7 ms·
There's absolutely no reason at all for anyone to possess more than a couple of million bucks. Anything over that should be taxed at 95%.
by Simon_ORourke 3y ago
There's absolutely no reason at all for anyone to possess more than a couple of million bucks. Anything over that should be taxed at 95%.
- hk__2 3y agoWe’re talking about wealth, not money. If you buy a house $1M and a few years later it’s worth $1.4M, your wealth went up by $400k but it’s hardly taxeable unless you sell the house.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Reubachi 3y agoHa. Maybe not a problem for rich people who have the ability to obfuscate local laws, mandatory appraisals, and inspections until they sell their property. Me? A person who actually lives in the property and NEEDS to comply? MY home certainly is a tax burden on me when every single year it's taxable value is reassessed by the county for 20 percent more, requiring immediate and prompt payment before it's lien'd. Such a joke.
- Guvante 3y agoI feel like you are overselling a bit. Property tax needs to be very delinquent to trigger a foreclosure and a lien doesn't matter unless you sell the property. Also in my experience there has been a relatively painless path to challenge the assessment. Although I have never seen an example where the $400 appraisal is worth paying to do so.
- Reubachi 3y agoNeither of your statements make me feel better about the problem that greatly affects my life. Sure, I need to be marked as a deliquent debtor (somehow) for my property to be taken away from me. And sure, every year, I can pay the department of revenue an appraisal fee to undo the arbitrary decision to increase my tax responsibility. How about though, we force municipalities and departments of revenues to actually examine the assessment, reassessments, and economic impact? The idea that my home, the land it sits on, an the unconscious value associated with it is worth 40 percent more to other homebuyers is absolutely laughable Very shortly ,my town will have population 0 with the only commercial land being the giant paper factory owned by a chinese paper congolomerate with a stranglehold over shipping products.
- __loam 3y agoI think something like 45% of house sales in the US went to corporate investors last year. Land speculators are a plague. They also cause problems like this because their goal is the appreciation of the assets, not necessarily to live in houses.
- undersuit 3y agoHouses... like many assets can be leveraged. One of the ways to take advantage of your wealth increasing 43% is to take out a loan with your wealth as leverage and if your wealth increases another 43% in value next year you're happy that you only pay 1-7% interest on the loan and not 15-25% in capital gains taxation.
- jzb 3y agoFair enough - raise it to anything over $100M then. Absolutely nobody needs more than that, and it's a policy failure that people are able to amass that kind of money - especially when it's often then deployed to help shape public policy to funnel more wealth their way.
- cdiamand 3y agoLet's say an (extremely) successful businessman wants to create a new business that requires a 250m investment to launch. Wouldn't this prevent that individual from starting the business?
- jzb 3y agoIf they can't secure loans for it, I suppose it would. Do I think the loss of the ability of extremely successful businessperson to independently launch a business that needs $250m up-front is a huge loss to society? No.
- cdiamand 3y agoSo in this case we would be eliminating the power of the individual to undertake large, risky undertakings that would provide a net benefit to society. Now you'd have to cobble together a group of investors, but if you can't find people who don't understand your vision, you're out of luck. Or you could go to a bank, so now the banks have more power, but they probably won't invest in your risky idea anyway. Okay so I guess, now it's up to the government to undertake this large risky project? Great. I don't know, I like the fact that motivated individuals can take a large amount of their own capital and take on large projects.
- asadotzler 3y agoThat one or two motivated billionaires start interesting businesses every once in a while is justification for an economic system hundreds of thousands die because of the resulting poverty? 2016 Study: A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) estimated that approximately 133,000 deaths in the US annually are attributable to poverty. 2019 Study: A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine suggested that around 300,000 deaths could be linked to social factors like poverty and lack of access to healthcare. 2020 Report: The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that roughly 136,000 deaths in 2018 were associated with poverty-related factors like lack of access to healthcare and healthy food. Your "please think of the rich guys" argument holds no sway with me.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago[dead]
- jedberg 3y agoA noble idea, but the logistics of it are difficult. How would you actually do that tax? For example, take Jeff Bezos. His income isn't all that much, so you'd probably want to tax his wealth. Luckily, most of his wealth is from a public company, so we can skip the difficulty of valuing it (something a lot of other billionaires would have to deal with). But now how do you collect the tax? Do you make him sell 95% of his shares of Amazon? That would certainly tank the stock, and then you would owe him a big refund for overtaxing him. Or does the government just take his Amazon shares? So now the government would be the biggest shareholder of Amazon. Is that good? What does the government do with that stock? Does it start giving shares to government workers instead of paychecks? Does it pay off its debts with Amazon stock? Would the government's vendors even take that as payment? I agree that wealth inequality is a problem, and we need to do something about it. I'm not exactly sure what or how though.
