9 ms·

Senate Democrats unveil a plan for a new tax on billionaires

44 points by anbende 5y ago

knodi 5y ago
So much spin on HN today, i hope you all read this before poo-pooing it. " The tax proposal would apply to just about 700 taxpayers, Democrats say — people who earn more than $100 million per year or who have more than $1 billion in assets for three straight years. It would require them to give the IRS a detailed account of how much the assets they own gained or lost each year, a process called mark to market."
- hnuser847 5y ago
  That’s what they said about the federal income tax too, back in 1913. Now it’s by far the largest tax that regular people pay on an annual basis.
- furgooswft13 5y ago
  Same shit was claimed about the Federal Income Tax. How'd that turn out?
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    I mean, it funds a global economic hegemony without being nearly as burdensome as taxes in the rest of the developed world, so pretty great?
    - furgooswft13 5y ago
      So you agree then? This wealth tax will soon leech off the middle class? That the Federal Income Tax is responsible for the United State's brief stint at Pax Americana, 80 years after it was instituted, is highly debatable to say the least. But this time around, I challenge anyone to confidently say the US will maintain it's "global hegemony" within the next few decades. But at least the middle class will be poorer, and the government more powerful and burdensome than ever.
- azth 5y ago
  Next think you'll hear is that they only want to additionally tax the 0.5%, then the 1%, then the 5%, then then.
anbende 5y ago
I have mostly skeptical about tax plans like this one that tax non-liquid assets. It seems odd to me to tax a person’s illiquid holdings in a company for example. Do we force people to sell pieces of their property to pay the taxes on that property? (In short, for many types of property, yes, but it still has always seemed strange to me) That said, the more I read about the low or no interest loans against investments that seem to be the primary “income” of the mega-rich, it seems more and more that something needs to be done here. Or am I wrong? Thoughts?
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Another issue on my mind is that non-liquid assets are really hard to assess the value. Let’s say I had a complete set of Picasso’s paintings for a year. Every painting he did that year, I have. Who is qualified to say how much each painting individually is worth (other than an auction), and who can say what the total set value is in comparison to the individual value? Of course this proposal isn’t quite the Wealth Tax that Warren originally wanted but I could see even this tax not being enough in the future.
  - Blackthorn 5y ago
    Seems like that would fall under the non-tradeable asset part, which is paid upon sale rather than mark-to-market.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    In theory it could work the same way as land/building assessment for certain assets. Physical goods can be taxed on sale though, that's easy.
  - naravara 5y ago
    > Another issue on my mind is that non-liquid assets are really hard to assess the value. If the assets in question are equities listed on a public market it's actually quite easy for the government to assess the value.
  - knome 5y ago
scohesc 5y ago
I find it very hard to support that much spending when they haven't even figured out where they're going to get the money from. Quit layering more laws on top of other laws. Review the current system because it's _obvious_ it's not working - and update the tax system. Too bad the government has so much corporate money baked into it's procedures that it'll never happen. I glanced at the article and I'm not sure if I'm incorrect/misremembering, or if it's the classic NPR spin, but wasn't this part of the whole "taxing unrealized gains" plan as a way to pay for this?
- thomastjeffery 5y ago
  > I find it very hard to support that much spending when they haven't even figured out where they're going to get the money from. How are you defining "figured out"? It sounds like you are expecting that to mean consensus, but the nature of politics is that every politician has "figured out" their own solution. So the only way to consensus is compromise, and that is what we are seeing here.
osipov 5y ago
inflation is the most effective billionaires tax we have. unfortunately it also hurts lower and middle classes. however, we can send direct monetary stimulus to lower and middle classes to offset the loss of monetary value.
zpeti 5y ago
Step 1 - print money, give it to banks Step 2 - banks use it to buy stocks, commodities pushing prices up Step 3 - tax the gains Step 4 - you an awesome government that both prints money and taxes into oblivion. Obviously the country benefits. /sarcasm
- long_time_gone 5y ago
  You are saying the banks buy the stocks and the banks get taxed, that isn't what this plan is proposing. ==taxes into oblivion.== Taxing billionaires on their (unrealized) capital gains doesn't seem like "into oblivion", does it? This plan applies to the 700 richest people in the entire country. I think they'll be ok.
- pradn 5y ago
  I think this simplifies things a bit too much. Fiscal and monetary policies are administered by two separate branches of government, the Fed and Congress. The Fed is only nominally under democratic control, with just the board members approved by Congress every few years. They're literally different hands, so one may giveth and one may take away. Conventional Keynesian theory specifies both fiscal and monetary stimulus when a recession occurs. I'm curious to know what other fiscal policies could have had a similar impact given the very low benchmark interest rates already. Anyone have some thoughts on policy alternatives?
GaryTang 5y ago
I would support this if I didn’t already know it was going to be thrown away by the govt. I would wager the capital is more effectively deployed to benefit society where it currently is.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  Effective by whose standards? The market?
- ldiracdelta 5y ago
  I think it varies, but I'm open to the idea. However much we tax Elon Musk is too much, because he is the driving force for many fantastic companies in the USA. However much we tax Mark Zuckerberg is too little, because he has weaponized the social network for politics and profit.
