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Inheritance tax is not a wealth tax (the person who accumulated the wealth has died), it's just another income tax (which NYT wants to raise to an absurdly high
by ralmidani 6y ago
Inheritance tax is not a wealth tax (the person who accumulated the wealth has died), it's just another income tax (which NYT wants to raise to an absurdly high rate).
Taxing wealth is far more equitable than taxing income; taxing wealth gives low-medium earners more discretion to spend on needs like housing, clothing, food, child care, education, transportation, etc (needs that differ between families, and which families are better equipped to assess than the government), while taxing income gives the government a share of people's money before they can decide what to do with it. Tax wealth while people are alive (on an annual basis), rather than destroy a company/farm/estate by having the government swoop in and take an enormous share of it (do we really want the government in the business of taking over companies and farms?)
Of course, wealthy people who don't want to pay taxes could buy yachts and fancy cars, but that could be remedied easily by instituting high sales taxes on luxury items.
- sesuximo 6y agoWealthy people could also leave America
- sachdevap 6y agoThis is a big myth. Wealthy people are not going to just get up and leave America. Where do you think they would go?
- sesuximo 6y agoLook at france. It added a wealth tax. A year later, it made international news when a billionaire stayed! I think they would go quite literally everywhere.
- ralmidani 6y agoLast time I checked, America is still the best place for a millionaire to become a billionaire. Having arbitrary thresholds where people suddenly get taxed at obscene rates is, of course, foolish.
- taxtionistheft 6y agoDon't lie. They left. Read about Gerard Depardieu and many other rich people who left the country.
- sesuximo 6y agoI think you misunderstood what I meant— almost all of them left except one which was newsworthy
- ralmidani 6y agoI agree this would be a challenge, but you can limit the percentage of a person's wealth that can be transferred out of the country. It won't be easy, but I still think taxing wealth (or a wealth tax combined with lighter income taxation) would be much more equitable than our current system.
- munificent 6y agoSo you're saying we get to keep all of the beautiful natural resources and culture of the country, but the handful of billionaires exploiting it and its people go elsewhere and take their shitty morals with them, leaving a country with reduced economic inequality? I'm sold.
- Analemma_ 6y agoPretty much all economists agree that a wealth tax is conceptually better than an income tax for all the reasons you described, but a tax has to be practical to implement. Wealth taxes would be an endless source of problems: how much is this yacht worth, how much is this painting [which sold on the open market only once, 50 years ago] worth, how much is this opaque financial instrument worth, etc. Wealthy people would be dragging the government into court endlessly to fight tooth and nail over every last valuation. Income taxes are an imperfect proxy for wealth taxes but much easier to implement, so that's what we do.
- ralmidani 6y agoLuxury taxes would alleviate this problem to a large extent. Someone who bought a painting just to hide their wealth would eventually want to sell it (or their heirs would). In the long run, society will get its share of the wealth in most cases.
- therealdrag0 6y agoIs there any analysis on how much wealth of the 0.1% is in physical assets vs stock/equity? When I look at something like this: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/?fbclid=IwAR2j0gxpeOSt5MGdGIrZLlDGedljNsSI6p1QtO5U5RJybSCoH9oZlwoGEj8 https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/?fbclid=IwAR2j0g... The volumes of wealth in equity is so large it seems like the luxury yachts/mansions might matter less.