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I'm a little baffled why there have been all these articles of this category recently. It's not news that you don't pay taxes on invested assets you hold and do

I'm a little baffled why there have been all these articles of this category recently. It's not news that you don't pay taxes on invested assets you hold and don't sell. That's how it works for everyone who invests their savings. This isn't a 'tax-avoidance' tactic - it's just what owning something is. Are we really advocating for a world where you are taxed just for appreciation? Maybe we are but at least be honest about it - that this would be a radical change from the current concept of ownership. I'm all for taxing the wealthy more, but I personally don't want to pay taxes yearly on an index fund I've held for 10 years and don't plan to sell until I retire, at which point I will pay taxes on the gains.

Retric 5y ago
Except property tax is a wealth tax. So we have a wealth tax, it’s just highly regressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_Sta...
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  Property tax is interesting but probably in a different category as you are sharing space/property with a local government. I hope we have a historian here that knows the background and rationale on property tax. It is interesting that it is tied to the value of the property and not simply based on the size of the lot.
  - nickpp 5y ago
    Not a historian but I suspect that property taxes were originally meant to pay for things like infrastructure, garbage, police, firefighters, schools, etc. Pretty much community costs incurred by the development of the area including and around your property. Of course, without actual transparence and accountability and considering the state of said infrastructure, schools, etc, it is hard to know where these taxes actually go nowadays.
    - Retric 5y ago
      That doesn’t explain taxing boats/cars/etc. The historic reality is property tax was equivalent to wealth tax for thousands of years. It’s only recently that intangible assets became so valuable.
      - nickpp 5y ago
        Actually car taxes were also justified by infrastructure costs around here. No idea about boats, as I don't own one. I suspect you may be right about property tax tough - historically land-owners were rich-lord types and had to pay "fealty" to the crown. So I guess tax history is complicated?! There is also the modern issue of pollution taxes which should be taken into consideration. For example it's long past time for a carbon tax...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  How is property tax regressive? Renters don't pay it and it is a flat tax across home value?
  - Retric 5y ago
    Because people generally spend a lower percentage of their income on cars and housing as their income increases. The minimums for shelter and transportation are hard to avoid. Put another way the percentage of people making say 50k with a 20+k worth of car(s) is greater than the percentage of people making 50 million a year with 20+ million in car(s). Similarly it’s not that rare for retirees to be house rich owning say a 1+ million dollar house while having less than a 50k a year income. On the other hand someone making 50 million is extremely unlikely to have 1+ billion dollars in personal property. It’s true the rich may own a yacht, but they are also likely to completely avoid paying personal property taxes on it.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      I see what you are saying. The question then becomes which taxes we want to be progressive or regressive, and what we want to tax in the first place. I don't think everything needs to be taxed, or all taxes should be progressive. In this light, I'm not sure what the rationale for a tax on yachts would be. It seems like it could be a way to generate government income, or discourage yacht ownership, but I'm not convinced these are sufficient reason.
  - dexterdog 5y ago
    How do renters not pay property tax? It's part of the cost of the property that the rent is based on.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Not any more than I pay corporate taxes at the groceries because it is baked into the price of goods. In some places, property taxes could impact rent, but in many places it doesn't matter because the price of rent is much higher than the cost of owning the rental (including tax). This is most true in places where you can't build more housing inventory.
germinalphrase 5y ago
“ It's not news that you don't pay taxes on invested assets you hold and don't sell.” Unless, of course, we’re talking about the only meaningful asset an average person might own -their house- then we tax its assessed value every year.
- Aqueous 5y ago
  Fair enough - however, what would the equivalent of this look like for invested assets? We are basically forced to sell to cover every year to pay taxes on accrued value?
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    Personally? I pay my wealth taxes out of my post-tax income.
  - japanuspus 5y ago
    Eh - yes? What would be the problem with this? On a practical level, if this was implemented, I am sure the market would quickly create funds that payed out at exactly the right level to fund this. Here in Denmark, ETF's are always taxed this way and any losses can be carried forward. The one area where this can get problematic is things like a a big family business that is not providing enough profit to pay the tax. Such a business would end up getting liquidated, which makes sense from a free market perspective, but would make for some great "taxman killed family business"-headlines.
    - jcadam 5y ago
      Governments just spent the last year killing small businesses to the benefit of large ones, so this would help them finish the job.
  - kingsuper20 5y ago
    Additional fun occurs when a government official stops by every year to take an inventory of household items. Of course, there's always the problem that a lot of nominal asset appreciation is due to inflation.
LinuxBender 5y ago