newaccount2021 5y ago
there was also once a tax proposed a century ago...one that was to only be applied to the ultra-rich, and even then...sparingly it was called the Federal Income Tax you will be paying this new tax eventually too
giantg2 5y ago
I'm curious, what are the tax loopholes they talk of for the companies? It seems they are using credits, etc built in by Congress to support policy, like EVs and stuff. This sounds overly complicated. Why not just fix the capital gains tax structure to match better with the standard tax rate for higher earners? Keeping track of individual's wealth seems a little tricky, especially once people start hiding assets.
- varelse 5y ago
  QSBS deduction, LLC to Type S conversions etc. These won't be fixed apparently anytime soon if ever.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    But how are those used as loopholes? Aren't these policies that were enacted for the the purposes of giving tax breaks to small businesses?
    - varelse 5y ago
      If you define small business as $10M in the former and $100M market caps in the latter then sure. Now imagine having a portfolio of such "small businesses" like this. I'm hoping we can agree this is abusing the law, but I give up mostly. I'm at the point of telling all the billionaires who somehow can't figure out what their assets are worth for a wealth tax (yet seem to always know their total net worth down to the dollar or so) to tell us what their assets are worth, whatever their hearts desire it should be and pay taxes on that value. Except now all such assets go on to an exchange where anyone can buy it immediately for that price. Thank you Robert Heinlein for that idea.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        It depends on how you determine market cap on private equity. $10M still seems like a small business. $100M might, and could be consistent with the worker limit found in other small business definitions (<200 people). If they are legitimate businesses, then I don't see the problem with having a portfolio of them. Each one can be a significant risk. If they aren't legitimate, then additional regulations should be formed. If you still think it's a problem to have a portfolio, then they could change the language to use the limit as an aggregate of all businesses owned/sold. "I'm at the point of telling all the billionaires who somehow can't figure out what their assets are worth for a wealth tax" It's not just them. Forbes has this issue when ranking them. The IRS needs to be able to validate the numbers too, which is unlikely.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gjsman-1000 5y ago
How about we implement a tax for any person or entity with more than 10 homes. More than 10 homes, each additional home has a 1% or more federal property tax against all homes. 15 homes = 5% property tax on all homes. For the big buyers like Zillow or BlackRock this would be business-destroying. Small investors and flippers would be unaffected. You’d see home shortages end at light speed. And yes home prices may crash but it’s a long term fix. People would probably appreciate it long term much more than this plan. Or maybe it phases in over a 5 year period. Something though.
swiley 5y ago
This will wipe put any wealth the middle class has. It's becoming very clear that the US has few years left.
whatshisface 5y ago
Instead of taxing asset growth, they should tax the loan trick. For example Elon Musk uses loans taken out with stock as collateral, with no intention to ever pay them back - the banks are happy to take the collateral when the shareholder dies or something, because they're happy enough to put the debt on their books.
- Someone1234 5y ago
  I agree, except the confusing "instead of." You can do both.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Taxing asset growth would encourage business people to do all of their valuations "under the table" and never go public, to defer asset growth taxes. Valuations would become a tax accounting fiction.
- gradys 5y ago
  Agreed. You could tax proceeds from this kind of loan as income and then make repayment tax-free. Or I suppose just tax that too as a form of disincentive.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Fairly sure this is illegal in the UK, and it was the enforcement against such schemes that blew up Rangers football club among others. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/loan-schemes-and-the-loan-charge-an-overview/tax-avoidance-loan-schemes-and-the-loan-charge https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/loan-schemes-and-...
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  Right, it doesn't seem too difficult or unreasonable to treat the value of something used as collateral for a loan as an opportunity to establish its realized value from a capital gains perspective. This could also help resolve the issue with taxing non-liquid asset values (like homes), in that you hit wealth when it is utilized (easy to judge) rather than when it is generated (often difficult to judge).
poorjohnmacafee 5y ago
Optics of it are bad given the CCP has been accelerating their crack down on billionaires, also known as state-independent power centers. This is the direction they want to take us I guess.
RNCTX 5y ago
The trend in any economic system over time is going to be for those with wealth to extract more from those without it. Ultimately, the end game is either going to be cyclical revolution / violence, or some sort of redistributive tax scheme. There's no abstract plan that lets Bill Gates own all of the nation's farm land, and lets Blackrock clear-cut all of the forests of the Amazon jungle, and lets Michael Bloomberg mass-arrest protesters of his political party after buying his way into office, and/or lets Google cover the landscape with armed ai-drone protected company towns. That said, the only reason DNC senators have proposed such a thing is that they have Manchin and Sinema to prevent it from actually being voted on by the 30 other DNC senators who would also oppose it for the sake of their donors.
- naravara 5y ago
  > That said, the only reason DNC senators have proposed such a thing is that they have Manchin and Sinema to prevent it from actually being voted on by the 30 other DNC senators who would also oppose it for the sake of their donors. No the only reason this bill is being proposed is because Sinema was a hard "no" on the corporate tax rate hike that was in the original bill, but she was amenable to Warren's 'Billionaire tax.'
