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The super-rich are already leaving Britain[1] so realistically if they want to raise more money they'll just tax workers a bit more since they're less economica

• klipt 2y ago
  Should tax land more and income less. Income from work is at least productive, owning land is not. #Georgism
  • elzbardico 2y ago
    Inheritance and donations should be strongly progressively taxed.
    • eikenberry 2y ago
      > and donations What do you mean by donations? A 'donation' is the typical way to refer to giving money to a charity. Are you saying that charitable donations should be taxed?
      • elzbardico 2y ago
        I mean gifts, a common way of evading inheritance taxes accross the world.
        • eikenberry 2y ago
          That makes sense, thanks.
      • DFHippie 2y ago
        I'm guessing they are a non-native speaker of English and meant gifts.
        • elzbardico 2y ago
          thanks, exactly.
  • theamk 2y ago
    hm... so a tech startup making millions in profits (tiny office for 10 people) should pay less taxes than a grocery store that barely breaks even? I am not sure I'd agree.
    • s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Exactly the problem with georgism. It was conceived in a time when all wealth arose from land, and doesn't account for a service or knowledge economy. The ultra rich don't get that way from accumulating land, they accumulate intangible contracts and earning rights, 1s and 0s on a server. The only answer I have heard from georgists is that the costs would would be passed from all of the teachers, farmers, and laborers to the ultra rich. If that that were true, we could just replace everything with a sales or value added taxes. I find that georgism appeals to a segment of people who are entirely preoccupied by urban real estate prices, and haven't thought through the implications for the broader economy
      • bee_rider 2y ago
        Apparently “land” in the economic sense covers more than just the physical ground. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_(economics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_(economics) > Examples include […] and portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Supply of these resources is fixed. I even saw some folks argue that IP should be considered a form of land, although I’m not sure if this is a real opinion or some very-online-economics silliness. Anyway, maybe worth looking into. — > If that that were true, we could just replace everything with a sales or value added taxes. I don’t see how this really follows. Land value is more like a wealth tax than an income tax, right? In the sense that it taxes something held, rather than inflow/outflow.
        • s1artibartfast 2y ago
          >I don’t see how this really follows. Land value is more like a wealth tax than an income tax, right? In the sense that it taxes something held, rather than inflow/outflow. I agree it is on possession, or something held. The proposition follows not from that property, but the idea that taxes would "trickle up". The idea that it doesnt matter if warren buffet no little land, because taxes levied on farmers and renters would pass on the costs. Land is much more evenly distributed than wealth and income. Similarly, consumption is much flatter than income.
• gizajob 2y ago
  The super-rich leaving really breaks my heart.
  • onemoresoop 2y ago
    If they liquidate their assets it’s gonna be a lot more affordable to buy homes. I think that alone will warm your heart
    • WalterBright 2y ago
      The super-rich do not have enough houses to make a dent in the supply of homes.
  • WalterBright 2y ago
    When they leave, they take their investments, spending, and created jobs with them. Many countries have confiscated everything from the rich, driven them out, and even mass murdered them. None resulted in the poor being better off - things just got worse for the poor.
    • elzbardico 2y ago
      Yeah? So, they are going to take their factories? They are leaving the biggest consumer markets to sell their trinkets in the giant Costa Rican market?
      • WalterBright 2y ago
        In Washington State, a tax on capital gains over $250,000 was recently instituted. Jeff Bezos, presumably the target of the tax, left the state just before it went into effect. Friends in the area have told me that many Microsoft wealthy people have left as well. Seattle has instituted a number of punitive taxes on businesses in the city. There has been a corresponding boom in business across the lake in Bellevue. The state has benefited a lot by being a low tax state in the past. It is no longer a low tax state. We'll see how that goes. Musk is one of the more famous industrialists who left California over taxes.
• lelandbatey 2y ago
  The title of that link seem to imply it was a net loss, but the numbers in the body seem to imply that while ~10k millionaires left, the tax revenue loss from millionaires leaving was $5b in (theoretical) yearly lost tax revenue (it's not clear from the article if all those millionaires leaving were even paying taxes as it notes many of them were in a grace period after entering before taxes kicked in, and it doesn't link to the downstream report from ASI). Given that there's a lot more than 10 thousand millionaires in Britain and they are sticking around to pay taxes (more than enough to cover the $5b from those who left), I don't see how that's actually a bad thing?
• elzbardico 2y ago
  So, lots of foreign guys who were not paying taxes in britain while benefitting from a temporary exemption and that would leave as soon as this exemption ended, left early because the exemption period was shortenened. Good. They were making houses more expensive and not paying taxes anyway.
