poors. Err, I mean we should be. The practical reason to tax wealth is to keep the money moving. Idle capital (hoarding) is its own special badness. Keep the money moving. Either the wealthy spend their money (R&D, philanthropy, building cool new stuff, ice cream…

The ability to borrow and never "cash out" is an artifact of fiat currency. A wealth tax is just another bandage on a broken system.

Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says

#74

Post by chatmasta »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #68
chatmasta wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they eventually need to sell some assets to repay the loan, right? They'll pay tax when they sell them.

If they have a 3% interest loan and their assets grow at 5% per year, then no, they never need to repay the loan.

What about when they die?

Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says

#75

Post by roflyear »

chatmasta wrote: post #74
HDThoreaun wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have a 3% interest loan and their assets grow at 5% per year, then no, they never need to repay the loan.

What about when they die?

Certain assets mature without tax implications. You can take out the loan on the equities, then as your bonds mature, pay down the loan.

Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says

#76

Post by roflyear »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #54
claudiulodro wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know what you're arguing. You can contest the appraised value but rarely will you win unless it's egregious.

Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says

#77

Post by roflyear »

antisthenes wrote: post #70
claudiulodro wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I pay property taxes on the "unrealized capital gains" of my house, and somehow I make it work Is the tax assessed value of your house actually the same or higher as its most recent market value? If something happened that would put your house market value below its tax assessed value, then you typically won't have any "unrealized capital gains" at all. Somehow I doubt that, it usually lags true market value by at…

> Is the tax assessed value of your house actually the same or higher as its most recent market value?

Why does this matter? Set an "appraised" value of stock portfolios > $10m, make it like the "worst downturn last 100 years" or something, and it would be more fair than home appraisals, and still generate the money we need.

These arguments are not in good faith IMO.

Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says

#78

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #69
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think we need to start treating indiscriminate internet commenting as a mental illness. The damage caused by indiscriminate internet commenting is negligible (excepting the click-bait magnifying effects of certain social media networks). The damage caused by wealth hoarding is tangible and leads to corporations acting against the welfare of humanity in their pursuit of greed. > You state that we should treat extr…

> The damage caused by indiscriminate internet commenting is negligible...

So that was an attempt to point out that, when you make claims like you did, with no supporting evidence, others can also make claims with no supporting evidence. Why should we take your claim seriously, and not mine?

But apparently that was a mistake, because you answered my "claim" as if it were a serious one, instead of a random thing thrown out there with the same structure as your claim.

My point was that anyone can claim that anything is a mental illness. Without something more to back it up, it's just someone pontificating on the internet.

The rest of my post was an attempt to get you to supply something to back up your position, because I didn't get it in your initial post.

> The damage caused by wealth hoarding is tangible...

Yeah? Then state what it is, and demonstrate that the damage is actual rather than theoretical. Don't assume that we all agree with you that it is.

> It's concerning that when posed with an opinion, you jump to an Ad Hominem point of view. Who I am is not important, and you should judge my comment on whether it raises an interesting point worthy of discussion or further consideration.

You're stating that something should be considered a mental illness. My evaluation of that claim depends a great deal on whether you know anything about what is or is not mental illness. So far, it looks like you are labeling as , with no actual connection beyond that. And that would have just been a bad rhetorical device, except that you went on to advocate locking them up. If you're going to advocate locking up people for mental illness, it matters a great deal whether you are a competent mental health professional.

> I don't know about him apart from what I just saw on Wikipedia, so I can't help dissect which people have been disadvantaged to gain him massive profits.

But, by saying "which people", you seem to be assuming that there are some. But again, you provide no evidence whatsoever, nor even an argument - you just state it as if it must be so.

> However, your language indicates that you are trying to pick an argument, despite not actually providing any counter-argument...

Well, see, my problem with your post was that you didn't provide an argument. You made a massive claim that was completely unsupported. The burden of proof was on you to demonstrate why we should take your claim seriously. You didn't even attempt to do that. My reply was an attempt (apparently a bad one) to point that out, and to try to get you to meet that burden of proof, so that we could have something of substance to talk about.

Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says

#79

Post by harimau777 »

makomk wrote: post #49
eli wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems silly to debate a hypothetical tax you extrapolated from a single sentence. The "billionaire's tax" Biden proposed earlier this year is closer an income tax that also includes unrealized gains and only if there are tens of millions in unrealized gains in that year. That said: you pay property tax even if the value of your home declines. It's not that crazy.

The whole point of proposals like the one the entire linked article is about is to make it seem like vast sums of money can be raised from seemingly small taxes on a few wealthy people by definining those taxes as an annual percentage of total wealth rather than income. The framing is meant to trick readers into mentally comparing the 2% tax it proposes and the 0-0.5% tax it claims the wealthy are currently paying wi…

I'd compare the 2% tax to the average yearly gain in the stock market. Based on https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/average-stock-m... it appears that the overage again is about 7% to 10% depending on how you figure it. The rule of thumb that I've heard in investing is 5%.

Therefore, my conclusion is that a 2% wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy on average wouldn't even keep them from gaining wealth; they would just increase their wealth more slowly.

Re: Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says

#80

Post by dbsights »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #63
ljm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There's nothing inherently being wrong with a billionare I disagree. The amount of money that a person can effectively use (or need) during their lifetime is likely to be less than half a billion. The people who have any kind of social conscience would reach their desired amount of wealth and wouldn't want to continue accumulating it as they know it's purely at the expense of other people and invariably the rich pe…

> wouldn't want to continue accumulating it as they know it's purely at the expense of other people

> Therefore, having a billion dollars is a clear sign that millions of people have been exploited by that billionaire.

When two people enter a trade freely, they both come out richer. How is that at the expense of other people?

You sound like a communist.

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