  - RNCTX 5y ago
    > No the only reason this bill is being proposed is because Sinema was a hard "no" on the corporate tax rate hike that was in the original bill, but she was amenable to Warren's 'Billionaire tax.' And she'll be off to have a fundraiser with the people who want her to oppose this directly, I'm sure. And collect half on behalf of DNC PACs.
knodi 5y ago
Lets face with real tax on the rich is never going to happen in the US as they hold and pull all the lobbying strings.
01100011 5y ago
The only way I'd support something like this is if they limited it to taxing investments when they are used. If a person holds onto an inflated asset they shouldn't be penalized. If they use that asset as collateral for a loan then I think it's fair game. That said, I'd like to see an analysis of what the financial system would look like if we applied that sort of logic to all asset classes and included various entities like corporations, trusts, etc., before I'm fully sold on it. I really appreciate the desire to reign in the massive wealth inequality in the world today. I'm just wary of these sorts of 'hackish' approaches. I think of the law like I think of source code. It should be clear, consistent, analyzable, and come with a clear set of testable goals and intentions.
- swiley 5y ago
  There's a serious problem where people are just sitting on valuable land in dense areas, your proposal would exacerbate that.
  - 01100011 5y ago
    Yeah obviously there are tradeoffs. I'd need to see a more thorough analysis of this before I fully support it. It may be the case that there are too many downsides to the proposal. It also may be the case that a few other proposals in concert with this one can achieve the goals in a more comprehensive and productive manner.
  - nayuki 5y ago
    We need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax to avoid squatting, instead of property tax which considers the value of land + building.
    - caeril 5y ago
      Yeah, this is an excellent idea, especially for the environment. Let's penalize urban gardening co-ops, dog parks, arboretums, and anyone else who thinks preserving some semblance of nature in urban environments is nice to have. Let's not rest until every urban area is paved completely over into a high-density, lifeless, brutalist hellscape. Screw species diversity. Homo sapiens is #1!
numair 5y ago
1. Kill the insane Opportunity Zone tax dodge. 2. Kill GRATs. I personally know of at least one person who has been passed a gain of over a billion dollars through that nonsense. And that was a decade ago. Oh, but wait, both of those things affect major donors... Yeah, never mind, let’s just waste lots of time distracting the populace with something with a catchy name — “the Billionaire’s Tax” — that will keep lots of polarized discourse going while absolutely nothing gets accomplished.
hnuser847 5y ago
It will start as a wealth tax on billionaires but within five years it will be a wealth tax on anyone with a net worth greater than 100k. That’s how these things go. Take a look at the history of the history of the federal income tax for an example. It started in 1913 as a mere 1% on the lowest income earner. By 1918, the lowest bracket was 6%. Now it’s 10%. You’ll have to do some adjusting for inflation, but this document lists every federal income tax bracket over the past 150 years: https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/fed_individual_rate_history_nominal.pdf https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/fed_individual_r...
- pradn 5y ago
  Well, maybe. People do vote. You can look at the strong opposition local and state level politicians see with any property tax or state income tax increase. There's a built-in regulating mechanism. Taxes are usually one of the top issues that swings elections from one party to another, so the democratic regulating mechanism works somewhat well, I believe. It's not an obscure topic that can escape democratic oversight, like subsidies for lumber harvesting in a few counties in Montana, for example.
- thomastjeffery 5y ago
  > Look, this slippery slope argument was valid, so the one I'm making now must be too! I'm not convinced.
- caeril 5y ago
  Valid point, but I'd note that it's backed off significantly since WW2, when top tax rates were close to 90%. Tax rates seem to more closely track actual government funding requirements than they do any sort of moral justification of such. The only reason congress is considering this is that TSY yields are starting to creep up, making government funding through debt more expensive. If 10y yields were still tracking around 1%, none of this noise would be here.
Workaccount2 5y ago
Just raise interest rates and use eminent domain to build housing in locally zoned off areas. Of course we can't do either of these things (gov debt and people with power have money -> own land -> love strict zoning)
akshayB 5y ago
Problem is big companies dodge taxes and that needs a fix. Example -- you buy a smart phone you pay sales tax (consumer or normal people), what they should do is put something like 0.5% or some small Federal tax which companies have to pay on sale. Because most of the time companies park their profit offshore and pay nothing in tax.
Aunche 5y ago
There's no way a radical bill like this would ever get even close to being passed. Do legislatures in other nations waste this much time virtue signaling? Given her background, I have a hard time believing that Warren genuinely thinks that it's a good idea. I'm sure it will make her more popular though.
0xbadc0de5 5y ago
We need more tax revenue to fund our largess says bloated, inefficient government. More news at 11.
_-david-_ 5y ago
Would such a law be legal? It seems like it would be a direct tax that is not an income tax.
tmaly 5y ago
I would also like to see term limits while we are at it.
chrismcb 5y ago
Why? The amount of money this week raise is small. And of course, many will take steps to not pay it, making the asking even smaller. So why? Is it to get the "wealth"tax started so they can grow who it affects? There are already a ton of comments here about how it didn't affect them or it is a good idea to steal wealth from the rich.

