81–90 of 246 posts
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Taxes usually only apply to income, not assets.
So wealth tax then! It’s really just a question of finding metrics and then sending people bills to force them to liquidate or whatever
Seems almost impossible to implement
This may be unpopular, but the hard thing in this discussion is to differentiate between consumption and investment. It does not help much to take wealth in terms of equity paper money away from people who know how to invest it efficiently and distribute it. On the other hand, there are minimum basic needs for consumption of food, health services, shelter, education etc. I agree that the system to finance those servi…
So when you actually look at investments made by billionaires they tend to underperform. Part of this is simply seeking low risk diversification, but another part is many people assuming that because past risk taking worked so will future risk taking.
This becomes really obvious when you start looking into former billionaires. Vast fortunes regularly evaporate.
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Let's say I start a Saas company and it does really well. Somebody offers to invest at a valuation of 25$ million bucks. By most standards of evaluation net worth- I'm worth $25 million bucks now. who seizes ownership of my company? What's to stop me from offering you $10 bucks for .0001% of your company and making you illegally rich? Taxes on net worth won't work because net worth is abstract
The tax could be such that you are forced to turn over shares in the company to the state. The bigger you get, the more shares you have to give to them, the more influence they have on company decisions. In theory, this would act sort of as a general purpose regulation. Instead of using the force of law to make companies comply, it uses the force of its share votes. Of course, there are a bunch of ways this kind of s…
And we all know how efficient government bureaucrats are. I can just imagine the joys of having civil servants dictating how you should run your company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say I start a Saas company and it does really well. Somebody offers to invest at a valuation of 25$ million bucks. By most standards of evaluation net worth- I'm worth $25 million bucks now. who seizes ownership of my company? What's to stop me from offering you $10 bucks for .0001% of your company and making you illegally rich? Taxes on net worth won't work because net worth is abstract
It's abstract until it isn't. Is the offer to invest 25$ million abstract?
Same as it ever was. Who needs to pay more taxes? Those people over there.
Surely they should. Every sane being with a hint of a sense of justice and empathy surely agree.
But they won't. Because they pay a lot less to just the right people so it will never happen.
If i got taxed at the same rate as millionaire and billionaires did, i'd be rich too. Just tax them at the same rate you tax Johnny Average. edit: and tax their companies at the same rate local mom-and-pop stores/bakeries/... get taxed.
Most "billionaires" have no where near a billion to tax. This is the problem with net worth, its a made-up number. Most billionaires own companies which are "worth in principle" something to someone. You can only tax that if you force them to sell, and if they can find a buyer. Do that, and the number of billionaires would precipitously drop from a global few thousand, to a few hundred.
And also, compare taxes eg. amazon pays to taxes your local mom-and-pop store pays (percentual)... [0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/03/why-amazon-paid-no-federal-i...
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What would this policy look like? Government seizing shares of companies from people if their valuation rises too much?
We have that already and it's called taxation. What would change would be that it would include a wealth tax that goes to 100% after that threshold. Oh, but don't worry. Greed is such an amazing motivator that it wouldn't take a decade before we accomplished meeting those basic needs.
Honestly so much time is spent on taxes. In terms of avoiding, discussing and modifying. Will there ever be a simple and easy solution?
We could start by overturning "Citizens United". I don't have any hope for that happening any time soon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say I start a Saas company and it does really well. Somebody offers to invest at a valuation of 25$ million bucks. By most standards of evaluation net worth- I'm worth $25 million bucks now. who seizes ownership of my company? What's to stop me from offering you $10 bucks for .0001% of your company and making you illegally rich? Taxes on net worth won't work because net worth is abstract
The tax could be such that you are forced to turn over shares in the company to the state. The bigger you get, the more shares you have to give to them, the more influence they have on company decisions. In theory, this would act sort of as a general purpose regulation. Instead of using the force of law to make companies comply, it uses the force of its share votes. Of course, there are a bunch of ways this kind of s…