Agreed. My favorite breakdown of this view is from David Mitchell [1] I am not sure what would happen economically if we started taxing all assets, non-income, etc... How much should people pay yearly on wedding rings, gold teeth, clothes, music collections? Would we have to itemize all possessions and have them assessed? [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2q-Csk-ktc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2q-Csk-ktc [potentially nsfw language]
- jstummbillig 5y ago
  Which begs the question, how happy are we with what is happening economically right now?
  - LinuxBender 5y ago
    To add to that, where are all our taxes being spent to make us happy? Have higher taxes historically resulted in everyone being happier? Is the money spent on the people? Here is one place in history we had really high taxes on the wealthy [1] but it does not say if it resulted in improved economy and everyone being happier. It looks more like it led to resentment and more defense spending. [1] - https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24489 https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/...
  - dnautics 5y ago
    the presumption there is that the pain is caused by not taxing enough, instead of, say, subsidies for the rich, stealing the value out of people's income through inflation, etc.
- dnautics 5y ago
  I'm definitely going to make friends with a personal posession assessor, together we'll make sure that our enemies with gold teeth have those teeth valued higher. I'd bid that tooth up higher. It's got real value AND emotional value.
nickpp 5y ago
During COVID governments spent and spent. Now the check must be paid. By us, as always. Since income is already taxed at about 50% pretty much everywhere in the developed world, it is time to tax the existing wealth. These articles are meant to prepare the public for it. They influence but also measure the public support for a wealth tax. It could be an all wealth or only a unrealized capital gains tax, similar to property taxes. They could start with executives and entrepreneurs who are mostly paid in stock. We will see.
- mprev 5y ago
  Are you suggesting that governments are colluding with journalists to deliver a particular narrative? Or are you saying that journalists and their editors believe there's a need for wealth taxes and so they're pushing that line?
  - nickpp 5y ago
    I rarely see any news these days which are not pushing an agenda or another. Politicians, journalists, governments, they all have their plans, ideas, biases and interests.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    I am taking no position on this specific instance, but it is clear that government officials intentionally leak inside information to journalists with a particular worldview to push narratives into the public consciousness.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    It's pretty clear that the British government over the last 12+ months have been doing just this with leaking Covid related announcements to the press prior to them being official announced.
  - jcadam 5y ago
    Probably some of both. A wealth tax would discourage investment and encourage consumer spending, and would hit the middle class the hardest. As usual - these things are always sold as being targeted at the "rich." Though, it would be interesting to see how people would try to game/avoid it. Instead of investing in stocks, a middle class person looking to preserve some wealth could buy things like physical gold/silver from local dealers with cash, hide it under the floorboards, and definitely NOT report it on their taxes.
QuixoticQuibit 5y ago
The recently proposed wealth taxes (e.g., Elizabeth Warren’s proposal) that work the way you’ve described would only start on wealth above $50 million. So your framing of such a tax as a way to steal from your working-class retirement funds is incredibly disingenuous. Unless, of course, you have 8+ figures of wealth. In which case I hope one day you’re made to pay your fair share to society.
- nickpp 5y ago
  Once a new tax is imposed, its limits and brackets are probably the easiest things to change about it. Moreover, if they aren’t inflation-adjusted, the Fed will make sure we’ll all get there pretty soon, just by printing money like they are doing these days. Anybody who has any legally earned wealth has already paid his fair share to the society by simply creating the corresponding value. Usually value creators get a few percent of the created value, the rest being enjoyed by the society, by the rest us.
  - QuixoticQuibit 5y ago
    So Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (and other stupidly rich executives) created hundreds of billions of dollars of value themselves? Of course not. They got their through exploitation. Any profit that a business has is value not being paid back to the actual workers who created the value of the company through their labor. Nobody has ever worked for $100 billion. Or $1 billion. Or $100 million.
    - jurassic 5y ago
      If your skill is moving boxes onto a delivery truck your work is not more useful/valuable as part of Amazon than at a small traditional company with no scalable internet components. The excess value in these companies should flow to those who took risks to set them in motion and continue leading them. Asserting this ownership premium is theft is pretty ridiculous on the face of it. Also, imagine if the guy loading trucks for Amazon did make 100x more money just because he’s connected to a high-growth internet company. The economy would be thrown into chaos because no logistics workers would be willing to do less remunerative but essential work like unloading food at the grocery store without substantial wage increases that get passed to the consumer as higher food/gas/delivery prices. Many sectors without productivity growth would get annihilated by Baumol’s cost disease, and consumers would have to spend a much larger share of their income on anything that is trucked around (which is basically everything we buy).
spywaregorilla 5y ago
I feel like what people really want is a wealth weighted income tax, so your tax rate on income is based on how wealthy you are, not how much you made in a single year.
- cascom 5y ago
  Well said - but unfortunately that’s not what what anyone is talking about.
