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Modeling a Wealth Tax

paulgraham.com

771–780 of 1001 posts

Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax

#771
What is not mentioned is that the Fed's printing of money IS a tax that is applied to every single dollar. The resulting cash horde was then used to purchase bonds, thereby "injecting liquidity" into the financial system.

Aka banks suddenly had cash to buy stocks, so they bought a lot of stocks.

End result is the Fed's everybody tax wound up actually taxing poor people. A "poor" tax. The wealthy wound up with this money in scads.

So... what Paul fails to mention is that his stock portfolio likely nearly doubled over the past 3 months. Using his math it will take 60 years to return to where it was 4 months ago.

This is why we need a wealth tax. Admittedly it's a bit like swallowing the cat to catch the bird...

Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax

#772
post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right so the government that already has enough money to fund all those good public services will suddenly stop funding the military to a ridiculous degree and finally use taxes for the best interest of the people?

Oh, I don't disagree at all! Government spending is currently not how I would allocate things. But somehow I expect that wherever taxes were going, rich people would be displeased with the amount of taxes they were being told to pay. And honestly, I don't blame them, it's a very natural feeling, I'd rather not pay taxes either. Here's my thinking: as a society, we should decide on what needs to be handled by the gove…

We should also work out the costs of not having good cheap public healthcare, education, infrastructure - and not also having public access to the best R&D talent because it's working to make billionaires even richer through clever rent-extraction strategies from the markets.

And so on.

All of these negatives cost money. Aside from the humanitarian considerations - not trivial - they're a huge drag on social mobility, innovation, and business opportunity.

The fact that some people feel irrationally inconvenienced by the prospect of extra taxes - which in reality will not materially affect them or their opportunities in any significant way - is an unconvincing reason to ignore the staggering social, economic, and political costs of their uniquely privileged position.

Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax

#773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>First, any wealth tax being seriously discussed has a floor and/or has marginal rates, probably starting at 1 or 5 or 10 million (or higher). Uh huh. >Second, taxes don't disappear into nothingness - they pay for civilization. But there are bad taxes. There is such a thing as too much tax. So you have to justify the wealth tax on its own merits instead of trying to pull a motte-and-bailey fallacy by pushing a wealth…

PG is tone deaf and missing the mood of the nation here. He says: > Even a .5% wealth tax would start to keep founders away from a state or country that imposed it. Mr Graham doesn't consider the possibility of startup founders leaving / kept away from a place that doesn't impose a wealth tax. I am not a successful startup founder (yet), but I would consider it my duty to live in /start a company in a place with bett…

>PG is tone deaf and missing the mood of the nation here.

Twitter is not 'the mood of the nation'. You are not representative of 'the mood of the nation'. In fact, you're an outlier.

>The idea behind increasing taxes on the wealthy is to build a better society for everyone - including the wealthy!

You're trying to pull the same fast one as OP. Wealth tax is not the same as increasing taxes on the wealthy. You can make an argument that taxes should be increased and at the same time see that the wealth tax is a terrible way to do it.

> Why should wealth tax not be a part of modern economy?

Because it's a bad tax. It doesn't work. It doesn't bring revenue you think it does. It's expensive to administer and enforce. And it has many bad unintended consequences.

Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax

#774
post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inequality in your country has risen dramatically the past 30 years. That's what your legislators are trying to address. A lot of value is created in the early stages. Should that be exempt? Remember, companies don't exist primarily to pay back investors, their first objective is to contribute to society. My €0.05

> Remember, companies don't exist primarily to pay back investors, their first objective is to contribute to society. If a company does pay back investors, that almost always means that it has contributed to society on net. Let me explain. If people don't pay for a company's products, that company will go out of business. Unlike a government, a company has little coercive power. If I refuse to use Facebook, Mark Zuck…

> If I refuse to use Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg can't send men with guns to my home and force me to create an account. Even companies that benefit from network effects (such as social media companies) must build compelling products that people want to use.

If this was 2008 you may have an argument. It isn't and in 2020 I have no choice about using Facebook. Even if I delete my account I am still their product just by virtue of being on the web. Or existing.

