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Doesn’t this already happen to some extent with property taxes? You pay tax on the appraised value of the property. If it later goes down, you just pay less fro
by danenania 5y ago
Doesn’t this already happen to some extent with property taxes? You pay tax on the appraised value of the property. If it later goes down, you just pay less from that point onward. It doesn’t seem like a problem.
To me, taxing wealth and only wealth seems like the most straightforward route to a truly progressive tax system. That’s not to say it’s simple or straightforward in an absolute sense, but neither is taxing income, is it?
At a high level, taxing wealth instead of income or transactions ensures that rich people are paying their share, while maximizing upward mobility so that people can become rich more easily. Think about how much easier it would be to become wealthy without income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, taxes on corporate profits, etc. etc.
This is what we should optimize for imho: making it as easy as possible to become wealthy. Sure, there details to figure out, as with any approach, and maybe some rich people will face some difficult choices or be forced to sell assets; I’m ok with that and it seems well worth the tradeoff.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y agoWealth taxes and land value taxes seem like the most sane way to fund social programs. Extract a bit of value from the people who have runaway wealth (but not so much that their wealth can't continue to grow), and use it to help the economically downtrodden become more upwardly mobile (education, healthcare, basic social safety nets.) Pair it with a hefty pigeuvian carbon tax and you could probably do away with income taxes entirely. (A nondistortionary VAT to replace sales taxes and corporate income taxes would be nice as well.)
- koprulusector 5y agoLike Georgism? Which, by the way, imagines the land tax alone being enough to eliminate personal income taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y agoYes, I am a Georgist.