- hammock 5y ago
  Under that system you would be rewarded for not productively generating any cash flow from the assets you own.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    If you are taxed 99 cents for every dollar you earn, you're still better off earning the dollar.
    - nickpp 5y ago
      Motivation is a funny thing. For example if someone else benefits more than me from my own work, I may decide I'd rather not do it at all. After all, just relaxing, smoking weed and playing on my Xbox is a really awesome way to spend my time.
      - spywaregorilla 5y ago
        That analogy doesn't really work when it comes to investing. edit: and if you're so wealthy that your tax rate is above 50% in this setup, it's probably fine if you want to smoke weed and play xbox. That's not a concern for the bottom 99%.
        nickpp 5y ago
        > That's not a concern for the bottom 99%. It should be: top 1% of income earners pay 40% of all federal income taxes. Also, entrepreneurs capture only a few percent of the value they create - the rest helping move forward the society and everybody else. We, as a society, should encourage high contributors and value creators since we are all gaining from their work. Moreover, we should be extremely careful to not discourage potential high contributors through the populist measures we are taking.
zz865 5y ago
I agree with you in general, but the index fund thing is a problem. Index funds/etf pay no CG taxes even when the stocks in the index change, where traditionally a mutual fund would pay taxes as they sell the old stocks and replace with new constituents.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
  But you still need to sell the index fund to realize an actual gain -- there's no income generated -- right?
  - zz865 5y ago
    yes that's the point, they pay less taxes than mutual funds.
lastofthemojito 5y ago
Previous discussion of this ProPublica story rightly pointed out that there was too much focus on billionaires (legally) not paying taxes while their assets are appreciating (but not yet sold), and not enough focus on the fact that often taxes aren't even eventually paid (a grey area mix of legal/illegal). From the original ProPublica article [0]: >It’s clear, though, from aggregate IRS data, tax research and what little trickles into the public arena about estate planning of the wealthy that they can readily escape turning over almost half of the value of their estates. Many of the richest create foundations for philanthropic giving, which provide large charitable tax deductions during their lifetimes and bypass the estate tax when they die. >Wealth managers offer clients a range of opaque and complicated trusts that allow the wealthiest Americans to give large sums to their heirs without paying estate taxes. The IRS data obtained by ProPublica gives some insight into the ultrawealthy’s estate planning, showing hundreds of these trusts. Other folks pointed out other examples of charitable self-dealing, where a wealthy person may give their money to a foundation, and then travel the world on behalf of the foundation, or have the foundation pay for family-owned businesses to do work under contract, etc. Some pointed out that there are laws against this sort of thing, other folks pointed out that enforcement of those laws is rare and difficult. So, should we step up efforts to try to enforce today's rules that haven't seemed workable in the past? Or do you want to do the easy thing and have a wealth tax on things like securities? 0: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
- bko 5y ago
  I think it's best to simplify when possible. Just get rid of the charitable tax deduction or cap it at a certain amount.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    But why? Do we not want to encourage charitable deductions? Removing the deduction doesn't even penalize the rich, it would just hurt charities
- NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
ykevinator3 5y ago
Agreed but paying an exec $1 in compensation salary and $100m in stock should also be illegal.
- dagw 5y ago
  It shouldn't be illegal, it just be taxed at a reasonable level making it more equivalent to getting the same salary in cash.
  - sologoub 5y ago
    It already is taxed as ordinary income - RSUs are taxed as cash when vested. Incentive stock options (you have to buy these out at strike price) are taxed as income for value at exercise less strike price. The advantage of RSU over regular cash comp is that they can appreciate while not yet vested - it’s like putting your future salary into stock market, it can go up or down. Then when vested, it’s taxed as cash salary (no long term capital gains advantage here).
  - gruez 5y ago
    AFAIK that's already the case. People are conflating the value of the stock at the moment you're paid (which is taxed as regular income) and the gains that come afterwards (which is taxed as capital gains).
- jcheng 5y ago
  If you pay an exec $100MM in stock, they’re taxed on it the same as $100MM in cash, no? They’re just not taxed if their stock appreciates by $100MM and they never sell it. (And if they do sell it’s taxed as capital gains)
itsoktocry 5y ago
>I'm a little baffled why there have been all these articles of this category recently. It's not news that you don't pay taxes on invested assets you hold and don't sell. That's how it works for everyone who invests their savings. Since most of the population has absolutely nothing saved, capital gains taxes on their index funds are completely irrelevant. I agree that having normal people paying cap gains on their savings is pretty ugly. However, there's some middle ground between that and people like Elon Musk paying themselves in shares, borrowing against them to live lavishly, and paying no income tax.
- sologoub 5y ago