Last year I was tagged in a photo from a camping trip by a person I met on that trip. That person's brother's girlfriend used to work with a guy I know from a totally different circle of people. He asked me about my camping trip because FB made the connections just based on who is in the picture.

I don't need a FB account for this to be possible, deleting my account doesn't prevent this.

Zuckerberg doesn't need to send goons to my house. He already has surveillance on my camping trips.

> As long as we ensure that parties pay the cost of the externalities they create, [...]

Right but we don't do that. The rest of your argument collapses when this assumption doesn't hold.

> The alternative to this is a world in which the majority decides for everyone what is beneficial to society or not.

You mean like a democracy?

> Considering the competence of the average voter (and the competence of our government), I'd prefer to err on the side of non-intervention.

Woah so who gets to make choices for the unwashed masses?

Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax

#775
post #704

This is simplistic to the point of absurdity, and doesn't model how any sensible wealth tax would be implemented or paid. First, any wealth tax being seriously discussed has a floor and/or has marginal rates, probably starting at 1 or 5 or 10 million (or higher). Second, taxes don't disappear into nothingness - they pay for civilization. It is clearly beneficial to everyone to live in a society where people are well…

Don't forget that Paul's stock portfolio doubled in the past 4 months on the back of a "poor tax"... what the Fed printed and gave to banks to buy stocks (via buying bonds).

Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax

#776
post #704

This is simplistic to the point of absurdity, and doesn't model how any sensible wealth tax would be implemented or paid. First, any wealth tax being seriously discussed has a floor and/or has marginal rates, probably starting at 1 or 5 or 10 million (or higher). Second, taxes don't disappear into nothingness - they pay for civilization. It is clearly beneficial to everyone to live in a society where people are well…

If Americans are temporarily embarrassed millionaires, then many of the good people on HN are temporarily embarrassed tech billionaires.

Silicon Valley is full of millionaires who are temporarily embarrassed tech billionaires. Thus, why they come out in threads like this so wildly. Slow day at the home office - I guess.

The amount of people I know with millions in assets but think they're poor and will someday be a billionaire is astounding. ("I just bought a nice vacation home in Lake Tahoe and a rental property in Santa Clara but I'm struggling with my little home in Palo Alto, you know? I barely have any money." - real example I've encountered multiple times) They're, of course, against wealth taxes. They are all convinced they're gonna be the next billionaire and that any taxes will absolutely destroy them in their path to ... whatever their destination is. (They don't even know - they all just want recognition)

Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax

#777
post #704

This is simplistic to the point of absurdity, and doesn't model how any sensible wealth tax would be implemented or paid. First, any wealth tax being seriously discussed has a floor and/or has marginal rates, probably starting at 1 or 5 or 10 million (or higher). Second, taxes don't disappear into nothingness - they pay for civilization. It is clearly beneficial to everyone to live in a society where people are well…

Not to mention that real estate taxes and excise taxes charged as a % of value are already understood wealth taxes already. No problem there.

Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax

#778
post #704

This is simplistic to the point of absurdity, and doesn't model how any sensible wealth tax would be implemented or paid. First, any wealth tax being seriously discussed has a floor and/or has marginal rates, probably starting at 1 or 5 or 10 million (or higher). Second, taxes don't disappear into nothingness - they pay for civilization. It is clearly beneficial to everyone to live in a society where people are well…

> the idea that people [read: super rich] "will just move to another country" is very silly.

This is a recurring theme in owners/investors: they always have some story that they will be forced to leave or close shop if some labour-proteaction-laws (like weekends, or 8h days, or banning of child labour), or taxes are implemented. It's a very old story, there's a history to it.

Please note that we have weekends/8h work day/ban on child labour and also still have the super rich. They never left. They did pass law that allow them to shift production overseas. But those laws can be repelled and then we will hear the story again of how this will kill their business,or force them to leave.

Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax

#779

I would much prefer a 'cash on hand' tax that would tax yearly the cash on hand that exceeds $1B. That private companies can just sit on all this capital rather than putting it to work in the economy is a real problem. It harms GDP and it harms working class people. By some estimates its $325B[1]. If we forced companies to invest that cash in new ventures rather than sit on it, it would be a win. [1] https://www.inve…

Nobody sits on cash. Even cash on deposit in a bank isn't in the bank - a multiple of it gets loaned out to businesses and home buyers.

Sort of and sort of not. Companies do sit on cash. Their cash equivalent accounts are designed so that they can be reliably liquidated in under 30, 60, and 90 days and have no chance of a reduction in principal amount.

The kinds of "investments" that allows for are thus quite limited to things such as treasury bonds, certificates of deposit, and some very special case derivative instruments.

Those are not the sort of investments that build houses or get loaned out to businesses.

Re: Modeling a Wealth Tax

#780
post #726

I would much prefer a 'cash on hand' tax that would tax yearly the cash on hand that exceeds $1B. That private companies can just sit on all this capital rather than putting it to work in the economy is a real problem. It harms GDP and it harms working class people. By some estimates its $325B[1]. If we forced companies to invest that cash in new ventures rather than sit on it, it would be a win. [1] https://www.inve…

You can deduce that cash on hand harms nobody by doing a thought experiment. If there were a company sitting on $100 trillion in cash - enough to make everyone else's money just a small fraction of the total - how would that hurt anybody? It wouldn't. Idle cash harms no one. You could make the argument that the cash has the potential to be spent in large influential harmful ways, like on elections or something, but t…

First of all, if a person or company were sitting on $100 trillion in cash it benefits the hoarder of this cash because they now wield inexorable control over the economy. In a nation like the US this is counter-democratic.

> You could make the argument that the cash has the potential to be spent in large influential harmful ways, like on elections or something, but that's a very different topic.

It's totally not a different topic. You can't talk about the dimensions of money like they aren't interrelated. A wielder of $100T has the potential to harm. Whether it's because there's already too much liquidity in the economy and movement of that $100T would cause massive inflation, or because there's too little money to make the economic engine hum the $100T would be much better off in the hands of those who would send it flowing through the veins of the system. There's other less straightforward ways it could work -- the economy could start tilting to service the needs of the entity holding $100T (e.g build $1T rocketships to mars rather than planting food for everyone else). In general lack of economic diversity is going to cause issues.

> You can deduce that cash on hand harms nobody by doing a thought experiment.

If you have $100T it's going to grow or fall, and the process of getting there meant taking liquidity out of the system. Liquidity is super important, after all, economic demand is not "I want X," it's "I want X and am willing and able to pay for X." Can't vote with dollars if you haven't got dollars. The latter part of this is what fails as cash pools into certain economic outlets (read: billionaires).

The fed, appointed by our elected government, uses monetary policy to try to avoid this outcome, but if a small group of unaccountable private individuals who have a lot of money end up wielding this same power, it gets bad -- the effect that billionaires have is that they attenuate signal from the economy about what goods/services would most benefit humans in aggregate. The efficiency of capitalism dies when all the decisionmaking is left to a few parties. The beauty of capitalism is most apparent when there is a diversity of demand. This is why many are calling for fiscal policy with the goal of rebalancing the "dollar vote."

At a minimum cash that isn't moving isn't being useful in the economic system, and that can be hurting folks who need that money to be put in their hands to drive demand. I don't think you can say today's system is in any way near perfect, since folks still die for want of food and medicine because cash has not been mustered to direct the economy in a direction that spreads the wealth.

The new hotness is the idea that if you put money in the hands of the people (e.g UBI but also smaller ways like making transportation, mail, schools, healthcare more affordable) you steer the economy in a direction that produces goods and services that lift everyone's quality of life, not just the quality of life for a few. The rich may pay, but they get the money back because they have capital assets and the economy doing well increases those assets. A wealth tax is one way to help us head in that direction -- the direction of rebalancing economic control to make things more sustainable and good for most humans.

Oversimplifying of course because this is in response to a thought experiment. Sadly we are also failing at dealing with capitalist externalities like climate change and decimation of our natural resources.

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