91–98 of 98 posts
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They pay 2% on their wealth.
Their wealth is usually stock in companies they founded.... Billionaires don't sit around with a billion dollars in their checking accounts.
Even without a wealth taxes there are situations where someone may need to borrow or sell assets to cover a tax bill. The billionaires will be ok.
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I don't know what you're arguing. You can contest the appraised value but rarely will you win unless it's egregious.
The appraised value is rarely very tightly linked to the actual value of the house. It gets adjusted once in a while, and if it's too high you can bring it down, but otherwise the appraisal tends to adjust with inflation while the house price tends to float relative to it.
> It gets adjusted once in a while
It gets adjusted nearly every year for most people.
> if it's too high you can bring it down
No, you can't. Not really.
Personally, my property taxes are about 2.25% on a appraised value that is about 70% of the actual home value. This sounds great, let's use these numbers for a wealth tax.
Unrealized capital gains are not income. This article wants a wealth tax because they think this is "income" that is going untaxed.
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.
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The appraised value is rarely very tightly linked to the actual value of the house. It gets adjusted once in a while, and if it's too high you can bring it down, but otherwise the appraisal tends to adjust with inflation while the house price tends to float relative to it.
I just don't understand how this has anything to do with the wealth tax. It's not an argument against a wealth tax, it's an argument in favor of a specific implementation: what value we're using to calculate the tax. > It gets adjusted once in a while It gets adjusted nearly every year for most people. > if it's too high you can bring it down No, you can't. Not really. Personally, my property taxes are about 2.25% on…
For inflation, yes. Real re-valuations that mark the house to market are a lot more rare, and tend to only happen when a house is sold.
> No, you can't. Not really.
I have personally done this a couple of times, and all it tends to take is a nice letter explaining why the value is too high. At worst you need to get a new appraisal to support the letter. The value is rarely too high, though.
Property taxes in my area are also relative: the tax rate floats depending on how much the local government needs to raise. The sum of the appraisals for the city is added up, and your property tax is your proportional share of the total amount that needs to be raised. For me, that's usually around 1-1.5%.
This is all to say that property tax is not at all a tax on unrealized gains of your house. It's a tax on an imaginary number that occasionally adjusts to be similar to your unrealized gains, and often even has a rate that floats relative to it.
I get that otherwise we're kinda just as bad as China, but so many of our laws and tax codes have become so toothless to billionaires without some kind of major legislative reset. And I don't see that happening on its own.
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People can be envious of the richest percentile when they are simply richer. They start to look at them with hate only when according to usual metrics, a few become ever more rich while most actually see their wealth level decrease whatever the legal path they take. This is not good for anyone, because history show that the next expectable step is blood bath, be it through mass repression or cutting heads of the perc…
History might play out differently if the targets could escape to lunar habitats in their respective private rockets. We're almost in James Bond supervillain territory.
Escaping on a private island, be it literally or more metaphorically, is still a far more realist option, and also a far more cozy one.
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I just don't understand how this has anything to do with the wealth tax. It's not an argument against a wealth tax, it's an argument in favor of a specific implementation: what value we're using to calculate the tax. > It gets adjusted once in a while It gets adjusted nearly every year for most people. > if it's too high you can bring it down No, you can't. Not really. Personally, my property taxes are about 2.25% on…
> It gets adjusted nearly every year for most people. For inflation, yes. Real re-valuations that mark the house to market are a lot more rare, and tend to only happen when a house is sold. > No, you can't. Not really. I have personally done this a couple of times, and all it tends to take is a nice letter explaining why the value is too high. At worst you need to get a new appraisal to support the letter. The value…