  > Since most of the population has absolutely nothing saved, capital gains taxes on their index funds are completely irrelevant. That’s not true for US - “ overall median net worth of U.S. households, which is $121,700.”[1] Capital gains can be especially problematic on housing, where let’s say a retire bought in the 70s and now wants to downsize, that $250k individual or $500k married exception isn’t going to cover their “gain” on the house, when in reality only part of it is real gain. Let’s say the house was bought for $25k in 1970 (CA average at the time) and sold for 814k (CA average for April 2021). That’s 814k - 25k base price of the asset less 250k (assuming windowed filing single) = 539k taxable capital gain. However, that 25k in today’s money is more like $178k[2], so we are taxing inflation “gain” that’s not actually real value already. The Biden approach of taxing cap gains over $1m is going to impact a lot more American dream type of regular people (sold home for a good gain, sold a small business, etc). The Warren wealth tax approach is going to be next to impossible to collect. Swiss have managed to pull off a wealth tax (0.3 to 0.5%) on all wealth and also have low income tax rates, compensated for with VAT and other consumption/use taxes[3]. Perhaps we can learn something there - I’d prefer to see lower income and gains taxes for most people to enable wealth building for most of the population and more focus on use of the money, e.g buying regular food should be no tax (it’s a necessity), but buying a private jet can be 50% VAT (value added tax). Buying a Camry same idea say 10% VAT (or no tax at all as necessity?), but buying a $500k sports car, can be 25% VAT. This way the regular folks leading regular lifestyles don’t end up heavily taxed, but luxury consumption is. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-net-worth-by-age/ https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-net-worth-by-age/ [2] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=25000&year1=197001&year2=202105 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=25000&year1=19... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Switzerland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Switzerland
hammock 5y ago
>I'm a little baffled why there have been all these articles of this category recently. These articles are all based on one (exciting, if you're a data journalist) source - the tax returns that the IRS leaked to ProPublica. The leak may probably be part of an effort on the part of the US government to spin up narrative preparing the public for an increase in taxes. More about coming taxes: https://denvergazette.com/wex/despite-campaign-promises-60-could-see-tax-increase-under-biden-proposals/article_8e4a6ddf-11c0-5472-9783-a39c91c7ebe5.html https://denvergazette.com/wex/despite-campaign-promises-60-c...
runawaybottle 5y ago
I personally don’t understand what collecting more taxes will even do for us. We are unable to agree on what to spend it on, so what’s the point. There won’t be universal healthcare or free college, and we mostly just send the money to social security, Medicare and defense, and our albatross education system. Stop collecting more taxes until we know what we want to spend it on.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  I teach in a public high school. My gut instinct is that most “education” problems are actually education problems so much as manifestations of other social problems we are unwilling/unable to solve. Schools are just one of the few environments all Americans participate in (one way or another) so other problems become visible in a way they aren’t otherwise. This is also why - in my non-expert opinion - the ‘high expectations’ and ‘full wrap around services’ educational models show positive impacts. They address (indirectly and directly) these externalities in a way that typical public school does not.
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    To your point, the same is true for policing. These things become the one funnel where all other problems get directed to (parenting, environment, media, etc), and just thrown into the laps of an institution that can’t make up for years of neglect or misguidance.
tyleo 5y ago
I’m finding the idea of taxing wealth less strange the more I think about it. At this point I find it almost equivalently strange to taxing income. Assuming there were no income tax I feel like your second paragraph could be rephrased: I’m all for taxing the rich more, but I personally don’t want to pay taxes yearly on wages I’m saving every year until I retire, at which point I will spend the savings and pay taxes on consumption. Objectively, I’m not sure one is much better/worse than the other. One is just more familiar.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  The main difference is wealth is only realized when it is liquidated. Investments appreciate and depreciate over time, so it makes sense to tax when you cash out. You could pay taxes on your retirement savings gains every year, and then then end up with less than you put in if value goes back down before you pull it out.
sigzero 5y ago
Joe Public doesn't get any of that. They see the headline and run with it.
tzs 5y ago
I think that a big part of it is that these executives are often living a lifestyle that involves consuming lots of expensive goods and services but pay less in taxes than someone with the same lifestyle who paid for that lifestyle via income from labor word.
pwinnski 5y ago
I think many people don't accept that explanation for the reason wealthy people aren't paying taxes, or don't accept it as complete. For example, I don't pay taxes on the appreciation in my investment accounts, since I'm not spending that money, but I do pay taxes on my income, the money I'm actually spending. Meanwhile, some of the people identified by ProPublica are paying literally zero in taxes, and yet clearly spending more in a week or even day than I spend in a year. THAT is what draws people to the story. "How does someone whose spending clearly outstrips mine by 10x or more pay less than I do in taxes?"
imtringued 5y ago
I honestly don't get it either. If you are jealous invest your money instead of hoarding it.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  You're presuming these people have assets to invest.
legulere 5y ago
> That's how it works for everyone who invests their savings. In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread. Rich People disproportionately benefit from this. For saving for your pension there’s 401(k) in the US.

