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> Wealth tax proposals I've seen don't kick in until $50 million or $100 million. This means that there is a floor on how "poor" the government can make you via

• dpeterson 6y ago
  I wish you had made this as a top level comment. This should be at the top, not the pro wealth tax comment. Like you said, the net always gets wider and wider.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• logicchains 6y ago
  This is exactly what happened with the US federal income tax. It was originally only a small amount, and only on the wealthy. Now it's gradually been expanded to everyone.
  • andrewtbham 6y ago
    Yep, there was no income tax till 1913. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_Uni...
  • thedufer 6y ago
    > It was originally only a small amount, and only on the wealthy. This is a bit misleading. The first income tax of 1861 was on incomes over $800, which inflation-adjusted is about $23000. The next year the threshold was lowered to $600 or about $17,000 in today's dollars. Currently the standard deduction is $12,200. Certainly some creep, but it doesn't quite fit the described jump from only the wealthy to everyone, except perhaps to the degree that nearly everyone in the US today is wealthy compared to the average citizen in the 1860s. Rates have certainly gone up since then (originally a 3% rate), but top rates today are quite low by modern standards - they were higher than today from the 1930s through the late 80s. Typical average rates have been on a slow downward trend since WWII.
    • voxic11 6y ago
      I think you are also being a bit misleading, you do mention how much richer people are today but this really can't be overstated. In 1861, only 3% of the population earned more than $800 per year. So the original income tax only applied to the very rich.
      • giantg2 6y ago
        And wasn't it also supposed to be temporary to pay for the war?
• bitcurious 6y ago
  >The state will, as always, become reliant on it and find ways to expand it to wield more power and pay debts that were taken on to “collect/spend in advance” as they’ve done countless times. This hasn't been true for the income tax [0], nor the capital gains tax [1], nor (at least in Silicon Valley) for real estate taxes[2], which are closest to a wealth tax. It's a reasonable thing to consider, but given the evidence we have, should not be a driving consideration. [0] https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Free_Resources/Federal-Income-Tax-Rates.aspx https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Free_Resources/Federal-Inco... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Federal_Capital_Gains_Tax_Collections_1954-2009_history_chart.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Federal_Capital_Gains_Tax... [2] https://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/decline-in-value/ https://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/decline-in-value/ edit: I was misinformed re: income tax, tracking only the top rate.
  • erichocean 6y ago
    > This hasn't been true for the income tax Well that's false, the income tax in the United States originally was promised only to ever apply to the ultra-rich. Now every tax payer pays it.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • conception 6y ago
      This is not true. Only about 60%ish of Americans pay income tax. While those who do aren’t just the ultra wealthy, certainly not all Americans do.
      • erichocean 6y ago
        Others have already pointed this out, but you're ignoring Social Security and Medicare which are both income taxes, just pre-allocated to specific government spending programs. 100% of tax payers pay these income taxes, including the self-employed.
    • awb 6y ago
• dannyw 6y ago
  Just for some historical context: US income tax rates started at 1% and ended at 6%, and applied to an extremely small amount of the population.
  • 0xffff2 6y ago
    What does "ended at 6%" mean here? As far as I can tell, all income earners in the US pay at least 15.3% income tax in the form of Social Security and Medicare taxes.
• knodi 6y ago
  These are all just assumption "how bad" the government will be in the future and casting fear and lies of the American dream, You too will be rich tomorrow and you don't want the government to take your money do you? Fuck off dude.
  • dang 6y ago
    > Fuck off dude. You can't do that on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Perhaps you don't owe "dude" better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here. I'm dismayed to see that you've been making a habit of posting like this, as well as unsubstantive comments generally. If you keep doing that we're going to have to ban you, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart?
• barrkel 6y ago
  I don't understand why you think the slippery slope argument works for the rate and threshold, but not for the existence. The problem with wealth taxes is not slippery slope, but rather that wealth can be obfuscated and moved around much more easily. Transactions are easy to tax; wealth worth taxing is about what you control, rather than stuff you have. There's good reasons the most successful wealth taxes are land taxes. You can't easily move land.
