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Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, report says
- dinkblam 3y agoit is easy to make the headlines by just telling people what they want to hear. hard truths, not so much.
- js8 3y agoIt is easy to make a comment. A comment with hard truths that could be upvoted, not so much.
- psychoslave 3y agoPeople can be envious of the richest percentile when they are simply richer. They start to look at them with hate only when according to usual metrics, a few become ever more rich while most actually see their wealth level decrease whatever the legal path they take. This is not good for anyone, because history show that the next expectable step is blood bath, be it through mass repression or cutting heads of the perceived most privileged, a mixture of both being the most likely option.
- jstarfish 3y agoHistory might play out differently if the targets could escape to lunar habitats in their respective private rockets. We're almost in James Bond supervillain territory.
- psychoslave 3y agohttps://www.worldspaceflight.com/bios/stats.php https://www.worldspaceflight.com/bios/stats.php Escaping on a private island, be it literally or more metaphorically, is still a far more realist option, and also a far more cozy one.
- cableshaft 3y ago> hard truths, not so much. Thank you for knowing that everyone on the planet has identical ideas in mind of which hard truths you're referring to, and so it was unnecessary for you to specify them or provide evidence as to why they are hard truths.
- KasianFranks 3y agoSo what?
- Eumenes 3y agoGovernment economists say the government needs more tax money. Very convincing. Instead of making people dependent on social welfare systems, and funneling money to useless bureaucracies, how about we force the billionaires to put that money to use in the markets? Not just stocks and bonds. Most certainly not NGOs/non-profits (they siphon enough public money). Venture capital, urban renewal projects, interests that promote science + discovery.
- jahnu 3y ago1) They are not government economists, it’s an independent body. 2) With increased tax revenue from billionaires a government could choose to reduce the tax burden of non billionaires and keep total taxation the same.
- Eumenes 3y ago> 1) They are not government economists, it’s an independent body. Its funded by the EU and NORAD - https://www.taxobservatory.eu/about/ https://www.taxobservatory.eu/about/ Not exactly neutral parties in 'we need more tax money' circles. > 2) With increased tax revenue from billionaires a government could choose to reduce the tax burden of non billionaires and keep total taxation the same. A big IF ... I don't trust government to lower taxes in any regard.
- harimau777 3y agoThings like venture capital, research, and urban renewal projects could produce new technologies and companies (which might help the economy). However, they wouldn't necessarily do much to address inequality. It's the difference between making a bigger pie and distributing the pie more evenly. As I see it, the best strategy is to try to balance both approaches.
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- Eumenes 3y agoThe same governments that created this so-called inequality should receive billions to address the inequality they apparently created? I don't really buy that. And we all know that inequality, from a western perspective, means addressing "equity", which is a fancy term for wealth redistribution, likely along racial/ethnic lines, and not class.
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- pclmulqdq 3y agoUnrealized capital gains are not income. This article wants a wealth tax because they think this is "income" that is going untaxed.
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- jackmott42 3y agoElon bought twitter with unrealized capital gains.
- HPsquared 3y agoSurely they became "realized" in the process.
- jackmott42 3y agoNope, because he used a loan, so he was able to buy twitter and not pay taxes. He will have to pay taxes if and when he pays off the loan, maybe.
- samsolomon 3y agoI have a hard time believing that he didn't realize gains on the Tesla stock he sold to cover part of the purchase. Twitter, the company, took out a loan as part of the financing to help Musk close. That is why Twitter desperately needs to return a profit. Because it now has to service that loan. Those are different things. EDIT: For reference it looked like he originally was going to back the loan with Tesla shares—so he wouldn't have to sell. It looks like he abandoned that idea and sold about $15.5B shares of Tesla to finance the deal. Maybe that's where the confusion is from? https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/10/28/how-elon-musk-financed-his-twitter-takeover https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/10/28/how-elon-musk-f...
- eli 3y agoIt's called "Buy, Borrow, Die" -- in that scheme no one ever pays capital gains tax. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
- scythe 3y agoThis seems to ignore the fundamental reason that billionaires don't pay taxes. It's not that governments don't try to tax billionaires. It's that they're able to avoid claiming income when they make money. But following this reasoning, they would likely develop ways to avoid claiming wealth as well. Consider, for example, Warren Buffet's own example of his California properties which have a taxable value well below their realistic market value. Similar sleight of hand would likely be employed (with a few strategically positioned lobbyists having lunch with legislative committees) in order to allow billionaires to minimize their taxable wealth. The more practical approach, as I understand it, is a tax on securitization of assets: whenever someone takes out a loan against an asset for expenses (which is common among the wealthy to avoid realizing gains), a tax is assessed on the loan value. This makes the tax harder to avoid because it is assessed closer to the actual use of money, which is a documented event. While this may affect the second mortgage and "auto loan" industry, weakening predatory finance doesn't seem like that much of a bad thing.
- rjsw 3y agoI think we will need to abolish trusts as well as imposing a wealth tax.
- VikingCoder 3y agoI love the ancient trick of taxing goods on a ship. You tell me how much the goods are worth. Then it's my choice whether to charge you the tax on that value, or to just hand you the value and the goods are mine now.
- eli 3y agoA wealth tax doesn't need to be perfect to be better than not having one. The wealthy will always have access to the best lawyers and accountants who can find ways to gain an edge here and there. That's o; or at least it doesn't invalidate the approach. Property tax is a fine example: sometimes properties aren't assessed in an ideal way (and to be fair some states also have very convoluted property tax schemes and credits) but overwhelmingly if you have very valuable property you pay more than someone with less valuable property.
