4 ms·
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
by 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.