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It’s probably a pretty smart idea. The “ideal tax” is probably a wealth indexed income tax. We don’t like the idea of just taxing wealth because you have it. We
by jncfhnb 3y ago
It’s probably a pretty smart idea. The “ideal tax” is probably a wealth indexed income tax. We don’t like the idea of just taxing wealth because you have it. We do tax income but it’s hard to scale it in a way that people perceive as fair. What we want is to make it harder for the rich to get richer without making it harder for the poor to get rich. That is, if you’re a billionaire, every dollar is taxed at 99 cents. If you have no money it’s taxed at 0. And if you’re middle class it’s done at a rate ballpark like today.
But measuring wealth as a pre req to implement a tax is really hard. You can assume that wealthy people own the wealth generating assets though basically by definition. A 0.1% tax on financial transactions would affect very little in the average Americans life. It would matter immensely to people who derive their income largely by sitting back and collecting economic rent.
- whatshisface 3y agoWhy does receiving rent involve more layered financial transactions than paying rent?
- jncfhnb 3y agoI’m not sure what you’re referring to. Perhaps you’re not familiar with “economic rent”?
- whatshisface 3y agoIt's not clear to me that rent of any sort of metaphorical capacity involves a larger number of transactions per dollar than anything else. All I can see it accomplishing is getting rid of high frequency trading and to a lesser extent day trading... Neither of which are pastimes of rich people but rather are middle class jobs of questionable yet arguable value.
- jncfhnb 3y agoMetaphorical? You’re asserting the volume is key here but it’s not really.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoYou seem to be either assuming that the rich are making large numbers of transactions. Consider Bill Gates and Warren Buffet as counterexamples. They're mainly holding stock and watching it go up. I mean, a 0.1% tax on financial transactions would kill day trading, and I'm not sure anything would be lost. But if your goal is to tax the rich, then tax the rich, not financial transactions.
- jncfhnb 3y agoIt doesn’t really matter if someone becomes passively wealthy in a liquid form they don’t access. So long as you catch edge cases like collateralizing those shares for debt it’s still fine. They don’t need to make a lot of trades either. Taxing the rich is incredibly hard because first you need to quantify how rich everyone is.
- Jensson 3y ago> collateralizing those shares for debt If you take a loan (collateralizing future income for money) should you pay taxes on that loan today? It isn't a tax loophole, it is insane to think that taking a loan should make you pay taxes on future income, it would cause so many issues for everyone. The taxes will be paid some day, you don't get richer or pay less by taking a loan. The reason these people take loans on their shares is to keep control of the company, but doing that costs them more not less. And finally, the government already takes out loans on future taxes to pay for things today, so not having taxes today isn't an issue for them either. So rich people taking out loans on shares is a total non issue that people for some reason talks about a lot, it doesn't make a difference at all.
- jncfhnb 3y ago0.1% same as any transaction involving the shares would be fine