44 points by anbende 5y ago

So much spin on HN today, i hope you all read this before poo-pooing it. " The tax proposal would apply to just about 700 taxpayers, Democrats say — people who earn more than $100 million per year or who have more than $1 billion in assets for three straight years. It would require them to give the IRS a detailed account of how much the assets they own gained or lost each year, a process called mark to market."

hnuser847 5y ago
That’s what they said about the federal income tax too, back in 1913. Now it’s by far the largest tax that regular people pay on an annual basis.
furgooswft13 5y ago
Same shit was claimed about the Federal Income Tax. How'd that turn out?
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  I mean, it funds a global economic hegemony without being nearly as burdensome as taxes in the rest of the developed world, so pretty great?
  - furgooswft13 5y ago
    So you agree then? This wealth tax will soon leech off the middle class? That the Federal Income Tax is responsible for the United State's brief stint at Pax Americana, 80 years after it was instituted, is highly debatable to say the least. But this time around, I challenge anyone to confidently say the US will maintain it's "global hegemony" within the next few decades. But at least the middle class will be poorer, and the government more powerful and burdensome than ever.
azth 5y ago
Next think you'll hear is that they only want to additionally tax the 0.5%, then the 1%, then the 5%, then then.

anbende 5y ago

I have mostly skeptical about tax plans like this one that tax non-liquid assets. It seems odd to me to tax a person’s illiquid holdings in a company for example. Do we force people to sell pieces of their property to pay the taxes on that property? (In short, for many types of property, yes, but it still has always seemed strange to me) That said, the more I read about the low or no interest loans against investments that seem to be the primary “income” of the mega-rich, it seems more and more that something needs to be done here. Or am I wrong? Thoughts?

