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If you are wealthy and refuse to earn an income, then your savings will eventually deplete and you’ll become bankrupt. Additionally they wealth already taxed i

If you are wealthy and refuse to earn an income, then your savings will eventually deplete and you’ll become bankrupt. Additionally they wealth already taxed in a previous era, and is currently taxed in this era any time they spend it via sales tax. If of course you are spending all your money on personal groceries as a billionaire, then I’m 100% fine with not taxing you.

bmitc 4y ago
I don't think any individual should be a billionaire. There's no conceivable reason for a single person to need or have the right to be a billionaire.
- underdeserver 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- simonswords82 4y ago
  I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this stance but at a practical level it's interesting to think about. Let's say life is a computer game, and once you max out at $1bn in earned wealth (presumably this includes liquid and illiquid assets such as properties, cars etc), you cannot accumulate more wealth. How does a government enforce this stance? You cannot stop say Bill Gates shorting Tesla and earning millions from the trade, can you? Can you stop a landlord renting out their properties to block further income from them? What about interest generated from bonds or savings accounts? Do you simply tax the shit out of people if they have over £1bn in wealth? The big challenge I see for all of this is that rich people have the best (and most expensive) accountants/lawyers money can buy. If you try to tax the shit out of them, their accountants and lawyers will find a way around it. Also, if one government is too heavy handed, they'll just move assets to another more lenient government.
  - Yizahi 4y ago
    You make "almost illegal" financial activities really illegal in the law, prosecute people, and I suspect that 90% of the problems will disappear automagically. Number of people who can become billionaires without committing borderline illegal and completely illegal activities are vanishingly small I suspect, probably only founders of megacorporations and those are often doing illegal stuff too to stay ahead. USA is an outlier probably as far as honest successful corporations go, but in other countries if you are a top100 Fortune person you are likely a criminal too. In my country for sure. Energy - illegal oligopoly, metallurgy - illegal oligopoly, animal farming - illegal oligopoly, etc. The number of illegal schemes happening in the big corps in my country is staggering.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Not to defend corruption, and I'll agree absolutely that there's a lot if room for improvement, but far too many people break far too many laws for full enforcement of any of them; and even outside egregious violations, law itself is too esoteric for most people to understand either their obligations or their rights. With regard to the first part, the normal examples I give of this are road traffic offences (which if fully enforced would mean the only people allowed to drive would be those who didn't); and drug laws — ignore weed for now, nobody defends heroin, full enforcement of UK heroin laws would treble the UK prison population all by itself, while enforcing the laws on cocaine would more than double the US prison population and increase the British one by a factor of 20. With regard to the second, look at how confused people get about copyright, trademarks, how they work, what the penalties are for violating them, what counts as "fair use", and so on.
      - Yizahi 4y ago
        We should focus on the large scale offenses by big entities of course. E.g. if you have 50% market share of chicken production in the country (and another 50% is also a single corporation) then I'm sure that both of the corporations are breaking a lot of laws and utilising a lot of barely legal schemes to launder profits. Same for all sectors of economy. Examples closer to us - ISPs, Cell operators, providers of cloud computing, search, communications etc. All of that must be carefully examined, and then partitioned where monopolies or conflicts of interests arise.
- mciancia 4y ago
  How would you want to achieve that?
- ben_w 4y ago
  > should OK, but does that include Rowling's Harry Potter sales, or Persson selling Minecraft to Microsoft? > There's no conceivable reason How about "someone is offering me a billion to take over the company I founded regardless of if I actually agree to sell"? Or worse, "someone wants to offer me a million for 0.1% of my shares, but if I sold all my shares the market price would crash by 95%, therefore I get all the blame for being rich with only a handful of the benefits"? I appreciate there are other economic systems besides one-dollar-one-vote, and we may wish to make mega corporations more democratic and less plutocratic-authoritarian, but that kind of change deserves a book rather than a single comment.
- tromp 4y ago
  A better attitude would be to say that billionaires need to share more of their wealth. If you make them pay a let's say 5% wealth tax for having excessive wealth, then they're not strongly discouraged from trying to increase their wealth, while everyone else benefits. And in due time they will cease to be billionaires.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tzmudzin 4y ago
> If you are wealthy and refuse to earn an income, then your savings will eventually deplete and you’ll become bankrupt. Please look up "rent", "dividend" and "capital gains".
- prottog 4y ago
  All three things are taxed, so it doesn't factor into this discussion of tax avoidance.
  - tzmudzin 4y ago
    That's not the point the parent was making.
- dismantlethesun 4y ago
  Rent, dividend and capital gains are all income. I’m not sure what your point is.