- HPsquared 3y agoIt's balance-of-power stuff. King vs nobles. Serfs remain serfs, regardless.
- specialist 3y agoThe moral reason to tax wealth is because gross (and accelerating) inequity is unfair. We're way past the era of the landed gentry extracting rents from the poors. Err, I mean we should be. The practical reason to tax wealth is to keep the money moving. Idle capital (hoarding) is its own special badness. Keep the money moving. Either the wealthy spend their money (R&D, philanthropy, building cool new stuff, ice cream for all) or the people will spend it for them.
- tastyfreeze 3y agoThe ability to borrow and never "cash out" is an artifact of fiat currency. A wealth tax is just another bandage on a broken system.
- RyanAdamas 3y agoTaxation does not equal better quality of life for citizens. The only ones proposing this myth are the ones who need more revenue to justify the obscene amounts of debt they leverage with it - and, that's governments.
- s5300 3y ago[dead]
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoI think we need to start treating extreme wealth hoarding as a mental illness. If someone has a net worth of more than a $billion for an appreciable amount of time, then they should be locked up to protect the world from their malfeasance and prevent them exploiting yet more people. A possible exception would be when someone inherits a vast fortune, and maybe they should be allowed some time to demonstrate that they are giving away wealth, though obviously a billion dollars is such an obscene amount of money that giving it away is going to take years.
- Nasrudith 3y agoThat is just plain stupid rhetoric as a talking point. When are we going to start splitting up nations to prevent them from compromising their sanity for reaching multi-billion dollar budgets? Arbitrary caps inevitably run into problems, especially when they aren't inflation indexed.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoClearly there's a substantial difference between an individual and a nation of people. So, what would you suggest instead of an arbitrary cap? Just carry on and let these individuals continue to destroy the world so that they can continue hoarding more wealth than they can ever use?
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago>such an obscene amount of money that giving it away is going to take years. If you earned, untaxed, one dollar EVERY SECOND (non-stop) it would still take you over thirty years to "earn" a billion dollars. A million seconds is only (just-over) eleven days, for comparison.
- ljm 3y agoI think having stronger employee rights such that a company's leadership can't increase their own compensation disproportionately to that of the average employee. A CEO earning 350x the average worker in their company suggests that the worker isn't benefitting from the company's success the same way the boss is, despite them driving the company's value through their labour. There's nothing inherently being wrong with a billionare, it's the gulf between the median income and their own that is a problem, so making an effort to prevent such people enriching themselves at the expense of increasing their staff's pay might help with that. As it stands, workers don't have as much rights as they require, so the balance is skewed heavily away from them and towards an absolute minority of wealthy people.
- Manheim 3y agoPosted the whole report earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37981730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37981730 It is actually an interesting report. here's a TL;DR: - The objectives and scope of the report: The report aims to address the questions of global tax evasion and the effects of recent policies, using new data and research conducted by the EU Tax Observatory and its partners. The report focuses on the issues of international tax evasion and competition by multinational companies and wealthy individuals, and their consequences for government revenue, inequality, and globalization. - The main findings of the report: The report establishes six new findings on the dynamic of global tax evasion and international tax competition, such as the reduction of offshore tax evasion by wealthy individuals, the persistence of profit shifting by multinationals, the weakening of the global minimum tax, the emergence of new forms of tax competition, the low effective tax rates of billionaires, and the revenue potential of a global minimum tax on billionaires. - The recommendations of the report: The report makes six recommendations to address the issues identified in the report, such as reforming the global minimum corporate tax, introducing a new global minimum tax for billionaires, taxing wealthy emigrants, implementing unilateral measures to collect tax deficits, creating a global asset registry, and strengthening anti-abuse rules. - The role and vision of the EU Tax Observatory: The EU Tax Observatory is a research laboratory hosted at the Paris School of Economics that conducts research on taxation with a focus on international tax issues. Its goal is to generate new knowledge, formulate proposals, and contribute to a more informed democratic debate. It also aims to become an IPCC for taxation, providing rigorous and global analysis of different policy options.
- daft_pink 3y agoAmerican billionaires already face a minimum tax of 28 percent generally, but a wealth tax is a totally different animal. Just sayin’
- sschueller 3y agoLet's first change the law to not let them borrow against their unrealized assets tax free. In fact the tax to get a loan should be higher then if you sold your shares at a company to discourage this crap. Or limit the total amount or forbid it outright.
- chatmasta 3y agoBut they eventually need to sell some assets to repay the loan, right? They'll pay tax when they sell them.
- HDThoreaun 3y agoIf they have a 3% interest loan and their assets grow at 5% per year, then no, they never need to repay the loan.
- TrackerFF 3y agoThe most scary aspect of unfettered accumulation of wealth would obviously be the consolidation of power. We're already seeing countries where the wealthiest citizens are saying "Screw this, I'll just move elsewhere, unless you fix those [tax] laws" - and the more powerful these people are, the easier it is to strong-arm politicians. Growth for the sake of growth, and all that.
- xracy 3y agoIt's funny to me the number of people who agree that billionaires should have a significant amount of their money taken from them, but then hem and haw about exactly how we should take their money from them. "We have to make up rules to take the money, otherwise it's unfair!" I get that otherwise we're kinda just as bad as China, but so many of our laws and tax codes have become so toothless to billionaires without some kind of major legislative reset. And I don't see that happening on its own.