- ysofunny 3y agoI would start by leraning more about how public markets really work that's were the solutions need to be implemented but I find it impossible to have good conversations about this. the last time I was able to discuss this I ended up concluding that somehow euler's constant is basically the same as the gravitational constant but people tell me I'm misscalibrated, so my only retort is I'm mister calibrated....
- gottorf 3y ago> I agree that wealth inequality is a problem, and we need to do something about it. Why? Wealth isn't zero-sum. Most of the American super-wealthy got that way by providing value to others. I'd argue that the bigger problem to societal stability is jealousy and envy, and the idea that rich people got that way by taking from the poor. The hugely inflated net worth numbers of the likes of Bezos and Musk are fake anyway, in the sense that their assets could not be converted to that amount of dollars; and the Fed should take a large share of the blame here, because ZIRP made it so that investors could only really put their money in growth tech companies.
- notpachet 3y ago
- gnaritas99 3y ago[dead]
- BlackjackCF 3y agoIf you’re in the US, you’re basically just asking for the tax rate to return to what it was in the 1950s.
- lainga 3y agoAnd many forget that the first cuts were proposed by Kennedy and passed by LBJ as part of the "Great Society" bills. [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1964
- renegade-otter 3y agoFunny how we have huge fans of the 50s but they don't want the tax rates or the unions. They just miss the racism and the casual misogyny.
- gruez 3y ago>you’re basically just asking for the tax rate to return to what it was in the 1950s. AFAIK the high tax rates of the 1950s were also coupled with high levels of deductions/tax loopholes (eg. company cars), so the effective tax rate didn't really change much.
- thegrimmest 3y agoWho are you to decide this for someone else? If I make something valuable and sell it to others at a profit, what is the moral basis for your claim on the wealth that I accumulate? Shouldn't you simply be grateful for the value I've already added?
- megabless123 3y ago> Who are you to decide this for someone else? a member of the same democratic society
- thegrimmest 3y agoSo your argument is that anything willed by the (narrow) majority is morally justified? Seems pretty obviously flawed doesn't it?
- __loam 3y agoWould you prefer the situation where 200 billionaires get to will it instead?
- thegrimmest 3y agoI would prefer a government that maintained a liberal ecosystem - one where violence is delegitimized and disputes are resolved via due process. I would however prefer that the government then did not try to meddle in the outcomes that ecosystem produces. I don't see a moral justification in the use of force to shackle the capable and the fortunate, forcing them to toil in maintenance of the incapable and the unfortunate. The ideal I'm describing was more or less the case in the US before United States v. Butler (1936), which changed the interpretation of the general welfare clause of the constitution.
- __loam 3y agoMan, I hate libertarians. What you get with this kind of system is powerful people meddling with the government to reinforce their power using anti-democratic means. A plutocracy. You also have to contend with the toxic economics of monopoly. I bet you want unregulated utilities too because you a) don't understand macroeconomics and b) subscribe to anti-social and psychopathic economic theories.
- RobRivera 3y agoIf I place a 5 million dollar bet on a roulette table, incure the 50.5% probability of losing it all, win, and now have 10 million dollars, why should your opinion removed my risk taking behavior and thus reward? I think your perspective on capitalism is grossly unfair.
- gafage 3y ago[flagged]
- narrator 3y agoThat would mean that almost every public and private company would be owned and controlled by Blackrock and Vanguard or the government because that's who they'd have to sell the shares to. No private individual anywhere would have control of any large company. Basically that's where we're going with most assets in this country with Blackrock buying up millions of single family houses to rent using unlimited money from fed bailouts.
- shagymoe 3y agoGiven that 2 million is barely enough to retire on, does that mean you think everyone should work until they die?
- yowzadave 3y agoWe should have a welfare state that provides for people who are retired (just like we should for other non-workers, like children, the disabled, students, etc.).
- muglug 3y ago2 million is barely enough to retired on in a country without a social safety net. But one of the points of taxing people is to provide that safety net.
- rowanG077 3y agoIn most countries with such taxes you can retire and have the state pay you.
- Guvante 3y agoWith a 4% burn rate 2 million is $80k a year plus social security. I don't think that describes barely enough for the vast majority of people.
- shagymoe 3y agoWhen you’re always in danger of going broke from a medical condition or emergency, $80k isn’t enough to feel secure. The system is designed so it’s never enough but you can reduce risk with more.
