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> these ultra-rich pay 0% in taxes, while I pay 30%. Then I have a modest proposal. If the median household net worth[0] in the US is about $120k, and the med

> these ultra-rich pay 0% in taxes, while I pay 30%. Then I have a modest proposal. If the median household net worth[0] in the US is about $120k, and the median household federal tax burden[1] is about $10k per year, then let's say that anyone with a net worth more than $1 billion should pay an annual wealth tax of 10%. The G7 have already agreed to a global minimum corporation tax rate, so let's make this wealth tax global too, and forbid billionaire residents of non-compliant countries from visiting or passing through countries that implement this tax. [0] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/ [1] 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...

Swenrekcah 5y ago
A 10% wealth tax is quite a lot but otherwise I agree hat we absolutely need to move from income to wealth tax. I’d support a progressive tax, something like 0 for the first 200,000 or something, then slowly rising to a few percent. The really tricky thing though is that some assets generate income but others don’t, and we probably don’t want to put even more pressure on people to make rent on their assets than they already have. So it’s a really hard problem but worth thinking about because taxing capital is really the only way to have a fair tax system in a capitalist society.
refurb 5y ago
Do you know why a number of EU countries had wealth taxes but then got rid them?
- dralley 5y ago
  Because they pushed the people to other EU countries without them - which wouldn't be true of a global minimum wealth tax.
  - refurb 5y ago
    It wasn’t only that. Setting up the infrastructure to actually measure and track wealth (nice pre-IPO stocks there, how much are those worth? Nothing? How interesting) is a massive undertaking and a bureaucratic mess. It’s a tax with a massive administrative overhead to it.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      The good thing about a law targeting billionaires (and taxing their wealth at 10%) is that the administration costs can be at least $100m per investigation and still break even. (Admittedly at the bottom end someone might manage to sneak in under the threshold, making the investigation a waste, but there's no harm in the bureaucrats starting with the richest person and working their way down the list, gaining skills and efficiency as they go). Even if all the money that the government collects ends up going to pay the investigators, at least that would be creating thousands of decent jobs. Also, assuming a balanced game, if the investigators are being paid $100m to find evidence then the billionaire would have to pay a similar amount to hide evidence, which means they might as well not bother hiding it.
      - refurb 5y ago
        What do you mean “per investigation”? A wealth tax has overhead that applies to every tax payer.
        dane-pgp 5y ago
        I'm imagining that the wealth tax would only apply to people with more than $1bn in net assets, so the overhead for almost every tax payer is to simply tick a box each year saying "I am not a billionaire". More precisely, the law would require anyone with gross assets above some threshold, say $500m, to report the value of those assets to the IRS every year, based on some simple valuation rules, like "How much did you pay for the asset?" and "What is the market value of those shares / cryptocurrencies?". Only assets worth more than $1m would need to be declared. Then, as I say, the IRS can go down the list of people with the most assets and do a more thorough audit, to make sure their valuations are correct, while also making sure that there aren't any billionaires who have forgotten to file, since it should be hard to hide that much wealth.

Swenrekcah 5y ago

A 10% wealth tax is quite a lot but otherwise I agree hat we absolutely need to move from income to wealth tax. I’d support a progressive tax, something like 0 for the first 200,000 or something, then slowly rising to a few percent. The really tricky thing though is that some assets generate income but others don’t, and we probably don’t want to put even more pressure on people to make rent on their assets than they already have. So it’s a really hard problem but worth thinking about because taxing capital is really the only way to have a fair tax system in a capitalist society.

refurb 5y ago

Do you know why a number of EU countries had wealth taxes but then got rid them?

dralley 5y ago
Because they pushed the people to other EU countries without them - which wouldn't be true of a global minimum wealth tax.
- refurb 5y ago
  It wasn’t only that. Setting up the infrastructure to actually measure and track wealth (nice pre-IPO stocks there, how much are those worth? Nothing? How interesting) is a massive undertaking and a bureaucratic mess. It’s a tax with a massive administrative overhead to it.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    The good thing about a law targeting billionaires (and taxing their wealth at 10%) is that the administration costs can be at least $100m per investigation and still break even. (Admittedly at the bottom end someone might manage to sneak in under the threshold, making the investigation a waste, but there's no harm in the bureaucrats starting with the richest person and working their way down the list, gaining skills and efficiency as they go). Even if all the money that the government collects ends up going to pay the investigators, at least that would be creating thousands of decent jobs. Also, assuming a balanced game, if the investigators are being paid $100m to find evidence then the billionaire would have to pay a similar amount to hide evidence, which means they might as well not bother hiding it.
    - refurb 5y ago
      What do you mean “per investigation”? A wealth tax has overhead that applies to every tax payer.
      - dane-pgp 5y ago
        I'm imagining that the wealth tax would only apply to people with more than $1bn in net assets, so the overhead for almost every tax payer is to simply tick a box each year saying "I am not a billionaire". More precisely, the law would require anyone with gross assets above some threshold, say $500m, to report the value of those assets to the IRS every year, based on some simple valuation rules, like "How much did you pay for the asset?" and "What is the market value of those shares / cryptocurrencies?". Only assets worth more than $1m would need to be declared. Then, as I say, the IRS can go down the list of people with the most assets and do a more thorough audit, to make sure their valuations are correct, while also making sure that there aren't any billionaires who have forgotten to file, since it should be hard to hide that much wealth.