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for an otherwise fairly intelligent forum, there is a lot of dumb on display on this thread. Taxing assets is an extremely bad idea and it doesn't solve the act

for an otherwise fairly intelligent forum, there is a lot of dumb on display on this thread. Taxing assets is an extremely bad idea and it doesn't solve the actual dead weight loss to society caused by the oligopolistic corporations the super wealthy own as their primary assets and it primarily harms the up and coming billionaires who are actually doing a great job at inventing and/or capital allocating to grow their wealth (think the elons of the world giving us wonderful new technology like starlink) and won't do very much against the old money families where the people smart enough to grow the fortune are long gone and all that is left is their mostly incompetent offspring living off the oligpolies their ancestors created. The much better strategy is to go after all the oligopolies and break them up similar to what the USA did pre Rehnquist supreme court (although not quite to the same level, those guys were breaking up small regional gas station chains, for example). This will cause a flourishing of new companies, with new and often better business practices/technology and make us all better off. Taxing assets just makes people invest in less easily tracked assets held in less easily tracked locations if they can (read if they are already billionaires aka mostly incompetent offspring of people that made the fortune) and harms the next round of up and coming (and competent) challengers.

snapplebobapple 3y ago
also, all you people pining for the 90% tax days go look at what sort of loopholes were available at that time. You basically had to be one of the unlucky few primarily earning income as salary to be exposed to that because there were so many loopholes. It wasn't the tax regime that made that the golden age, it was that antitrust broke up the trusts and world war 2 crushed a lot of the incompetent offspring billionaires, making the usa more equal than it ever had been and the golden age came from the cream of the crop striving and making it to the top over the following decades (and leaving us with the oligopoly problem we have now, along with their incompetent offspring broadly in control of the oligopoly).

snapplebobapple 3y ago

also, all you people pining for the 90% tax days go look at what sort of loopholes were available at that time. You basically had to be one of the unlucky few primarily earning income as salary to be exposed to that because there were so many loopholes. It wasn't the tax regime that made that the golden age, it was that antitrust broke up the trusts and world war 2 crushed a lot of the incompetent offspring billionaires, making the usa more equal than it ever had been and the golden age came from the cream of the crop striving and making it to the top over the following decades (and leaving us with the oligopoly problem we have now, along with their incompetent offspring broadly in control of the oligopoly).