Retric 5y ago

Except property tax is a wealth tax. So we have a wealth tax, it’s just highly regressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_Sta...

LinuxBender 5y ago
Property tax is interesting but probably in a different category as you are sharing space/property with a local government. I hope we have a historian here that knows the background and rationale on property tax. It is interesting that it is tied to the value of the property and not simply based on the size of the lot.
- nickpp 5y ago
  Not a historian but I suspect that property taxes were originally meant to pay for things like infrastructure, garbage, police, firefighters, schools, etc. Pretty much community costs incurred by the development of the area including and around your property. Of course, without actual transparence and accountability and considering the state of said infrastructure, schools, etc, it is hard to know where these taxes actually go nowadays.
  - Retric 5y ago
    That doesn’t explain taxing boats/cars/etc. The historic reality is property tax was equivalent to wealth tax for thousands of years. It’s only recently that intangible assets became so valuable.
    - nickpp 5y ago
      Actually car taxes were also justified by infrastructure costs around here. No idea about boats, as I don't own one. I suspect you may be right about property tax tough - historically land-owners were rich-lord types and had to pay "fealty" to the crown. So I guess tax history is complicated?! There is also the modern issue of pollution taxes which should be taken into consideration. For example it's long past time for a carbon tax...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
s1artibartfast 5y ago
How is property tax regressive? Renters don't pay it and it is a flat tax across home value?
- Retric 5y ago
  Because people generally spend a lower percentage of their income on cars and housing as their income increases. The minimums for shelter and transportation are hard to avoid. Put another way the percentage of people making say 50k with a 20+k worth of car(s) is greater than the percentage of people making 50 million a year with 20+ million in car(s). Similarly it’s not that rare for retirees to be house rich owning say a 1+ million dollar house while having less than a 50k a year income. On the other hand someone making 50 million is extremely unlikely to have 1+ billion dollars in personal property. It’s true the rich may own a yacht, but they are also likely to completely avoid paying personal property taxes on it.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    I see what you are saying. The question then becomes which taxes we want to be progressive or regressive, and what we want to tax in the first place. I don't think everything needs to be taxed, or all taxes should be progressive. In this light, I'm not sure what the rationale for a tax on yachts would be. It seems like it could be a way to generate government income, or discourage yacht ownership, but I'm not convinced these are sufficient reason.
- dexterdog 5y ago
  How do renters not pay property tax? It's part of the cost of the property that the rent is based on.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Not any more than I pay corporate taxes at the groceries because it is baked into the price of goods. In some places, property taxes could impact rent, but in many places it doesn't matter because the price of rent is much higher than the cost of owning the rental (including tax). This is most true in places where you can't build more housing inventory.

germinalphrase 5y ago

“ It's not news that you don't pay taxes on invested assets you hold and don't sell.” Unless, of course, we’re talking about the only meaningful asset an average person might own -their house- then we tax its assessed value every year.

Aqueous 5y ago
Fair enough - however, what would the equivalent of this look like for invested assets? We are basically forced to sell to cover every year to pay taxes on accrued value?
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Personally? I pay my wealth taxes out of my post-tax income.
- japanuspus 5y ago
  Eh - yes? What would be the problem with this? On a practical level, if this was implemented, I am sure the market would quickly create funds that payed out at exactly the right level to fund this. Here in Denmark, ETF's are always taxed this way and any losses can be carried forward. The one area where this can get problematic is things like a a big family business that is not providing enough profit to pay the tax. Such a business would end up getting liquidated, which makes sense from a free market perspective, but would make for some great "taxman killed family business"-headlines.
  - jcadam 5y ago
    Governments just spent the last year killing small businesses to the benefit of large ones, so this would help them finish the job.
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  Additional fun occurs when a government official stops by every year to take an inventory of household items. Of course, there's always the problem that a lot of nominal asset appreciation is due to inflation.

