this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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Wealth Tax
I am against any wealth tax. The revenue services for many governments are very focused on not blocking economic growth, and then periodically taking a reasonable amount of wealth.
In the end, only wealth can be taxed (things that aren't physical can't be seized and auctioned). However, I don't want to be forced to let someone into my house to calculate how much stuff I have.
In general, I think it’s more reasonable to monitor wealth moving (and more so if wealth moves between people) rather than to force people to cooperate with monitoring wealth staying in the same place. I don’t want someone checking up on whether I own the same stock certificates or gold bars each year; that seems like an insult to my dignity.
Enforcement Complications
Distribution
I don't think that focusing on people who already pay a disproportionate amount of tax will be very helpful. Rapidly changing what is taxed (wealth vs income) would probably be harmful, as people will probably have trouble adapting to significantly different policies. For example, we'd probably hear about people who happen to have inherited expensive houses being unable to pay thousands of dollars for tax bills, after thinking that they wouldn't be affected by policy changes.
Avoidance
If there was a wealth tax and I was rich enough to spend a lot of time managing my money, I would just create a "charitable organization" that I and my family completely control, then have it pay people to do things I would want them to do anyway, and maybe even try to let the charity pay a high wage to its managers (such that I could be a manager and get the charity to pay for my yearly living expenses, directly or indirectly). I also might be able to get away with using a trust or charitable remainder trust to avoid being affected by a wealth tax.
I don't know the degree to which tax exempt organizations affect my life, but I do know that trusts have a relevant affect on my life, since they are often used to own land, specifically by landlords of housing and by people who own land that is worth a lot of money. How they are dealt with would probably have to significantly change in order to accommodate a wealth tax.
Inheritance Tax
I'm not sure I'm against inheritance tax, but it might be an unnecessary complication. Treating inheritance like a gift from one person to another at the moment of their death might make things easier for everyone. The policies regarding gifts are relatively clear: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/gift-tax https://www.irs.gov/faqs/capital-gains-losses-and-sale-of-home/property-basis-sale-of-home-etc/property-basis-sale-of-home-etc
However, having separate inheritance law might also make things less painful for some people. If my assets suddenly gained or lost a large amount of value just before I died, I wouldn't want that to justify taking more wealth from my heirs. Having a special way to value assets gained due to someone dying might be more reasonable than treating each receipt as a gift.
I would give up my US citizenship if it were passed. It's enough I live abroad and still pay taxes for my dividends. If you start taxing my investments directly, I'll have to get a different passport
The US is the only country I know of that practises this.
I've been told Hungary does, though I haven't heard much about it until recently: https://www.uscisguide.com/dual-citizenship/u-s-dual-citizenship-and-taxes-with-hungary/
I've also been told South Africa and Eritrea do, and I wouldn't be surprised if places like North Korea and Turkmenistan do too.
Somehow Hungary gets a score of 30/50 for taxation for 2024 from https://nomadcapitalist.com/nomad-passport-index/ (United States and South Africa and Eritrea get 10, North Korea and Turkmenistan get 20) but I'd be suspicious of anywhere with a lower rating than 30.
Do you have a source for this? I see that "wealth taxes have failed in Europe", and it seems that places with a wealth tax were mostly in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264290303-4-en
One example that caught my attention is Belgium, which introduced an "annual tax on securities accounts", which suggests that they were taxing resources that were invested already.
I can imagine that it's possible for government spending to produce more economic growth than would have happened without taxation, but the entire point of money is to have a multitude of people working towards prosperity in ways that can't be predicted by state authorities, so if there are more taxes it seems likely that economic growth will be reduced.
Of course, an analysis would have to account for things like using resources from a wealth tax to make cheap/free healthcare available, which might then make people vastly more productive such that any negative effects of a wealth tax are neutralized. Also, providing an obviously higher quality of life might be worth some cost.
Is a car or shirt or house personal property? It seems things like that are seized in response to people not paying revenue services: https://home.treasury.gov/services/treasury-auctions https://www.treasury.gov/auctions/treasury/gp/index.html https://www.cwsmarketing.com/?p=36139 https://auctions.cwsmarketing.com/auctions/1-9DDP42/gp-dayton-nj-live-wsimulcast-august-21 https://auctions.cwsmarketing.com/lots/view/1-9DE12Y/wearing-apparel-riverside-ca
I do see that items had bids much higher than I'd expect, and they were being auctioned at the same time watches and jewellery and electric motorcycles and trailers, so I suspect any clothing was "luxury" in some way, or the auction was for more clothing than is documented with pictures.