gjsman-1000 5y ago
Another issue on my mind is that non-liquid assets are really hard to assess the value. Let’s say I had a complete set of Picasso’s paintings for a year. Every painting he did that year, I have. Who is qualified to say how much each painting individually is worth (other than an auction), and who can say what the total set value is in comparison to the individual value? Of course this proposal isn’t quite the Wealth Tax that Warren originally wanted but I could see even this tax not being enough in the future.
- Blackthorn 5y ago
  Seems like that would fall under the non-tradeable asset part, which is paid upon sale rather than mark-to-market.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  In theory it could work the same way as land/building assessment for certain assets. Physical goods can be taxed on sale though, that's easy.
- naravara 5y ago
  > Another issue on my mind is that non-liquid assets are really hard to assess the value. If the assets in question are equities listed on a public market it's actually quite easy for the government to assess the value.
- knome 5y ago

scohesc 5y ago

I find it very hard to support that much spending when they haven't even figured out where they're going to get the money from. Quit layering more laws on top of other laws. Review the current system because it's _obvious_ it's not working - and update the tax system. Too bad the government has so much corporate money baked into it's procedures that it'll never happen. I glanced at the article and I'm not sure if I'm incorrect/misremembering, or if it's the classic NPR spin, but wasn't this part of the whole "taxing unrealized gains" plan as a way to pay for this?

thomastjeffery 5y ago
> I find it very hard to support that much spending when they haven't even figured out where they're going to get the money from. How are you defining "figured out"? It sounds like you are expecting that to mean consensus, but the nature of politics is that every politician has "figured out" their own solution. So the only way to consensus is compromise, and that is what we are seeing here.

osipov 5y ago

inflation is the most effective billionaires tax we have. unfortunately it also hurts lower and middle classes. however, we can send direct monetary stimulus to lower and middle classes to offset the loss of monetary value.

zpeti 5y ago

Step 1 - print money, give it to banks Step 2 - banks use it to buy stocks, commodities pushing prices up Step 3 - tax the gains Step 4 - you an awesome government that both prints money and taxes into oblivion. Obviously the country benefits. /sarcasm

long_time_gone 5y ago
You are saying the banks buy the stocks and the banks get taxed, that isn't what this plan is proposing. ==taxes into oblivion.== Taxing billionaires on their (unrealized) capital gains doesn't seem like "into oblivion", does it? This plan applies to the 700 richest people in the entire country. I think they'll be ok.
pradn 5y ago
I think this simplifies things a bit too much. Fiscal and monetary policies are administered by two separate branches of government, the Fed and Congress. The Fed is only nominally under democratic control, with just the board members approved by Congress every few years. They're literally different hands, so one may giveth and one may take away. Conventional Keynesian theory specifies both fiscal and monetary stimulus when a recession occurs. I'm curious to know what other fiscal policies could have had a similar impact given the very low benchmark interest rates already. Anyone have some thoughts on policy alternatives?

GaryTang 5y ago

I would support this if I didn’t already know it was going to be thrown away by the govt. I would wager the capital is more effectively deployed to benefit society where it currently is.

halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
Effective by whose standards? The market?
ldiracdelta 5y ago
I think it varies, but I'm open to the idea. However much we tax Elon Musk is too much, because he is the driving force for many fantastic companies in the USA. However much we tax Mark Zuckerberg is too little, because he has weaponized the social network for politics and profit.

newaccount2021 5y ago

there was also once a tax proposed a century ago...one that was to only be applied to the ultra-rich, and even then...sparingly it was called the Federal Income Tax you will be paying this new tax eventually too

giantg2 5y ago

I'm curious, what are the tax loopholes they talk of for the companies? It seems they are using credits, etc built in by Congress to support policy, like EVs and stuff. This sounds overly complicated. Why not just fix the capital gains tax structure to match better with the standard tax rate for higher earners? Keeping track of individual's wealth seems a little tricky, especially once people start hiding assets.

varelse 5y ago
QSBS deduction, LLC to Type S conversions etc. These won't be fixed apparently anytime soon if ever.
- giantg2 5y ago
  But how are those used as loopholes? Aren't these policies that were enacted for the the purposes of giving tax breaks to small businesses?
  - varelse 5y ago
    If you define small business as $10M in the former and $100M market caps in the latter then sure. Now imagine having a portfolio of such "small businesses" like this. I'm hoping we can agree this is abusing the law, but I give up mostly. I'm at the point of telling all the billionaires who somehow can't figure out what their assets are worth for a wealth tax (yet seem to always know their total net worth down to the dollar or so) to tell us what their assets are worth, whatever their hearts desire it should be and pay taxes on that value. Except now all such assets go on to an exchange where anyone can buy it immediately for that price. Thank you Robert Heinlein for that idea.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      It depends on how you determine market cap on private equity. $10M still seems like a small business. $100M might, and could be consistent with the worker limit found in other small business definitions (<200 people). If they are legitimate businesses, then I don't see the problem with having a portfolio of them. Each one can be a significant risk. If they aren't legitimate, then additional regulations should be formed. If you still think it's a problem to have a portfolio, then they could change the language to use the limit as an aggregate of all businesses owned/sold. "I'm at the point of telling all the billionaires who somehow can't figure out what their assets are worth for a wealth tax" It's not just them. Forbes has this issue when ranking them. The IRS needs to be able to validate the numbers too, which is unlikely.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