• darkerside 6y ago
  Slippery slope is a logical fallacy [0], which you likely already knew. Of course, that doesn't make your argument wrong, just fallible. I think it's arguable that taxes only ever go up. Income taxes on the rich used to be near 90% in the top bracket, so it's not a one way ratchet. That said, I agree government tends to expand and needs to fund that growth somehow. But I think it's much more likely that need manifests as an increase in the wealth tax rate rather than a lowering of the wealth threshold. The billionaires have so much more money than everyone else (and so much more than they need) that it will be much more politically popular to raise the wealth tax on them than it would to expand the pool. Not to mention, there are more of us. I'm not advocating a wealth tax, and I think it's problematic for other reasons, but I don't think the slippery slope argument is much more than fearmongering in this case. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
  • nemo44x 6y ago
    Sure, nearly every opinion or argument is fallible. I'm not explicitly trying to create a slippery slope or fear monger. A slippery slope tends to lead to unintended consequences. I don't think expanding the net is unintended - I believe it's the deliberate goal. Our history suggests this w/r/t income taxes, etc.
    • darkerside 6y ago
      I don't think the net will be widened, I think when more tax funds are needed, the gauge of the net will be adjusted to catch more fish from the same people. i.e. They'll increase the rate from 3% to 5%, not expose lower wealth individuals to the new tax.
      • nemo44x 6y ago
        You're partially correct. They'll increase the rate from 3% to 5% and then a new rate of 1% for the 30m-50m bracket and make it progressive.
  • gotoeleven 6y ago
• kpmcc 6y ago
  States like the US can just spend in advance without taxing, there’s no necessary relation. We’re not on the gold standard anymore. The point of a tax isn’t to pay for things, it’s to attempt to control inflation and the money supply, and to combat inequality. The idea that a state (read nation, for US states things are different) would become reliant on such a tax to pay for things doesn’t hold water. It may become ‘reliant’ on it as a means to reduce inequality but that’s another matter. The avoidance issue is a big one and the mechanism of making sure people pay is at least as important as where one sets the floor. Cross border capital flows can be pernicious. Piketty gets into how different rates of capital accumulation create huge rifts between people who own appreciating assets like land and equities and people who don’t who primarily earn wages. The idea behind the wealth tax is to try and narrow the rift.
  • logicchains 6y ago
    >The point of a tax isn’t to pay for things, it’s to attempt to control inflation and the money supply, and to combat inequality. A significant proportion of Americans would disagree with you that it's the government's business to "combat inequality". Most people agree with taxes to help the needy and fund infrastructure, but it's a harder sell that the government should punish people just for being too successful. >Piketty gets into how different rates of capital accumulation create huge rifts between people who own appreciating assets like land and equities and people who don’t who primarily earn wages. The idea behind the wealth tax is to try and narrow the rift. But he doesn't outline clearly what the problem with this rift is. To quote the criticisms section of the Wiki page on his book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...): "One strand of critique faults Piketty for placing inequality at the center of analysis without any reflection on why it matters. According to Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, he merely assumes that inequality matters, but never explains why. He only demonstrates that it exists and how it worsens.[36] Or as his colleague Clive Crook put it: "Aside from its other flaws, Capital in the 21st Century invites readers to believe not just that inequality is important, but that nothing else matters. This book wants you to worry about low growth in the coming decades not because that would mean a slower rise in living standards, but because it might ... worsen inequality."[35] "
• helen___keller 6y ago
  Not that you're necessarily wrong, but I find it fascinating that the state of social trust is so low in the united states that the most powerful and resonant arguments against potential laws are even if the law is good, a future law in the same vein might go too far and thus even the good law should be shot down. You can see this on a variety of topics. Gun control legislation, immigration reform, healthcare reform, etc. Reasonable laws are perpetually overshadowed by the boogeyman on the horizon.