LinuxBender 5y ago

Agreed. My favorite breakdown of this view is from David Mitchell [1] I am not sure what would happen economically if we started taxing all assets, non-income, etc... How much should people pay yearly on wedding rings, gold teeth, clothes, music collections? Would we have to itemize all possessions and have them assessed? [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2q-Csk-ktc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2q-Csk-ktc [potentially nsfw language]

jstummbillig 5y ago
Which begs the question, how happy are we with what is happening economically right now?
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  To add to that, where are all our taxes being spent to make us happy? Have higher taxes historically resulted in everyone being happier? Is the money spent on the people? Here is one place in history we had really high taxes on the wealthy [1] but it does not say if it resulted in improved economy and everyone being happier. It looks more like it led to resentment and more defense spending. [1] - https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24489 https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/...
- dnautics 5y ago
  the presumption there is that the pain is caused by not taxing enough, instead of, say, subsidies for the rich, stealing the value out of people's income through inflation, etc.
dnautics 5y ago
I'm definitely going to make friends with a personal posession assessor, together we'll make sure that our enemies with gold teeth have those teeth valued higher. I'd bid that tooth up higher. It's got real value AND emotional value.

nickpp 5y ago

During COVID governments spent and spent. Now the check must be paid. By us, as always. Since income is already taxed at about 50% pretty much everywhere in the developed world, it is time to tax the existing wealth. These articles are meant to prepare the public for it. They influence but also measure the public support for a wealth tax. It could be an all wealth or only a unrealized capital gains tax, similar to property taxes. They could start with executives and entrepreneurs who are mostly paid in stock. We will see.

mprev 5y ago
Are you suggesting that governments are colluding with journalists to deliver a particular narrative? Or are you saying that journalists and their editors believe there's a need for wealth taxes and so they're pushing that line?
- nickpp 5y ago
  I rarely see any news these days which are not pushing an agenda or another. Politicians, journalists, governments, they all have their plans, ideas, biases and interests.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  I am taking no position on this specific instance, but it is clear that government officials intentionally leak inside information to journalists with a particular worldview to push narratives into the public consciousness.
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  It's pretty clear that the British government over the last 12+ months have been doing just this with leaking Covid related announcements to the press prior to them being official announced.
- jcadam 5y ago
  Probably some of both. A wealth tax would discourage investment and encourage consumer spending, and would hit the middle class the hardest. As usual - these things are always sold as being targeted at the "rich." Though, it would be interesting to see how people would try to game/avoid it. Instead of investing in stocks, a middle class person looking to preserve some wealth could buy things like physical gold/silver from local dealers with cash, hide it under the floorboards, and definitely NOT report it on their taxes.

QuixoticQuibit 5y ago

The recently proposed wealth taxes (e.g., Elizabeth Warren’s proposal) that work the way you’ve described would only start on wealth above $50 million. So your framing of such a tax as a way to steal from your working-class retirement funds is incredibly disingenuous. Unless, of course, you have 8+ figures of wealth. In which case I hope one day you’re made to pay your fair share to society.

nickpp 5y ago
Once a new tax is imposed, its limits and brackets are probably the easiest things to change about it. Moreover, if they aren’t inflation-adjusted, the Fed will make sure we’ll all get there pretty soon, just by printing money like they are doing these days. Anybody who has any legally earned wealth has already paid his fair share to the society by simply creating the corresponding value. Usually value creators get a few percent of the created value, the rest being enjoyed by the society, by the rest us.
- QuixoticQuibit 5y ago
  So Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (and other stupidly rich executives) created hundreds of billions of dollars of value themselves? Of course not. They got their through exploitation. Any profit that a business has is value not being paid back to the actual workers who created the value of the company through their labor. Nobody has ever worked for $100 billion. Or $1 billion. Or $100 million.
  - jurassic 5y ago
    If your skill is moving boxes onto a delivery truck your work is not more useful/valuable as part of Amazon than at a small traditional company with no scalable internet components. The excess value in these companies should flow to those who took risks to set them in motion and continue leading them. Asserting this ownership premium is theft is pretty ridiculous on the face of it. Also, imagine if the guy loading trucks for Amazon did make 100x more money just because he’s connected to a high-growth internet company. The economy would be thrown into chaos because no logistics workers would be willing to do less remunerative but essential work like unloading food at the grocery store without substantial wage increases that get passed to the consumer as higher food/gas/delivery prices. Many sectors without productivity growth would get annihilated by Baumol’s cost disease, and consumers would have to spend a much larger share of their income on anything that is trucked around (which is basically everything we buy).

spywaregorilla 5y ago

I feel like what people really want is a wealth weighted income tax, so your tax rate on income is based on how wealthy you are, not how much you made in a single year.

