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>The idea that you work hard and pay your income taxes, while I live off your enforced kindness, doing nothing by choice, is untenable. If a universal basic inc

by pliny 10y ago

>The idea that you work hard and pay your income taxes, while I live off your enforced kindness, doing nothing by choice, is untenable. If a universal basic income is to be legitimate, it cannot be financed by taxing Jill to pay Jack. That is why it should be funded not from taxation, but from returns on capital. Capital is savings is unconsumed income. "Universal dividend" is another name for tax on investment which is another name for tax on income. Whether confiscating income to pay for leisure is "untenable" shouldn't depend on the name you give the act of confiscating income. In the end, a corporation is a machine that takes investment now and distributes dividends later, and the reason why the investment occurs is the promise of dividends. A corporation has to distribute $100 in dividends to get $75 into the hands of its investors (given a tax on capital gains of 25%), or it has to distribute $100 in dividends to get $75 dollars into the hands of its investors and $25 for the government because the government confiscated 25% of the IPO... what's the difference? I guess in Varoufakis' model people can still buy, like, gold as an investment and enjoy preferential taxation.

sooheon 10y ago
Not posting to disagree, necessarily, just to state my somewhat muddled thoughts and ask for your critique. > Capital is savings is unconsumed income. If you think of it that way you can pretty much equivocate capital and income tax. The way that they differ in reality is that subsistence laborers generally have no reason to pay capital tax. For the rich, capital tax is a huge proportion of their tax burden. Picture an heiress who does not earn a salary a day in her life. Modern trends of decreasing capital tax leads to effectively a regressive total tax structure. I think the author is essentially arguing for a more progressive tax, in a way that feels more "fair".
- pliny 10y ago
  >If you think of it that way you can pretty much equivocate capital and income tax They are equivalent. Income is only good for consumption and investment (which is just deferred consumption), so if you tax income and you also tax everything that income is used for, you have taxed the same income twice. In fact income used to buy equity is taxed three times, first when it is earned, second every time the company reports a profit and then third every time the company issues a dividend. But all of these are collected on the "same" money. If you want the rich to have a greater part of the tax burden, that's fine, but Varoufakis pretends he can argue against income tax in one paragraph, and argue for a functionally identical revenue scheme in the next.
jawbone3 10y ago
Well no, with the hich capital concentrations we have now, most captial is inheritance and so cannot be counted as saved income of the individual that owns it. Further, saved wages merely seed capital accumulation, so that most capital comes from investment returns and not wages. So the critical question here is if investment is different frome wage work?

by pliny 10y ago

sooheon 10y ago

Not posting to disagree, necessarily, just to state my somewhat muddled thoughts and ask for your critique. > Capital is savings is unconsumed income. If you think of it that way you can pretty much equivocate capital and income tax. The way that they differ in reality is that subsistence laborers generally have no reason to pay capital tax. For the rich, capital tax is a huge proportion of their tax burden. Picture an heiress who does not earn a salary a day in her life. Modern trends of decreasing capital tax leads to effectively a regressive total tax structure. I think the author is essentially arguing for a more progressive tax, in a way that feels more "fair".

pliny 10y ago
>If you think of it that way you can pretty much equivocate capital and income tax They are equivalent. Income is only good for consumption and investment (which is just deferred consumption), so if you tax income and you also tax everything that income is used for, you have taxed the same income twice. In fact income used to buy equity is taxed three times, first when it is earned, second every time the company reports a profit and then third every time the company issues a dividend. But all of these are collected on the "same" money. If you want the rich to have a greater part of the tax burden, that's fine, but Varoufakis pretends he can argue against income tax in one paragraph, and argue for a functionally identical revenue scheme in the next.

jawbone3 10y ago

Well no, with the hich capital concentrations we have now, most captial is inheritance and so cannot be counted as saved income of the individual that owns it. Further, saved wages merely seed capital accumulation, so that most capital comes from investment returns and not wages. So the critical question here is if investment is different frome wage work?