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You can do a wealth tax by targeting the big ticket items. Rather than invade everyone's home with tax collectors to guesstimate how much every couch cushion yo
by zanny 9y ago
You can do a wealth tax by targeting the big ticket items. Rather than invade everyone's home with tax collectors to guesstimate how much every couch cushion you have is worth, you can hit probably 98% of wealth by just taxing the calculated value of owned land and buildings (which is already being appraised for property taxes in most states) and stocks, bonds, and options.
So we already invade your privacy to appraise the former, and the later has to be be public because companies need to know who owns what shares and the trading platforms need to associate users to shares they own. Both can be used by government to provide ownership details.
You would also want to wealth tax companies for total global cash-on-hand assets they have as well. Those are also required to be public record already. That way private business executives cannot tax haven their own stuff under an LLC, and companies like Google / FB are punished for hoarding hundreds of billions in offshore accounts they have no intent to spend or bring back into the states.
Of course, this is all saying "government should do X" which is just for entertainment, pretty much. The US is in no condition to act in the will of the people at all right now anyway, so its all speculation - you would have to fix the broken democracy first.
- pjmorris 9y ago> you can hit probably 98% of wealth by just taxing the calculated value of owned land and buildings (which is already being appraised for property taxes in most states) Henry George proposed this in the 1800's [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
- dredmorbius 9y agoAnd David Ricardo prior to him (George credits Ricardo lavishly, though I seldom see this mentioned).
- conanbatt 9y agoAnd Milton Friedman after both of those
- flyinglizard 9y agoOnce you start targeting public market holdings, it would just create an even stronger incentive for companies to remain private. Soon enough you'd have secondary markets for high rollers dealing in shares of private entities, which would be completely inaccessible to the average Joe - and congratulations, you've increased inequality. In fact, this is already the situation in technology investments to a large extent. Companies remain private for longer to avoid post IPO regulations and restrictions, and the only guys who can invest are the insiders who get the opportunity through their network. The companies are only pumped to the public when the ascent in value has pretty much diminished (SNAP, anyone?).
- sokoloff 9y ago> You would also want to wealth tax companies for total global cash-on-hand assets they have as well. Those are also required to be public record already. I'm not familiar with this being a requirement for foreign, private companies. (Reading between the lines, I'd expect a marked increase in investments in foreign, private companies under such a taxation scheme.)