5 ms·

I think the assumption that we're looking for an equivalence here is fundamentally flawed and with it the entire post. For most people income is tied to sellin

by Havoc 5mo ago

I think the assumption that we're looking for an equivalence here is fundamentally flawed and with it the entire post. For most people income is tied to selling their time. It doesn't scale at all. Unless the income comes from wealth. The societal problem here is a group with self-reinforcing run-away levels of wealth. And to counter that you do need something more extreme than this nonsensical equivalency of income tax

dheera 5mo ago
> you do need something more extreme That's how you end up with an over-regulated country where people doing great things for the country's economy start choosing a different country to build their dreams in. It's also how you drive the currently-wealthy to other countries to spend and invest their fortunes in. The possibility of being ultra-wealthy is a huge reason to build awesome shit in the US that creates millions of jobs and brings the US economy ahead.
- svachalek 5mo ago
  How is rent-seeking and monopolizing "doing great things for the country's economy"?
- thrance 5mo ago
  This nefarious logic has been used for 50 years to justify ever worse austerity and tax breaks for the wealthy. And look at the situation today: pedophile oligarchs rule the world while we fight for scraps. The West has no future, unless we start aggressively redistributing wealth.
  - GS523523 5mo ago
    Hasn't a rich oligarchy been the status quo for most of humanity? It seems to me most of humanity has had quite a future to look forward to, historically speaking.
    - thrance 5mo ago
      I'd be reluctant to call the lords from the feudal system "oligarchs". Really, the people currently called such could only exist in a globalized economy. But anyway, oligarchs weren't this powerful in the mid-century. FDR's New Deal was successful in bringing down the Robber Barons and ushering in America's golden age. Coincidentally, things started to go to shit with the introduction of Reaganomics and the promise that letting a few private individuals concentrate more and more wealth would be beneficial to the economy.
- newtonianrules 5mo ago
  Yeah because the one thing the US has is a risk of being overregulated.
notahacker 5mo ago
The big flaw in his argument is that a mere 1% which is actually 20% of annual return is still less than the average income tax rate on workers, levied on people who have a lot more money and in some cases don't do anything resembling work. It's trivially true that 1% wealth taxes represent something in the region of a fifth of the average annual return on wealth, it's rather less convincing when it's suggested that this is harsh compared with income tax when people who pay more than half their much lower income in overall taxes whilst working 60 hour weeks and actually worrying about paying bills. There are arguments about wealth taxes inducing capital flight and investment disincentives, the difficulty of paying tax bills from illiquid intangible wealth or even quantifying it, and whether it's really a good thing to pressure people building a company to sell much of it off, but telling income tax payers that an effective tax rate of 20% is high isn't one of them...
- disgruntledphd2 5mo ago
  > There are arguments about wealth taxes inducing capital flight and investment disincentives If the US and the EU introduced a wealth tax then it would be relatively difficult for the capital flight fears to materialise. But yeah, the trouble with wealth taxes is that wealth (i.e. capital) is mobile. Which is why land and property taxes are probably the most effective way of taxing wealth.
  - abletonlive 5mo ago
    Most of us would not prefer to follow the EU into irrelevancy. If they were the model for how we should be running things how come they are not the ones running the show on innovation?
    - disgruntledphd2 5mo ago
      > Most of us would not prefer to follow the EU into irrelevancy. If they were the model for how we should be running things how come they are not the ones running the show on innovation? I think innovation is a tricky thing to measure, firstly. Certainly the US benefits massively from the world's largest capital markets, sucking in foreign money from all over the world. Is that innovation? is it stock price, or is it the work of all the academics, engineers, tech people etc? Like, Europe (and the EU at the time) is where Deepmind came from, without which we'd be vanishingly unlikely to have seen Transformers/LLMs etc. Nokia basically made mobile phones a global category. ASML provides something that neither the US nor China can match. And just to note, property taxes make up a much larger proportion of state revenue in the US than in the EU, if that's how you're measuring things. And i didn't say anything about how great the EU was, I just noted that the US & the EU make up most of the richest countries in the world, where rich people like to live, so a wealth tax would probably work relatively effectively at that level. Obviously that's not going to happen, but land and property taxes could get us a lot of the way there, with much less issues with capital flight and tax collection.
solidsnack9000 5mo ago
I'm not sure how there is a societal problem with "run-away levels of wealth". We have societal problems around food costs, housing costs, healthcare costs, &c; but people with extreme wealth are not bidding up sandwiches, studio apartments, &c, &c. If we "solve" their wealth by taking it from them and giving it to the government, what does that help? What good is the government going to do with that? Allocating money through the government has not been a particularly successful strategy for improving the overall standard of living.
- Epa095 5mo ago
  Money is votes into the economy and what it shall produce. The more money you have, the larger vote you have. Taxes are the way the government takes controll over a fraction of the votes. Then the government can use this power to make good or bad decisions. One thing which is clear is that the billionaires is not using their power over the economy to fix any of the deep fundamental problems we are facing
  - solidsnack9000 5mo ago
    Consumption is a kind of voting in the economy, I suppose; but the economy is heavily geared towards making things that regular people want. How many Corollas are there for every Bugatti? If what you're saying is true, would it be unfair of me to say that the government is not using their power over the economy to fix any of the deep fundamental problems we are facing? Is it good policy to take people's money because they aren't doing what we think they should be doing with it?
- i_cannot_hack 5mo ago
  > Allocating money through the government has not been a particularly successful strategy for improving the overall standard of living. What are you even basing this assumption on? Just quickly comparing the highest ranking countries by Human Development Index with the highest government budgets per capita and the highest income tax rates would, if anything, support the opposite conclusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen... https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/personal-income-tax-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/personal-income-ta...