cascom 5y ago
Well said - but unfortunately that’s not what what anyone is talking about.
hammock 5y ago
Under that system you would be rewarded for not productively generating any cash flow from the assets you own.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  If you are taxed 99 cents for every dollar you earn, you're still better off earning the dollar.
  - nickpp 5y ago
    Motivation is a funny thing. For example if someone else benefits more than me from my own work, I may decide I'd rather not do it at all. After all, just relaxing, smoking weed and playing on my Xbox is a really awesome way to spend my time.
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      That analogy doesn't really work when it comes to investing. edit: and if you're so wealthy that your tax rate is above 50% in this setup, it's probably fine if you want to smoke weed and play xbox. That's not a concern for the bottom 99%.
      - nickpp 5y ago
        > That's not a concern for the bottom 99%. It should be: top 1% of income earners pay 40% of all federal income taxes. Also, entrepreneurs capture only a few percent of the value they create - the rest helping move forward the society and everybody else. We, as a society, should encourage high contributors and value creators since we are all gaining from their work. Moreover, we should be extremely careful to not discourage potential high contributors through the populist measures we are taking.

zz865 5y ago

I agree with you in general, but the index fund thing is a problem. Index funds/etf pay no CG taxes even when the stocks in the index change, where traditionally a mutual fund would pay taxes as they sell the old stocks and replace with new constituents.

NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
But you still need to sell the index fund to realize an actual gain -- there's no income generated -- right?
- zz865 5y ago
  yes that's the point, they pay less taxes than mutual funds.

lastofthemojito 5y ago

Previous discussion of this ProPublica story rightly pointed out that there was too much focus on billionaires (legally) not paying taxes while their assets are appreciating (but not yet sold), and not enough focus on the fact that often taxes aren't even eventually paid (a grey area mix of legal/illegal). From the original ProPublica article [0]: >It’s clear, though, from aggregate IRS data, tax research and what little trickles into the public arena about estate planning of the wealthy that they can readily escape turning over almost half of the value of their estates. Many of the richest create foundations for philanthropic giving, which provide large charitable tax deductions during their lifetimes and bypass the estate tax when they die. >Wealth managers offer clients a range of opaque and complicated trusts that allow the wealthiest Americans to give large sums to their heirs without paying estate taxes. The IRS data obtained by ProPublica gives some insight into the ultrawealthy’s estate planning, showing hundreds of these trusts. Other folks pointed out other examples of charitable self-dealing, where a wealthy person may give their money to a foundation, and then travel the world on behalf of the foundation, or have the foundation pay for family-owned businesses to do work under contract, etc. Some pointed out that there are laws against this sort of thing, other folks pointed out that enforcement of those laws is rare and difficult. So, should we step up efforts to try to enforce today's rules that haven't seemed workable in the past? Or do you want to do the easy thing and have a wealth tax on things like securities? 0: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

bko 5y ago
I think it's best to simplify when possible. Just get rid of the charitable tax deduction or cap it at a certain amount.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  But why? Do we not want to encourage charitable deductions? Removing the deduction doesn't even penalize the rich, it would just hurt charities
NovemberWhiskey 5y ago

ykevinator3 5y ago

Agreed but paying an exec $1 in compensation salary and $100m in stock should also be illegal.

dagw 5y ago
It shouldn't be illegal, it just be taxed at a reasonable level making it more equivalent to getting the same salary in cash.
- sologoub 5y ago
  It already is taxed as ordinary income - RSUs are taxed as cash when vested. Incentive stock options (you have to buy these out at strike price) are taxed as income for value at exercise less strike price. The advantage of RSU over regular cash comp is that they can appreciate while not yet vested - it’s like putting your future salary into stock market, it can go up or down. Then when vested, it’s taxed as cash salary (no long term capital gains advantage here).
- gruez 5y ago
  AFAIK that's already the case. People are conflating the value of the stock at the moment you're paid (which is taxed as regular income) and the gains that come afterwards (which is taxed as capital gains).
jcheng 5y ago
If you pay an exec $100MM in stock, they’re taxed on it the same as $100MM in cash, no? They’re just not taxed if their stock appreciates by $100MM and they never sell it. (And if they do sell it’s taxed as capital gains)

itsoktocry 5y ago

>I'm a little baffled why there have been all these articles of this category recently. It's not news that you don't pay taxes on invested assets you hold and don't sell. That's how it works for everyone who invests their savings. Since most of the population has absolutely nothing saved, capital gains taxes on their index funds are completely irrelevant. I agree that having normal people paying cap gains on their savings is pretty ugly. However, there's some middle ground between that and people like Elon Musk paying themselves in shares, borrowing against them to live lavishly, and paying no income tax.

