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I'm not settled on this yet. I'm from the USA, and one thing that concerns me is the geopolitics of billionaires. What happens when USA taxes billionaires out o

• anotherfounder 4y ago
  If there was fair taxation on billionaires, and there was a wage growth where all the productivity gains didn't only stay at the top, then I think folks would be less incensed at billionaires.
  • emptysongglass 4y ago
    You don't even need to discuss billionaires though to get some very bad effects. Take Denmark for example that taxes software engineers 50 percent of their salary (it's not unique to SWEs it's just because nearly all SWEs will make enough to fall into this bracket). I'm thoroughly examining other lower tax bracket countries to move to because why do I want to pay half of my salary until I am enfeebled and the state lets me enjoy my enfeeblement? Let's macrosize the perspective: why do you think Unity moved HQ from DK to the USA? Could it be the crushing taxes here? This is the issue. You really can't have it both ways. Yet many Americans love to fetishize a hatred for few very specific individuals without thinking through the whole causal chain that girds their economy.
    • Johnny555 4y ago
      Take Denmark for example that taxes software engineers 50 percent of their salary (it's not unique to SWEs it's just because nearly all SWEs will make enough to fall into this bracket). I'm thoroughly examining other lower tax bracket countries to move to because why do I want to pay half of my salary until I am enfeebled and the state lets me enjoy my enfeeblement? Denmark consistently ranks in the top 5 of countries with the best quality of life. A year of parental leave, great social welfare, universal healthcare and retirement benefits, etc. Including federal/state/local taxes, healthcare premiums, retirement contributions, disability insurance, etc, I pay close to 50% of my salary in the USA And I'd still worry about how I'll pay the bills if I lost my job. why do I want to pay half of my salary until I am enfeebled and the state lets me enjoy my enfeeblement? Because that's how the state pays for the enfeebled today? Are you really suggesting you want to leave Denmark to go somewhere with lower tax rates, then when you need social healthcare, you'll move back to Denmark and take advantage of the healthcare system that you didn't pay for?
      • yardstick 4y ago
        > Are you really suggesting you want to leave Denmark to go somewhere with lower tax rates, then when you need social healthcare, you'll move back to Denmark and take advantage of the healthcare system that you didn't pay for? Isn’t that the point of their healthcare/retirement system? It’s socialist, not user pays. That it covers everyone irrespective of their tax contributions. Otherwise it would exclude the unemployed, students, disabled, low income (untaxed) people (esp housewife/househusbands) etc.
        • Johnny555 4y ago
          Isn’t that the point of their healthcare/retirement system I don't think "Encourage people to move out of the country during the working years and move back to the country when they are old and need expensive healthcare coverage" is the point. It may be the result of their system, but it's not the point. But if it became a problem, they could require that you buy back into the system after an extended absence out of the country.
          • yardstick 4y ago
            > they could require that you buy back into the system after an extended absence out of the country. And if you can’t buy back in? Won and lost your fortune overseas (or never won at all and remained poor all your life) and returned “home” destitute? What then?
• Johnny555 4y ago
  Does that do something to the power relationships in the world? The fact that you're even asking that is a reason we shouldn't have billionaires -- world power relationships shouldn't be based on the wealth of individual citizens. For example, what did Musk really talk about when he met with the president of Brazil? Did he represent American interests, Amazon Inc's interests, or Elon Musk's interests?
  • kordlessagain 4y ago
    So then you are also OK with gutting capitalism and limiting company's abilities to make mad profits? Because, you can't have one without the other.
    • Johnny555 4y ago
      I don't understand how a tax on personal wealth guts capitalism and limits a company's ability to make mad profits?
      • gammabetadelta 4y ago
    • arrosenberg 4y ago
      Or distribute the profits more broadly? No need to be dramatic.
    • yellowapple 4y ago
      If we can't have capitalism without neofeudalist exploitation of the working class for the sake of enriching a privileged ownership class, then yes, I would very much prefer to gut capitalism.