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- chrisco255 3y agoNo incentive to take multi million dollar bets would mean most of the achievements of the last 200 years like railroads, airports and airliners, microchips, etc would have never gotten built.
- mrguyorama 3y ago>Railroads You mean that thing that happened when we gifted huge tracts of lands to a few private businesses so they could pay for the railroads? American railroads were NOT a private investment, but a public one! >airports and airliners Once again, public money during the war, creating the giant B-29 was more expensive than the Manhattan Project! America absolutely pumped cash into any building that claimed they could put out a few screws a week to support the insane amount of war material building we did. The airliner industry was further supported by Cold War warplane development, with bigger planes and bigger jet engines. >microchips Bell telephone had a legal monopoly for several generations. Literal government handout for free extra profit. Further improvements in computing were once again funded by military desires, simulators for planes, early computers were designed nearly entirely for computing ballistic tables for artillery, and selling a little bit of spare time on the side. Modern America exists because in 1940, America actually invested in itself. None of those investments were private. More examples: IBM owes a lot of it's early success to mechanizing the US census, once again public money. They even took some money from the Nazis FFS. How much did Henry Ford make building Shermans and other war material, often for the british or soviets to use? Starlink's Dishy terminal wouldn't exist without shitloads of public funds put into new phase array solid state scanned radars that were built out for the aegis system. Or how about basically the entire country's infrastructure exists because the feds spent billions on paying poor people to dig ditches so they wouldn't starve to death. I'm sure walmart and amazon would do great with our old state roads right? But sure, let's keep pretending these were "bets" by "private" companies.
- gottorf 3y ago> You mean that thing that happened when we gifted huge tracts of lands to a few private businesses so they could pay for the railroads Do huge tracts of land magically become working railroads? The word "happened" is carrying a lot of weight here. In general, your argument handwaves the difference between basic research (often paid for by public grants to universities) and a working implementation subject to market forces. The two have radically different incentive structures and require very different competencies. Good things don't happen by a politician's fiat, no matter how many tax dollars you throw at the problem. Behind every story of "America actually investing in itself" is men and women toiling away, breaking backs and burning midnight oil, almost always out of a profit motive.
- slantaclaus 3y agoRound it up to 100, comrade
- golergka 3y agoThere's absolutely no reason at all for anyone to be able to tell another person what property and how much he should be able to own.
- __loam 3y agoWhen that property is billions of dollars and they have so much of it that they start warping market economics and political organizations around them because of their own gravity, that becomes a public problem. If we want a functional democracy then we very much do need to think about the influence of billionaires. Accepting the notion that "it's just private property, who cares" is an ignorant view on the actual situation. For example, I was listening to a discussion on how Bill Gate's philanthropic organization causes many problems. They've basically taken over the field of malaria research by virtue of spending a ridiculous amount of money, and Gate's personal influence has limited the directions of that research. There are people in Africa that are trying to tell the Gates foundation to leave because their solutions are poorly suited to the on the ground situation, but the neo-colonial nature of this organization means you have many "smart" people in Washington and Geneva dictating how the global poor should run things. The influence of the organization has on public education apparently been disastrous, with the charity reorganizing public schools in ways that are unproven and harmful to students. The foundation is a revolving door for corporate actors like pharmaceutical employees, and they take and use public tax dollars in ways that are unaccountable to the public. All of this is because one man has more money than god. It's anti-democratic and ineffective.
- gottorf 3y agoThe combined net worth of all billionaires in America come out to ~$4.5T. Even ignoring the fact that that number is fiction (because those assets cannot be converted to that amount of money in real life), it's not very much money in the grand scheme of things. It's not even one year of federal expenditure. It'll pay for maybe three years of Social Security. If Bill Gates wasn't allowed to have so much money, I assume the government would have taken it at truly confiscatory tax rates. Then you have the same problem of meddlesome "aid" to Africa, except that the entity writing the check would be the US government, not Bill Gates.
- dangles 3y agoIncome tax has no impact on already accumulated wealth. Increasing income tax to target wealth accumulation only makes it harder for high earners who aren't currently wealthy to become wealthy, it has little impact on the already wealthy. A person earning $1 million a year passively from accumulated wealth is much better off than a person earning $1 million a year in income, with no accumulated wealth. The former doesn't have to work at all and can continue earning that income indefinitely, while if the latter stops working there income drops back to zero. Breaking up dynastic wealth with an actual robust inheritance tax and taxing very high earnings derived from wealth (e.g. capital gains) will be much more effective than higher income tax.
- neogodless 3y agoParent comment said "possess", not "earn."
- tengbretson 3y agoMaking owner-operated farms functionally impossible might have unforseen consequences.