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> If people want to reduce the tax burden on folks with low incomes just scraping by, the way to accomplish that is by increasing taxes on corporate profits, ve

• twblalock 8y ago
  The wealthy paid taxes on their wealth back when it was income. And they pay capital gains tax if their wealth grows.
  • s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Only if they realize those gains.
    • twblalock 8y ago
      Why should unrealized gains be taxed?
      • derefr 8y ago
        You can get interest-free loans against your illiquid assets. With enough income coming in to replace the spent money, it's essentially as if you're spending the illiquid assets themselves, without having had to liquidate (and thereby pay taxes on) them.
        • twblalock 8y ago
          This is really more like using the illiquid assets as collateral, not like spending them. The loan payments still need to be made from income, or by liquidating assets, both of which would be taxed.
          • derefr 8y ago
            It's plain-old collateral if you're just spending the money normally, sure. But you can also take that loan and use it as leverage on a bet (i.e. a risky investment.) Then, your upside is more untaxed capital gains; while your downside can be immediately repaid by liquidating the assets, leaving you only with the need to pay the taxes. There is a reason that investment firms exist: this process is a ratchet for making untaxed (or less-taxed) income.
            • twblalock 8y ago
              But the monthly loan payments need to be made somehow, no matter what you use the loan for. If you pay them with income, you paid income tax. If you pay them by liquidating assets (including assets you purchased with the loan money and then sold), you pay capital gains tax (unless you sell for a loss).
              • derefr 8y ago
                In this case, I was assuming a risky investment that returns within the same month.
  • ubernostrum 8y ago
    "The wealthy" generally structure their income to avoid it being "income", or hide it in jurisdictions the US can't see, or any of dozens to hundreds of other tricks to make sure they don't pay anything resembling their share. This is a game as old as the US income tax itself; the 16th Amendment wasn't passed to legalize income taxes (they were already legal), but to make sure Congress could tax income "from whatever source derived", since wealthy people were restructuring their income streams to try to avoid taxation. They still do that today.
    • twblalock 8y ago
      That's an argument for changing the income tax rules, not for adding a wealth tax. In any case, a wealth tax would be easy to game too. There is a lot of room for loopholes in the definition of wealth, what kind of wealth should be taxed, what the tax brackets should be, what kinds of deductions are allowed, etc.
      • VintageCool 8y ago
        We need to rebuild the Inheritance Tax. Hit the wealth at the moment of inheritance, when it acts as income for the next generation. I'm worried about the decline of the inheritance tax. It's happening all over the West. In France, "the incomes attained by the top 1% of French inheritors are already higher than those attained by the top 1% of workers". We could be headed back to a Jane Austen -esque society where ambitious young people seek their fortunes in marriage, rather than in business.
  • frockington 8y ago
    And then sales tax when they buy things and an estate tax when they die.
  • Latteland 8y ago
    A lot of really wealthy people inherited their wealth, they aren't doing anything useful.
• ams6110 8y ago
  The wealthy pay the vast majority of all the income tax already. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/top-3-of-u-s-taxpayers-paid-majority-of-income-taxes-in-2016 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/top-3-of-...
  • crooked-v 8y ago
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-richest-1-percent-now-owns-more-of-the-countrys-wealth-than-at-any-time-in-the-past-50-years/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-r... > The wealthiest 1 percent of American households own 40 percent of the country's wealth, according to a new paper by economist Edward N. Wolff.
    • lordlimecat 8y ago
      There's probably some good discussion to be had around that, but whenever anyone in the US talks about the injustice of the top 1%, I can't help but wonder: if we calculated how much of the world's wealth the 99% in America owned, would they feel contrition for their injustice? Given that the US has 25% of the world's wealth, and the lower 99% of the US population has 60% of the US's wealth, it stands to reason that "the 99%" have a full 15% of the world's total wealth. Given that the US has ~4% of the world's population, surely resolving "the wealth disparity" is more likely to lower their position than raise it.
      • Brockenstein 8y ago
        This is pretty disingenuous and I'll explain why. The next 1% after the top 1% owns a pretty sizable chunk too. And the next 1% after that a large chunk, and so on. The top 10% has 75% of U.S. wealth, the top 20% has 87% of U.S. wealth. So carrying on about the 99% as if wealth is distributed in anyway evenly within that group is more than a bit silly. Especially when you look at the bottom 50% having a pittance, somewhere between 1-2% of U.S. wealth. The next natural group after discussing the 1%'s wealth, isn't the other 99% just because 100-1=99... So really your argument falls apart for me because most of the 99%, the bottom 70%, end up owning just about 1% of the world's wealth. And that's a fairly small slice of pie to be split between 227 million people. And before you show me the math that it's actually quite a bit per person. Don't forget that in reality the bottom 60% only has almost as much wealth as the whole next 10% and that most of the population isn't seeing the wealth you're describing.
• closeparen 8y ago
  The 401k and IRA are inverse wealth taxes, so naturally you want to eliminate those, right? After all, no one should be so wealthy as to not need or have an income (retire).
  • 8note 8y ago
    seems reasonable. you already can't contribute above some amount tax free, and you shouldnt have more than 30M dollars put away for retirement