gjsman-1000 5y ago

How about we implement a tax for any person or entity with more than 10 homes. More than 10 homes, each additional home has a 1% or more federal property tax against all homes. 15 homes = 5% property tax on all homes. For the big buyers like Zillow or BlackRock this would be business-destroying. Small investors and flippers would be unaffected. You’d see home shortages end at light speed. And yes home prices may crash but it’s a long term fix. People would probably appreciate it long term much more than this plan. Or maybe it phases in over a 5 year period. Something though.

swiley 5y ago

This will wipe put any wealth the middle class has. It's becoming very clear that the US has few years left.

whatshisface 5y ago

Instead of taxing asset growth, they should tax the loan trick. For example Elon Musk uses loans taken out with stock as collateral, with no intention to ever pay them back - the banks are happy to take the collateral when the shareholder dies or something, because they're happy enough to put the debt on their books.

Someone1234 5y ago
I agree, except the confusing "instead of." You can do both.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  Taxing asset growth would encourage business people to do all of their valuations "under the table" and never go public, to defer asset growth taxes. Valuations would become a tax accounting fiction.
gradys 5y ago
Agreed. You could tax proceeds from this kind of loan as income and then make repayment tax-free. Or I suppose just tax that too as a form of disincentive.
pjc50 5y ago
Fairly sure this is illegal in the UK, and it was the enforcement against such schemes that blew up Rangers football club among others. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/loan-schemes-and-the-loan-charge-an-overview/tax-avoidance-loan-schemes-and-the-loan-charge https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/loan-schemes-and-...
InitialLastName 5y ago
Right, it doesn't seem too difficult or unreasonable to treat the value of something used as collateral for a loan as an opportunity to establish its realized value from a capital gains perspective. This could also help resolve the issue with taxing non-liquid asset values (like homes), in that you hit wealth when it is utilized (easy to judge) rather than when it is generated (often difficult to judge).

poorjohnmacafee 5y ago

Optics of it are bad given the CCP has been accelerating their crack down on billionaires, also known as state-independent power centers. This is the direction they want to take us I guess.

RNCTX 5y ago

The trend in any economic system over time is going to be for those with wealth to extract more from those without it. Ultimately, the end game is either going to be cyclical revolution / violence, or some sort of redistributive tax scheme. There's no abstract plan that lets Bill Gates own all of the nation's farm land, and lets Blackrock clear-cut all of the forests of the Amazon jungle, and lets Michael Bloomberg mass-arrest protesters of his political party after buying his way into office, and/or lets Google cover the landscape with armed ai-drone protected company towns. That said, the only reason DNC senators have proposed such a thing is that they have Manchin and Sinema to prevent it from actually being voted on by the 30 other DNC senators who would also oppose it for the sake of their donors.

naravara 5y ago
> That said, the only reason DNC senators have proposed such a thing is that they have Manchin and Sinema to prevent it from actually being voted on by the 30 other DNC senators who would also oppose it for the sake of their donors. No the only reason this bill is being proposed is because Sinema was a hard "no" on the corporate tax rate hike that was in the original bill, but she was amenable to Warren's 'Billionaire tax.'
- RNCTX 5y ago
  > No the only reason this bill is being proposed is because Sinema was a hard "no" on the corporate tax rate hike that was in the original bill, but she was amenable to Warren's 'Billionaire tax.' And she'll be off to have a fundraiser with the people who want her to oppose this directly, I'm sure. And collect half on behalf of DNC PACs.

knodi 5y ago

Lets face with real tax on the rich is never going to happen in the US as they hold and pull all the lobbying strings.

