4 ms·

Several paragraphs of emotional appeal attempting to support a jealousy tax that would be easily avoided and ineffective. Pass.

tt433 6y ago
Yeah just because criminals do crimes and avoid prosecution, we should give up prosecuting crimes. Schools can build themselves.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  I mean, I’m not sure your crime prosecution analogy works all that great considering how many times this year we’ve heard about defunding the police, and in how many cities the local prosecutors have been executing policy precisely of giving up prosecuting crime.
  - tt433 6y ago
    They're at least explicitly saying out loud what some of their choices about not prosecuting are. Most of the time the thought that goes into those decisions isn't shared with the public. The prosecutor has a wide degree of independence, and they are always accountable to someone. Even prosecutors who aren't "progressive" choose not to prosecute some crimes, to litigate everything would be ridiculous and counter productive to the business of government and commerce. My guess is your hair is on end because of a prosecutor(s) who was installed by the public.
AndrewBissell 6y ago
Every year Forbes publishes a list of the wealthiest people in the world with a number next to their name. If Forbes can do it I'm sure a properly staffed and funded IRS could too.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Finding their name isn't their hard part. Calculating their assets is. Imagine the following I own a $100M building outright that I rent to tenants (say an office building) - it's illiquid with a thin market and I can't just move a building. So let's say I do this: I enter into a terminally settled, non-transferable, future-callable, sale-leaseback with a partial-repo feature, with an overseas bank. The mechanics are this: I 'sell' the building to, say, Nomura in Japan. This is the 'sale', but I don't take any cash. Instead, Nomura agrees to a 999-year lease where I can operate the building and the rent payments are settled via the sale proceeds I never received - this is the terminally settled part. I rent to tenants and keep the net operating profit. 'Future-callable' means I can undo this in the future; 'repoed' means that if I need some of the money that Nomura is holding from the proceeds, I can get it back in part. You say, "but the operating lease has value!" - but does it? Its non-transferable, so it has no market value whatsoever, and I can zero the economics of it so it has no model value; you can't value that using any generally accepted measure. There are some detailed complicating factors in this example, but they can be sorted out; importantly, transactions like this are fairly common for (completely legal) reasons. The main thing I have done is taken the building out of my calculation of 'wealth' - I would have owed 6% times $100M, but now I don't 'have' a $100M building to tax - Nomura has the building, and they're in Japan. I will owe either income tax or corporation tax, but I would have owed that anyway. Wealth tax zeroed. Now multiply this by literally tens of thousands of millionaires and their respective assets. At some point, the cost of extracting the tax is more than the receipts collected! And this doesn't even touch on the fact that there are many asset rich, cash poor people. For instance if you own $25 million in shares in a pre-ipo unicorn, and you're making $175k in salary per year, where are you going to cough up the millions annually to afford the tax? These are real problems and it appears that the sole motivation why some want a wealth tax is not because it makes sense by any economic or policy standard, or that it might improve the lot of the man lesser-off, but because they want to make other people poorer. Full stop. And that seems to me to be a morally toxic and ideologically disgusting criteria for developing law.
  - medium_burrito 6y ago
    Well then it sounds like us poors should just grab our pitchforks if the rich can't decide how to tax themselves
- dagw 6y ago
  Every year Forbes publishes a list of the wealthiest people in the world with a number next to their name. And each year a lot is written about how wildly inaccurate (in both directions) many people believe those numbers to be.

tt433 6y ago

Yeah just because criminals do crimes and avoid prosecution, we should give up prosecuting crimes. Schools can build themselves.

xyzzyz 6y ago
I mean, I’m not sure your crime prosecution analogy works all that great considering how many times this year we’ve heard about defunding the police, and in how many cities the local prosecutors have been executing policy precisely of giving up prosecuting crime.
- tt433 6y ago
  They're at least explicitly saying out loud what some of their choices about not prosecuting are. Most of the time the thought that goes into those decisions isn't shared with the public. The prosecutor has a wide degree of independence, and they are always accountable to someone. Even prosecutors who aren't "progressive" choose not to prosecute some crimes, to litigate everything would be ridiculous and counter productive to the business of government and commerce. My guess is your hair is on end because of a prosecutor(s) who was installed by the public.

AndrewBissell 6y ago

Every year Forbes publishes a list of the wealthiest people in the world with a number next to their name. If Forbes can do it I'm sure a properly staffed and funded IRS could too.

missedthecue 6y ago
Finding their name isn't their hard part. Calculating their assets is. Imagine the following I own a $100M building outright that I rent to tenants (say an office building) - it's illiquid with a thin market and I can't just move a building. So let's say I do this: I enter into a terminally settled, non-transferable, future-callable, sale-leaseback with a partial-repo feature, with an overseas bank. The mechanics are this: I 'sell' the building to, say, Nomura in Japan. This is the 'sale', but I don't take any cash. Instead, Nomura agrees to a 999-year lease where I can operate the building and the rent payments are settled via the sale proceeds I never received - this is the terminally settled part. I rent to tenants and keep the net operating profit. 'Future-callable' means I can undo this in the future; 'repoed' means that if I need some of the money that Nomura is holding from the proceeds, I can get it back in part. You say, "but the operating lease has value!" - but does it? Its non-transferable, so it has no market value whatsoever, and I can zero the economics of it so it has no model value; you can't value that using any generally accepted measure. There are some detailed complicating factors in this example, but they can be sorted out; importantly, transactions like this are fairly common for (completely legal) reasons. The main thing I have done is taken the building out of my calculation of 'wealth' - I would have owed 6% times $100M, but now I don't 'have' a $100M building to tax - Nomura has the building, and they're in Japan. I will owe either income tax or corporation tax, but I would have owed that anyway. Wealth tax zeroed. Now multiply this by literally tens of thousands of millionaires and their respective assets. At some point, the cost of extracting the tax is more than the receipts collected! And this doesn't even touch on the fact that there are many asset rich, cash poor people. For instance if you own $25 million in shares in a pre-ipo unicorn, and you're making $175k in salary per year, where are you going to cough up the millions annually to afford the tax? These are real problems and it appears that the sole motivation why some want a wealth tax is not because it makes sense by any economic or policy standard, or that it might improve the lot of the man lesser-off, but because they want to make other people poorer. Full stop. And that seems to me to be a morally toxic and ideologically disgusting criteria for developing law.
- medium_burrito 6y ago
  Well then it sounds like us poors should just grab our pitchforks if the rich can't decide how to tax themselves
dagw 6y ago
Every year Forbes publishes a list of the wealthiest people in the world with a number next to their name. And each year a lot is written about how wildly inaccurate (in both directions) many people believe those numbers to be.