I reference "dignity" because it's part of "the unshakeable foundation of the Republic of Poland", and thinking about dignity seems like a good way to tell if something is a bad idea, and I probably wouldn't feel like I had more dignity than 1 month ago if I was having my car or house seized because I hadn't paid as much taxes as a revenue service thought I should. I expect that you will have more trouble implementing policies you like if you express that you're disregarding dignity.
I expect that this is true.
I'm certainly for social change, and people with entrenched interests will probably try to hamper it. However, other people might not want to cooperate with you if you remind them of the Soviet Union, and I expect that saying "we should remove the capitalist class" will do that.
If you don't care about the IRS, why are you talking about a wealth tax using English? I suspect that that the majority of people who speak English as well as you do are U.S. citizens, so I'd assume you were interested in speaking to U.S. citizens. Are you trying to talk to people in Europe / worldwide in a common language?
Who is the target audience for your messages? I'm interested in where/how you're focusing your efforts.
What misinformation am I repeating? I wouldn't have written a statement that I don't think is true, so I suggest you point out anything you think is incorrect and explain your perspective, and maybe share a URL for some more interesting sources.
Note: I originally pressed "Reply" too early by mistake, so I edited this text. Originally I had only written "Is a car or shirt or house personal property?" and one URL.
This is misinformation, because it paints a picture of the rich being hard done by.
The bottom 50% pays an actual tax rate that is a higher percentage of their earnings than the top 50%. The richer you are, the more opportunity you have to reduce your tax burden. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-much-poor-actually-pay-taxes-probably-think
Your own numbers are an indicator of massive income disparity.
I think the tax system in the USA is designed to reward people who form corporations and then get people employed. People who are employed don't have as much time to work on reforming institutions, so giving a tax break for employing people makes powerful people's lives easier. In order to keep this process revenue neutral, earned income is taxed instead of taxing business as much. After extracting money from people's labor (since labor is clearly necessary in order to create wealth), the remainder of budget needs is made up from whatever resources are easily available (which is currently the assets of rich people, since they have been given a lot of money to get people employed).
Yeah dude. The value of these corporations in inflated or neutral at best. Corporations pop up that are solely created to shelter or exploit to expand wealth.
It's not actually higher:
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/
Top 1% pay 25.9% of their income to taxes, bottom 50% pay 3.3%
That doesn't take into account non federal tax.
https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/
This says it more explicitly.
Also, reported income is not the same for regular people and the top 1%. Tax evasion techniques makes it seem as if they have way less income than they really have.
EDIT: I do realize some of this could be incorporated into the statement of your quote above.
Yeah dude it's all a game :/
Can I pay my rent with unrealized capital gains?
@iopq Not you.. but yes it's possible and generally it creates financial bubbles. Basically using your capital as collateral on your mortgage. An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpV1FS-gRZw (4:50)
But then I'd have to take out loans to pay my taxes which is absurd. I'll have to pay taxes on money that I don't physically have
@iopq You asked about rent, not taxes. They actually avoid taxes in this way. And yes, using money they don't physically have is exactly the source of all financial bubbles.
I'm saying you can't pay with paper money, you must pay with real money for everything.
I'm not against considering loans against unrealized assets as realization (with stepped up basis) since the person taking out said loan can use it to pay said tax.
People do this exact thing all the time. Taking on debts to keep cashflow or avoid taxes is normal.
If you are just sitting on unproductive assets instead of realising their value in some way, you are doing the wrong thing.
You should be able to gain revenue from the asset or it wouldn't have appreciating value.
All your comments don't make sense, it's like you just want to take from the economy without giving anything back.
I forgot the most obvious example:
If you bought a house for $200,000 and when you retire it's worth $1,000,000 the government shouldn't demand you pay a percentage of your "gain" for the rest of your life or until you are forced to sell it.
Why not
Taxes bad?
You are saying you want to tax retired people with no income just because they have a place to live in. Should we kick them out for nonpayment of said taxes too? Because that's what would happen. It happens in states with property taxes, but now you want to take it national.
This is the problem with leftists. This message would be an extremely bad electoral platform.