by Havoc 5mo ago

dheera 5mo ago

> you do need something more extreme That's how you end up with an over-regulated country where people doing great things for the country's economy start choosing a different country to build their dreams in. It's also how you drive the currently-wealthy to other countries to spend and invest their fortunes in. The possibility of being ultra-wealthy is a huge reason to build awesome shit in the US that creates millions of jobs and brings the US economy ahead.

svachalek 5mo ago
How is rent-seeking and monopolizing "doing great things for the country's economy"?
thrance 5mo ago
This nefarious logic has been used for 50 years to justify ever worse austerity and tax breaks for the wealthy. And look at the situation today: pedophile oligarchs rule the world while we fight for scraps. The West has no future, unless we start aggressively redistributing wealth.
- GS523523 5mo ago
  Hasn't a rich oligarchy been the status quo for most of humanity? It seems to me most of humanity has had quite a future to look forward to, historically speaking.
  - thrance 5mo ago
    I'd be reluctant to call the lords from the feudal system "oligarchs". Really, the people currently called such could only exist in a globalized economy. But anyway, oligarchs weren't this powerful in the mid-century. FDR's New Deal was successful in bringing down the Robber Barons and ushering in America's golden age. Coincidentally, things started to go to shit with the introduction of Reaganomics and the promise that letting a few private individuals concentrate more and more wealth would be beneficial to the economy.
newtonianrules 5mo ago
Yeah because the one thing the US has is a risk of being overregulated.

notahacker 5mo ago

The big flaw in his argument is that a mere 1% which is actually 20% of annual return is still less than the average income tax rate on workers, levied on people who have a lot more money and in some cases don't do anything resembling work. It's trivially true that 1% wealth taxes represent something in the region of a fifth of the average annual return on wealth, it's rather less convincing when it's suggested that this is harsh compared with income tax when people who pay more than half their much lower income in overall taxes whilst working 60 hour weeks and actually worrying about paying bills. There are arguments about wealth taxes inducing capital flight and investment disincentives, the difficulty of paying tax bills from illiquid intangible wealth or even quantifying it, and whether it's really a good thing to pressure people building a company to sell much of it off, but telling income tax payers that an effective tax rate of 20% is high isn't one of them...

disgruntledphd2 5mo ago
> There are arguments about wealth taxes inducing capital flight and investment disincentives If the US and the EU introduced a wealth tax then it would be relatively difficult for the capital flight fears to materialise. But yeah, the trouble with wealth taxes is that wealth (i.e. capital) is mobile. Which is why land and property taxes are probably the most effective way of taxing wealth.
- abletonlive 5mo ago
  Most of us would not prefer to follow the EU into irrelevancy. If they were the model for how we should be running things how come they are not the ones running the show on innovation?
  - disgruntledphd2 5mo ago
    > Most of us would not prefer to follow the EU into irrelevancy. If they were the model for how we should be running things how come they are not the ones running the show on innovation? I think innovation is a tricky thing to measure, firstly. Certainly the US benefits massively from the world's largest capital markets, sucking in foreign money from all over the world. Is that innovation? is it stock price, or is it the work of all the academics, engineers, tech people etc? Like, Europe (and the EU at the time) is where Deepmind came from, without which we'd be vanishingly unlikely to have seen Transformers/LLMs etc. Nokia basically made mobile phones a global category. ASML provides something that neither the US nor China can match. And just to note, property taxes make up a much larger proportion of state revenue in the US than in the EU, if that's how you're measuring things. And i didn't say anything about how great the EU was, I just noted that the US & the EU make up most of the richest countries in the world, where rich people like to live, so a wealth tax would probably work relatively effectively at that level. Obviously that's not going to happen, but land and property taxes could get us a lot of the way there, with much less issues with capital flight and tax collection.

solidsnack9000 5mo ago

I'm not sure how there is a societal problem with "run-away levels of wealth". We have societal problems around food costs, housing costs, healthcare costs, &c; but people with extreme wealth are not bidding up sandwiches, studio apartments, &c, &c. If we "solve" their wealth by taking it from them and giving it to the government, what does that help? What good is the government going to do with that? Allocating money through the government has not been a particularly successful strategy for improving the overall standard of living.

Epa095 5mo ago
Money is votes into the economy and what it shall produce. The more money you have, the larger vote you have. Taxes are the way the government takes controll over a fraction of the votes. Then the government can use this power to make good or bad decisions. One thing which is clear is that the billionaires is not using their power over the economy to fix any of the deep fundamental problems we are facing
- solidsnack9000 5mo ago
  Consumption is a kind of voting in the economy, I suppose; but the economy is heavily geared towards making things that regular people want. How many Corollas are there for every Bugatti? If what you're saying is true, would it be unfair of me to say that the government is not using their power over the economy to fix any of the deep fundamental problems we are facing? Is it good policy to take people's money because they aren't doing what we think they should be doing with it?
i_cannot_hack 5mo ago
> Allocating money through the government has not been a particularly successful strategy for improving the overall standard of living. What are you even basing this assumption on? Just quickly comparing the highest ranking countries by Human Development Index with the highest government budgets per capita and the highest income tax rates would, if anything, support the opposite conclusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen... https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/personal-income-tax-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/personal-income-ta...