    • X6S1x6Okd1st 4y ago
      Why do you think a wealth tax would limit a companies abilities to make "mad profits"?
• PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  Chinese billionaires still only exist at the mercy of China. Jack Ma, anyone?
• throwaway894345 4y ago
  Also, billionaires' wealth isn't parked in a vault, right? It's invested in companies, so it's working in the economy whereas it would otherwise go to the government. It's not obvious to me that the government is going to provide more value for the public in general than industry, but I would like for that to be the case (an easy solution for inequality that doesn't shrink our economy overall).
  • Johnny555 4y ago
    A wealth tax wouldn't change that. No billionaire is going to sit around and watch his $1B fortune be whittled away in 5 years by a 20% tax. Instead he's going to divest -- he'll put the money into other companies or charitable foundations.
    • DamnYuppie 4y ago
      You statement makes it sound like they aren't currently doing those things already. Can you point to some data that shows they aren't donating to charities and aren't diversified? I can understand if someone like Bezos is highly invested in the company he founded but overtime he will be like Gates and hold a small portion of his portfolio in Amazon and the rest broke up across many companies and charities.
      • Johnny555 4y ago
        Then I guess a wealth tax is not needed, billionaires are already giving away all of their money or starting new companies through direct investments, so they're no longer billionaires.
        • throwaway894345 4y ago
          If you have a billion dollars and you invest all of it, you're still a billionaire (unless your investments tank). No billionaire keeps all of his money in cash.
    • throwaway894345 4y ago
• krrrh 4y ago
  Billionaires provide value as alternate sources of power to the state. Distributed sources of philanthropy that can target areas neglected by government are one thing (Carnegie’s libraries, Bill Gates work on tropical diseases, Frick’s art collection which he donated to the American people, alternate media and educational projects (Ford foundation’s continued funding of NPR, Soros’ Open Society Foundation, Koch funding of the Reason foundation and CATO etc, putting hyperbolic conspiracy theories aside these all enrich the political conversation and increase the opportunities for policy experimentation)). Secondly, billionaires have a good claim on being experienced and skilled deployers of capital. A wealth tax would have limited the capacity for private investment in EV, space flight, the acceleration of cloud computing. There are two common ripostes to this. One is that these are wasteful vanity projects, which just proves the point that there is value to this sort of decentralized system of capital allocation where some small percentage of total available capital is in the hands of quixotic individuals who can pursue aims that a majority of the population doesn’t (yet) see the value of. The second objection is that these things should all be handled by the state. It’s fine for people to want space exploration to be entirely handled by NASA for instance, but the record is pretty clear that US (and by extension humanity’s) pace of space exploration has been absolutely transformed by the ability for private actors with substantial resources to make moves outside of an existing bureaucracy. The US government spends upwards of $4T dollars a year, and the media class has a much larger influence on politics than and group of billionaires could buy. Because most billionaires are entrepreneurs they also typically look at ways they can deploy capital that are underserved and where the state would be an inappropriate actor in terms of required risk and innovation. A group of talented weirdos that have the resources to move the needle on neglected projects is a feature not a bug.
  • Johnny555 4y ago
    A wealth tax wouldn't prevent the Gates Foundation from existing, it would encourage it -- instead of keeping personal wealth that's going to be taxed, the would-be billionaire can set up a charitable foundation like the Gates Foundation to spend the money. Since the charity is run by a board and bound to abide by its charter, it's not the same thing as the person controlling the wealth himself. The Gates Foundation is not going to buy Bill Gates a private island with a $100M super yacht to get there.
• munificent 4y ago
  > What happens when USA taxes billionaires out of existence? This is a really good question. I believe the answer is that the USA will be better able to outcompete those countries that do have them. History has shown time and again that massive inequality is a huge barrier to maximizing the productivity of all of a society's members. It leads to cynism and corruption and breaks down cooperation. It forces a society to spend valuable resources on policing in order to keep the poor taking from the rich. It's just economically incredibly inefficient. You need some level of inequality to incentivize people but once you go beyond that, it's a net harm.