Zero cashflow retirees are not a thing.
ALL states have property tax.
You don't know what you are talking about if you don't understand how taxes are offset and credited. You are just whining about not wanting to participate in society.
Taxes pay for things, go get educated.
They have social security and some of them have savings. My mom is planning to retire in West Virginia and she's already planning on selling her current residence to build a house there. She chose a low property tax state on purpose.
At this point she would only receive social security and start to go through her savings to live. You want to start charging her federal taxes the moment her property is worth $1 more than what she bought it for, even though she's on fixed income.
Yup. And then credit it against standard deduction rates so that 🤡s owning multiple unoccupied homes pay real amounts while your grandmother pays pennies
Like a normal tax system, you doink
She owns one home now and one plot of land. She doesn't own multiple unoccupied homes. She's also my mother, not my grandmother
Are you a bot or something?
Please answer in ASCII semaphore or French if you don't know semaphore.
Let's say I give $100,000 to a friend that starts a start-up. You claim after some years that investment is worth $1,000,000 and want me to pay $150,000 tax
I take out a loan for $150,000 because the startup didn't make any profit. The startup goes bust. I now have a $100,000 loss and I paid $150,000 in taxes. Thankfully I can write $3000 off on my taxes every year until I die!
If the startup made no profit it would never be worth 1000000. You would only have a capital gain if value was realizable.
If you never made a dime from your initial 100000 investment you would sell off the asset at that point instead of paying taxes.
If you were too dumb to sell parts of your assets, and instead chose to be cash negative or fail to pay your taxes, you kind of deserve to lose everything because you were too stubborn to receive advice from anybody.
Amazon had its first profitable year in 2003. It was worth 21 billion dollars.
Yes, but how much cashflow did it have, and how much in dividends did the individual stakeholders receive.
It never didn't pay it's taxes afaik
Edit: I'm fact checking myself, Amazon's strategy is reinvesting all profits to support further growth. They were never in a position like the other poster is describing.
There were companies that didn't survive the dot com crash despite being worth billions. Amazon is a company you would recognize, even though a better company is pets.com
If you bought their stock you would be very rich for a very short while until it went bankrupt
https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/revenues_annual
For reference
Did I say zero revenue? I said didn't make a profit. Lots of companies made money, but couldn't make more money than they spent. You can easily have an investment that is valued high that you can't cash out
Let's say you bought some stock now, at the end of the year it's worth $1,000,000 and you get charged $150,000 in April. Big problem, the brokerages stopped allowing you to sell the stock and it crashed down, so now your GameStop stock is worth $100,000
How do you pay?
You don't pay... This is a solved problem, wealth gain/loss would work the same way as capital gain/loss
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individuals/topics/about-your-tax-return/tax-return/completing-a-tax-return/personal-income/line-12700-capital-gains/capital-losses-deductions/you-use-a-capital-loss.html
It feels like people that don't like this don't actually know how to whole system is supposed to work.
Canada?!
The (then) right-wing Norwegian government (left-wing by US standards ordered a study because they wanted to claim this. The results (source in Norwegian, use a translator) were the opposite of what they wanted.
For example: "the businesses used more money on their workers when the stock owners were subjected to higher wealth tax" (paraphrasing here).
Yes.
Yea, not sure I care about the right-wingers in Poland either.
Well, I think we should be honest about our intentions, unlike the capitalist class that tell you "brown people" or "the economy" is the reason they pay you slave wages.
The part about seizing personal property to pay taxes, for instance. A progressive tax system can have bottom tiers paying no taxes. The right are those who impose high tax rates on the middle class and poor, in order to make them hate taxes.
I thought this was going to be fun satire.
You don't really know how anything works if you think all this.
How do things work? I provided my perspective, partly so that I could refer to it later, so it would be enlightening to learn about yours.
Nah
Question is, do you know how much the tax revenue is in your area
Is that tax revenue transaction based or wealth based
Would taxing in your paradigm be reasonable or sustainable in the context of the government expenditures in your area?
FYI, I think that focusing on proportional representation electoral reform is the best way to increase respect to the inherent dignity of the person, and that to "choose a defining fight" is better than trying to focus on more than one thing.
I happen to be interested in tax policy, but I would prefer for the electoral system to improve before tax policies change.
See also !fairvote@lemmy.ca / https://sh.itjust.works/comment/12708609