sologoub 5y ago
> Since most of the population has absolutely nothing saved, capital gains taxes on their index funds are completely irrelevant. That’s not true for US - “ overall median net worth of U.S. households, which is $121,700.”[1] Capital gains can be especially problematic on housing, where let’s say a retire bought in the 70s and now wants to downsize, that $250k individual or $500k married exception isn’t going to cover their “gain” on the house, when in reality only part of it is real gain. Let’s say the house was bought for $25k in 1970 (CA average at the time) and sold for 814k (CA average for April 2021). That’s 814k - 25k base price of the asset less 250k (assuming windowed filing single) = 539k taxable capital gain. However, that 25k in today’s money is more like $178k[2], so we are taxing inflation “gain” that’s not actually real value already. The Biden approach of taxing cap gains over $1m is going to impact a lot more American dream type of regular people (sold home for a good gain, sold a small business, etc). The Warren wealth tax approach is going to be next to impossible to collect. Swiss have managed to pull off a wealth tax (0.3 to 0.5%) on all wealth and also have low income tax rates, compensated for with VAT and other consumption/use taxes[3]. Perhaps we can learn something there - I’d prefer to see lower income and gains taxes for most people to enable wealth building for most of the population and more focus on use of the money, e.g buying regular food should be no tax (it’s a necessity), but buying a private jet can be 50% VAT (value added tax). Buying a Camry same idea say 10% VAT (or no tax at all as necessity?), but buying a $500k sports car, can be 25% VAT. This way the regular folks leading regular lifestyles don’t end up heavily taxed, but luxury consumption is. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-net-worth-by-age/ https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-net-worth-by-age/ [2] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=25000&year1=197001&year2=202105 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=25000&year1=19... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Switzerland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Switzerland

hammock 5y ago

>I'm a little baffled why there have been all these articles of this category recently. These articles are all based on one (exciting, if you're a data journalist) source - the tax returns that the IRS leaked to ProPublica. The leak may probably be part of an effort on the part of the US government to spin up narrative preparing the public for an increase in taxes. More about coming taxes: https://denvergazette.com/wex/despite-campaign-promises-60-could-see-tax-increase-under-biden-proposals/article_8e4a6ddf-11c0-5472-9783-a39c91c7ebe5.html https://denvergazette.com/wex/despite-campaign-promises-60-c...

runawaybottle 5y ago

I personally don’t understand what collecting more taxes will even do for us. We are unable to agree on what to spend it on, so what’s the point. There won’t be universal healthcare or free college, and we mostly just send the money to social security, Medicare and defense, and our albatross education system. Stop collecting more taxes until we know what we want to spend it on.

germinalphrase 5y ago
I teach in a public high school. My gut instinct is that most “education” problems are actually education problems so much as manifestations of other social problems we are unwilling/unable to solve. Schools are just one of the few environments all Americans participate in (one way or another) so other problems become visible in a way they aren’t otherwise. This is also why - in my non-expert opinion - the ‘high expectations’ and ‘full wrap around services’ educational models show positive impacts. They address (indirectly and directly) these externalities in a way that typical public school does not.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  To your point, the same is true for policing. These things become the one funnel where all other problems get directed to (parenting, environment, media, etc), and just thrown into the laps of an institution that can’t make up for years of neglect or misguidance.

tyleo 5y ago

I’m finding the idea of taxing wealth less strange the more I think about it. At this point I find it almost equivalently strange to taxing income. Assuming there were no income tax I feel like your second paragraph could be rephrased: I’m all for taxing the rich more, but I personally don’t want to pay taxes yearly on wages I’m saving every year until I retire, at which point I will spend the savings and pay taxes on consumption. Objectively, I’m not sure one is much better/worse than the other. One is just more familiar.

s1artibartfast 5y ago
The main difference is wealth is only realized when it is liquidated. Investments appreciate and depreciate over time, so it makes sense to tax when you cash out. You could pay taxes on your retirement savings gains every year, and then then end up with less than you put in if value goes back down before you pull it out.

sigzero 5y ago

Joe Public doesn't get any of that. They see the headline and run with it.

tzs 5y ago

I think that a big part of it is that these executives are often living a lifestyle that involves consuming lots of expensive goods and services but pay less in taxes than someone with the same lifestyle who paid for that lifestyle via income from labor word.

pwinnski 5y ago

I think many people don't accept that explanation for the reason wealthy people aren't paying taxes, or don't accept it as complete. For example, I don't pay taxes on the appreciation in my investment accounts, since I'm not spending that money, but I do pay taxes on my income, the money I'm actually spending. Meanwhile, some of the people identified by ProPublica are paying literally zero in taxes, and yet clearly spending more in a week or even day than I spend in a year. THAT is what draws people to the story. "How does someone whose spending clearly outstrips mine by 10x or more pay less than I do in taxes?"

imtringued 5y ago

I honestly don't get it either. If you are jealous invest your money instead of hoarding it.

cptskippy 5y ago
You're presuming these people have assets to invest.

legulere 5y ago

> That's how it works for everyone who invests their savings. In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread. Rich People disproportionately benefit from this. For saving for your pension there’s 401(k) in the US.