  • xienze 6y ago
    > Reasonable laws are perpetually overshadowed by the boogeyman on the horizon. Because that’s exactly what’s happened in the past. We don’t just get ONE piece of gun legislation and that’s the end of it, every so many years we keep on getting pushes for more. For immigration reform, we didn’t just get ONE amnesty of illegal immigrants and then strict immigration control which was promised back during the Reagan administration, we got complete acceptance of continued illegal immigration and renewed calls for amnesty. The smart money is always on not trusting the government.
    • nemo44x 6y ago
      It's like when we deign policy we never have KPI's, OKR's, or any other metrics associated with it to define what we agree what success is. Everything is an ideological battle to claim a new trench and push the opposition back a trench. I think we'd get along better if we first proposed and found agreement upon which metrics we want to achieve (gun deaths at x%, or a decline of x% by such and such date, etc) and then implement policy that get there. And then correct as needed. There was a time when universities had a very disproportionate amount of males VS females. So we passed policy that was designed to make a university degree more achievable for females. And it has worked, which is great! However, we never really implemented an end condition to this policy. And the entrenched apparatus that makes it's living or achieves ideological goals continue the policy, as-is, in a never ending battle. If we would have said "we want 50% of college students to be female by x-date" (or better, we want to maintain a balance of 50/50) then we could have either stopped the policies that were used to correct the initial condition or modify them to hold it steady at 50%. But we haven't and now 56% are females and it's growing and any suggestion that we either need to hold off on these policies now that we achieved the goal or even correct it to get more males into universities is immediately labeled sexist, etc. I think it's easier to get a diverse group of people to work towards a common goal when you define the end condition (put a man on the moon) rather than using vague descriptions of what would be a better world. At the very least it stops skeptics from just flat out saying "no, as it will never end".
• hyperpape 6y ago
  This is not what actually happened in several European countries that had wealth taxes. In fact, they found the taxes ineffective at collecting revenue, and abandoned them. This isn't exactly a recommendation of wealth taxes (which I'm skeptical of), however it is evidence that your assumptions about what would happen are not inevitable.
• option 6y ago
  exactly. Also money printing will mean that 50 mil in 10 years is more like 10 mil now. Personally, this and income tax increases make me seriously consider moving out of CA (where I’ve been a resident for a very long time)
  • giantg2 6y ago
    You shouldn't even need to consider those two points - just leave that miserable state.
• rurp 6y ago
  > These things always get a wider, and wider net until anyone just starting to get ahead is caught in it. No, they don't. You only have to go back a couple years in the US for an example where tax rates for the wealthy were massively cut.
  • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    But that doesn't answer the complaint. The original idea of income tax was also that only the wealthy would pay, not the middle class. Yet here we are. Tax rates for the wealthy were cut? That's great, for them. Were tax rates cut for the middle class? Did any of the lower class no longer have to pay income tax? That's what would be a response to nemo44x. (What would be a response to me would be for there to be no income tax for anyone in the lower 90% of income. That would be back to the original intent, and would reverse all the years of scope creep.)
    • Daishiman 6y ago
      Yes, here were are because it turns out that modern societies with their amenities depend on taxation. What's the problem with that? If it were such a humongous deal you'd have more people voting for tax cuts.
      • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        OK, but it may well turn out that future versions of "modern society" depend on the revenue from wealth taxation, not just for those with wealth above $50 million, but with wealth above, say, $50 thousand. Remember what the argument in the local thread is. nemo44x stated that "these things" (things like the wealth tax) always expand to cover more people than they did at the beginning. rurp said that the income tax cuts a couple of years ago disproved that. I said that the expanding scope of income tax over the last 107 years supported nemo44x, not rurp. Your arguing that that's OK, because we want the society that results. That may be. But that's a different claim than "this won't expand to hit everybody".
        • 6y ago