  • kortilla 4y ago
    > believe the answer is that the USA will be better able to outcompete those countries that do have them Based on what? The US already outcompetes these other countries in business success and average citizen income. What countries don’t have billionaires that are competitive? > History has shown time and again that massive inequality is a huge barrier to maximizing the productivity of all of a society's members. History has literally never shown this. This is the first time we’ve had massive inequality while still having a solid middle class. The jury is still out on whether the instability of the past was just because of excessive poverty and no upward mobility or because wealthy people were there.
    • oblio 4y ago
      For every localized case, including critical ones such as the army, historically super rich and powerful people would distort the system. There are countless examples of rich or powerful and connected people buying officer posts, for example, and meritocracies (= equality of chances) stomping all over these corruped systems. There's little reason to believe rich people willingly or not, do not distort every market they're in. That's why they become rich, to be powerful.
    • bildung 4y ago
      > History has literally never shown this. Empirically, this is actually beyond doubt by now. Piketty et al. were in the news 10 years ago with this very topic, showing that inequality is detrimental to growth, for many countries and over very large periods of time. And there has been a bunch of additional studies after that publication that support these findings.
• sdenton4 4y ago
  The most productive decades in the US correspond with its highest relative tax rates, between the fifties and the eighties. Thomas Piketty: "if you look at the long-run evolution, we’ve seen less concentration of wealth. So the top 10 percent of the wealth distribution today would have 60 percent in Europe, 70 percent in the U.S., as compared to 90 percent before World War I in Europe. This did not destroy the economy. If anything, this decline in the share of total wealth going to top 10 percent and the corresponding increase in the share going to the next 40 percent has contributed to a much faster economic growth in the 20th century than in previous centuries. "I think partly because it allowed more people to participate, to the economy. And also partly because it came also with the rise of education. And this was the true source of productivity in the long run, rather than the enormous level of inequality that we had before World War I. This theoretical discourse that more inequality, more concentration of wealth is always better for economic growth was made, of course, throughout history by people who had large concentration of wealth, certainly in Europe before World War I. "And this is a discourse that, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan tried to tell Americans, basically tried to tell them, look we’ve gone too far with the New Deal, with Roosevelt, in terms of progressive taxation or wealth redistribution. We are going to cut top tax rate by two, where they’re going to go down to 28 percent or 30 percent, as compared to the 80 percent, 90 percent top tax rate under Roosevelt. So the promise that was made by Reagan during the 1980s was that cutting top tax rate might lead to more inequality, but will also lead to so much more innovation, more economic growth. And the incomes of average Americans are going to grow much faster than they used to grow. "Except that this is not what we’ve seen at all. So if you look at the three decades after Reagan, 1990 to 2020, the growth rate of national income per capita in the U.S. was only 1.1 — 1.2 percent as compared to 2 percent, 2.5 percent in the period of 1950 to 1980, or 1950 to 1990, which itself was not particularly exceptional. It was the same — 1910 to 1950, it was about 2 —2.5 percent. 1870 to 1910, around 2 percent. So in fact, the post-Reagan period, 1990-2020 has been particularly bad in terms of growth rate of national income per capita, which at the end of the day is the best economic measure we have of the increase in productivity and this should reflect innovation, et cetera." https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-thomas-piketty.html?showTranscript=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
  • thrwy_meta 4y ago
• tshaddox 4y ago
  Would you apply that same form of argument to everything else that is illegal or strongly disincentivized? “We shouldn’t ban/disincentivize x because people will just go do x in some other country” doesn’t seem like an argument I would make for a large range of x’s.
• csomar 4y ago
  You pass laws to tax Russia and China billionaires. Then there are no billionaires in the world. That's how the US did with Russia, it passed sanctions in response to the Ukraine war. Wait... That didn't actually work. source: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=RUB https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=RUB