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A question to you: Would it help if we gave up income taxation and switched to expense taxation of natural persons? I am trying to think long-term and visionary
by _nalply 5y ago
A question to you: Would it help if we gave up income taxation and switched to expense taxation of natural persons? I am trying to think long-term and visionary.
The idea behind this: even the super rich consume. One might have a big yacht which costed a few hundred million dollars. If the state can enforce taxation of expenses of natural persons, the man with the yacht would have to pay a percentage of his expenses with the yacht.
I know there are many loopholes, but let's think about them and try to close them. One of them is pushing expenses abroad. To close the loophole declare that moving money abroad to a country which doesn't do expense taxation counts as expense. And let's try to this in many countries of the world.
I also know that super rich tend to consume less as a percentage to their wealth. But surely they consume a lot more and more expensive things than the general populace.
After all, people are people and it doesn't really matter what complicated structure of incorporations they have created to evade taxes. It doesn't matter, too, whether something is a salary or capital gain. Finally they will use part of the money to consume. Then strike hard and extract a percentage as tax.
I know there's value-added tax, this is similar, but the target is different. And I know this idea is somewhat vague. I just wanted to outline the principle here: expense taxation.