bmitc 4y ago

I don't think any individual should be a billionaire. There's no conceivable reason for a single person to need or have the right to be a billionaire.

underdeserver 4y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
simonswords82 4y ago
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this stance but at a practical level it's interesting to think about. Let's say life is a computer game, and once you max out at $1bn in earned wealth (presumably this includes liquid and illiquid assets such as properties, cars etc), you cannot accumulate more wealth. How does a government enforce this stance? You cannot stop say Bill Gates shorting Tesla and earning millions from the trade, can you? Can you stop a landlord renting out their properties to block further income from them? What about interest generated from bonds or savings accounts? Do you simply tax the shit out of people if they have over £1bn in wealth? The big challenge I see for all of this is that rich people have the best (and most expensive) accountants/lawyers money can buy. If you try to tax the shit out of them, their accountants and lawyers will find a way around it. Also, if one government is too heavy handed, they'll just move assets to another more lenient government.
- Yizahi 4y ago
  You make "almost illegal" financial activities really illegal in the law, prosecute people, and I suspect that 90% of the problems will disappear automagically. Number of people who can become billionaires without committing borderline illegal and completely illegal activities are vanishingly small I suspect, probably only founders of megacorporations and those are often doing illegal stuff too to stay ahead. USA is an outlier probably as far as honest successful corporations go, but in other countries if you are a top100 Fortune person you are likely a criminal too. In my country for sure. Energy - illegal oligopoly, metallurgy - illegal oligopoly, animal farming - illegal oligopoly, etc. The number of illegal schemes happening in the big corps in my country is staggering.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Not to defend corruption, and I'll agree absolutely that there's a lot if room for improvement, but far too many people break far too many laws for full enforcement of any of them; and even outside egregious violations, law itself is too esoteric for most people to understand either their obligations or their rights. With regard to the first part, the normal examples I give of this are road traffic offences (which if fully enforced would mean the only people allowed to drive would be those who didn't); and drug laws — ignore weed for now, nobody defends heroin, full enforcement of UK heroin laws would treble the UK prison population all by itself, while enforcing the laws on cocaine would more than double the US prison population and increase the British one by a factor of 20. With regard to the second, look at how confused people get about copyright, trademarks, how they work, what the penalties are for violating them, what counts as "fair use", and so on.
    - Yizahi 4y ago
      We should focus on the large scale offenses by big entities of course. E.g. if you have 50% market share of chicken production in the country (and another 50% is also a single corporation) then I'm sure that both of the corporations are breaking a lot of laws and utilising a lot of barely legal schemes to launder profits. Same for all sectors of economy. Examples closer to us - ISPs, Cell operators, providers of cloud computing, search, communications etc. All of that must be carefully examined, and then partitioned where monopolies or conflicts of interests arise.
mciancia 4y ago
How would you want to achieve that?
ben_w 4y ago
> should OK, but does that include Rowling's Harry Potter sales, or Persson selling Minecraft to Microsoft? > There's no conceivable reason How about "someone is offering me a billion to take over the company I founded regardless of if I actually agree to sell"? Or worse, "someone wants to offer me a million for 0.1% of my shares, but if I sold all my shares the market price would crash by 95%, therefore I get all the blame for being rich with only a handful of the benefits"? I appreciate there are other economic systems besides one-dollar-one-vote, and we may wish to make mega corporations more democratic and less plutocratic-authoritarian, but that kind of change deserves a book rather than a single comment.
tromp 4y ago
A better attitude would be to say that billionaires need to share more of their wealth. If you make them pay a let's say 5% wealth tax for having excessive wealth, then they're not strongly discouraged from trying to increase their wealth, while everyone else benefits. And in due time they will cease to be billionaires.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tzmudzin 4y ago

> If you are wealthy and refuse to earn an income, then your savings will eventually deplete and you’ll become bankrupt. Please look up "rent", "dividend" and "capital gains".

prottog 4y ago
All three things are taxed, so it doesn't factor into this discussion of tax avoidance.
- tzmudzin 4y ago
  That's not the point the parent was making.
dismantlethesun 4y ago
Rent, dividend and capital gains are all income. I’m not sure what your point is.