01100011 5y ago

The only way I'd support something like this is if they limited it to taxing investments when they are used. If a person holds onto an inflated asset they shouldn't be penalized. If they use that asset as collateral for a loan then I think it's fair game. That said, I'd like to see an analysis of what the financial system would look like if we applied that sort of logic to all asset classes and included various entities like corporations, trusts, etc., before I'm fully sold on it. I really appreciate the desire to reign in the massive wealth inequality in the world today. I'm just wary of these sorts of 'hackish' approaches. I think of the law like I think of source code. It should be clear, consistent, analyzable, and come with a clear set of testable goals and intentions.

swiley 5y ago
There's a serious problem where people are just sitting on valuable land in dense areas, your proposal would exacerbate that.
- 01100011 5y ago
  Yeah obviously there are tradeoffs. I'd need to see a more thorough analysis of this before I fully support it. It may be the case that there are too many downsides to the proposal. It also may be the case that a few other proposals in concert with this one can achieve the goals in a more comprehensive and productive manner.
- nayuki 5y ago
  We need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax to avoid squatting, instead of property tax which considers the value of land + building.
  - caeril 5y ago
    Yeah, this is an excellent idea, especially for the environment. Let's penalize urban gardening co-ops, dog parks, arboretums, and anyone else who thinks preserving some semblance of nature in urban environments is nice to have. Let's not rest until every urban area is paved completely over into a high-density, lifeless, brutalist hellscape. Screw species diversity. Homo sapiens is #1!

numair 5y ago

1. Kill the insane Opportunity Zone tax dodge. 2. Kill GRATs. I personally know of at least one person who has been passed a gain of over a billion dollars through that nonsense. And that was a decade ago. Oh, but wait, both of those things affect major donors... Yeah, never mind, let’s just waste lots of time distracting the populace with something with a catchy name — “the Billionaire’s Tax” — that will keep lots of polarized discourse going while absolutely nothing gets accomplished.

hnuser847 5y ago

It will start as a wealth tax on billionaires but within five years it will be a wealth tax on anyone with a net worth greater than 100k. That’s how these things go. Take a look at the history of the history of the federal income tax for an example. It started in 1913 as a mere 1% on the lowest income earner. By 1918, the lowest bracket was 6%. Now it’s 10%. You’ll have to do some adjusting for inflation, but this document lists every federal income tax bracket over the past 150 years: https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/fed_individual_rate_history_nominal.pdf https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/fed_individual_r...

pradn 5y ago
Well, maybe. People do vote. You can look at the strong opposition local and state level politicians see with any property tax or state income tax increase. There's a built-in regulating mechanism. Taxes are usually one of the top issues that swings elections from one party to another, so the democratic regulating mechanism works somewhat well, I believe. It's not an obscure topic that can escape democratic oversight, like subsidies for lumber harvesting in a few counties in Montana, for example.
thomastjeffery 5y ago
> Look, this slippery slope argument was valid, so the one I'm making now must be too! I'm not convinced.
caeril 5y ago
Valid point, but I'd note that it's backed off significantly since WW2, when top tax rates were close to 90%. Tax rates seem to more closely track actual government funding requirements than they do any sort of moral justification of such. The only reason congress is considering this is that TSY yields are starting to creep up, making government funding through debt more expensive. If 10y yields were still tracking around 1%, none of this noise would be here.

Workaccount2 5y ago

Just raise interest rates and use eminent domain to build housing in locally zoned off areas. Of course we can't do either of these things (gov debt and people with power have money -> own land -> love strict zoning)

akshayB 5y ago

Problem is big companies dodge taxes and that needs a fix. Example -- you buy a smart phone you pay sales tax (consumer or normal people), what they should do is put something like 0.5% or some small Federal tax which companies have to pay on sale. Because most of the time companies park their profit offshore and pay nothing in tax.

Aunche 5y ago

There's no way a radical bill like this would ever get even close to being passed. Do legislatures in other nations waste this much time virtue signaling? Given her background, I have a hard time believing that Warren genuinely thinks that it's a good idea. I'm sure it will make her more popular though.

0xbadc0de5 5y ago

We need more tax revenue to fund our largess says bloated, inefficient government. More news at 11.

_-david-_ 5y ago

Would such a law be legal? It seems like it would be a direct tax that is not an income tax.

tmaly 5y ago

I would also like to see term limits while we are at it.

chrismcb 5y ago

Why? The amount of money this week raise is small. And of course, many will take steps to not pay it, making the asking even smaller. So why? Is it to get the "wealth"tax started so they can grow who it affects? There are already a ton of comments here about how it didn't affect them or it is a good idea to steal wealth from the rich.