• elzbardico 2y ago
  You know what? Let them leave. If they have business here, are they going to close shop and forego this market? No, they aren't. Can we still tax them for what they remmit to whatever the place they are? Yes, we can. And where they will go? Once a major developed nation starts being serious on taxing the billionaires, the others will follow soon, or more probably, they will even coordinate among themselves to harmonize their rates. Yeah, they could go to some third world hellhole where they could bribe the authorities and live in a Pablo Escobar's style compound. Will they do it? Will they subject themselves to the judicial insecurity that abunds in those places? To politician that manage the incredible feat of being orders of magnitude even more corrupt than the ones we have in washington? All western nations used to have far higher top marginal rates for income and inheritance taxes. Far less loopholes, and yet here we are.
  • opo 2y ago
    >...All western nations used to have far higher top marginal rates for income and inheritance taxes. Far less loopholes, and yet here we are. When western nations had far higher top marginal rates for income there were far MORE loopholes, not less. Those high rates did not bring in much revenue. For example: >...Of the $517 billion the Treasury collected in 1980, only $3 billion to $5 billion came from the 70 percent bracket — less than 1 percent of total tax revenue. https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2019/02/05/democrats-70-percent-tax-rate-000879/ https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2019/02/05/democrats-7... (This is one reason that democrats suggested lowering the top rate in 1981.) Those high marginal rates encouraged all kinds of unproductive investments to take advantage of loopholes built into the law. Where people couldn't get around such high rates, there were deadweight losses from economic activity that didn't occur. Even if someone thinks it is morally ok to take that much of someone's income, those kinds of high rates simply hurt the economy.
• elzbardico 2y ago
  This opponents of this kind of discussion always argue assuming a binary. Either we keep the status-quo, or we will enter a socialist chaos. We are discussing making a fairer tax system were billionaires pay more of a fair share, we are not proposing full communism where we confiscate all their money. Is any marginal increase on taxes fatally destined to lead to capital flight? It looks like a lot of people are arguing exactly that. Well, in that case lets stop completely taxing the oligarchs! Trickle down stravaganza now!
  • robocat 2y ago
    > we are not proposing full communism where we confiscate all their money. That's exactly what is usually being proposed - the difference is confiscating everything slowly over decades (rather than by immediate revolution). The deception is that a 2% tax sounds tiny. If you have a retirement portfolio and are withdrawing money to live (drawdown) then that 2% can easily take > 50% of your wealth over decades. Financial literacy is understanding the power of compounding - yet when it is in reverse it isn't obvious. And when the victims are somebody else (people wealthier than yourself) we conveniently shut our ears to any complaints. Ironically I think the core motivations of most proponents of wealth taxes are their own greed and envy. Tax anybody else but not moi... The systematic driver is our aging demographics. Our governments need new taxes to pay for the infinite demand of health services, and the demands of the voting 65yo+ welfare state beneficiaries
    • elzbardico 2y ago
      If we are going to talk about fairness and greed and envy we should also be discussing how the billionaires benefit from government deficits, how a lot of our government investment is distorted by lobbying from the richest amongst us. Our years of fiscal irresponsability, of adventures like ZIRP, Quantitative Easings and Stymulus made the rich even richer. Asset Inflation for the rich and purchasing power corrosion for the pleb is all cool and dandy, but it is destroying our societies, and the way we have to fix it is by reversing decades of Lobby facilitated regressive tax policies. The billionaires benefit from having an educated society to work for them, infrastructure, the rule of law, security from thiefs as well as from foreign governments and organizations. The USMC existence is far more important for big oil magnates than for a public school teacher in Chicago. I was lucky, I am generation X and I still managed to have a fully paid mortage, a decent, albeit modest, retirement fund, but what about my kids? What world are we leaving them? How can I look him in the eyes and tell, well kid, you're doing great on school, but sometimes I wonder if you shouldn't be playing because our government thinks that you having your own house in the future is something to be decided by the "free"markets, but at the same time, let's subsidize Big Tech to the tune of billions so they can build AI to make sure you won't have a job and will forever live of whatever I manage to pass to you or be a UBI slave. Because you and I know that all this government money going to AI is motivated by the greed of oligarchs salivating at the prospect of shedding off whole mountains out of their payrolls. Inflation is never a problem for this system when it is mostly confined to asset inflation. But as soon as we have too little unemployment, and workers start having to mute linked-in recruiter notifications, the calls for austerity start immediatly. You complain about the poor acting politically for a more progressive taxation system, but why then the rich don't stop lobbying for subsides, why they don't stop lobbying for wars? Isn't it clear that they are they motivated by greed too and will use political power too to satisfy it?