4 ms·

> The math doesn't math for someone on the other extreme end of the spectrum who has zero savings or investments and obtains all his income from labor: To him,

> The math doesn't math for someone on the other extreme end of the spectrum who has zero savings or investments and obtains all his income from labor: To him, a N% wealth tax = 0% income tax for all N. Those with -some- savings are somewhere in the middle. Productivity comes from labor AND assets though. You need the farmer and the tractor. Why would we create a tax system that encourages people to divorce themselves from having a stake in the means of production?

ryandrake 5mo ago
The current system without wealth taxes already largely divorces labor from equity stake. Unless you're one of the relatively few tech or office workers who get equity compensation or have a large savings rate, you currently don't have much of a stake in any means of production.
- tengbretson 5mo ago
  I'm not disputing the claim that few people are able to save and invest into having a stake in the means of production. However, if your goal is to increase stakeholdership, how would a policy that explicitly disincentivizes that behavior fix anything?
  - svachalek 5mo ago
    How does it disincentivize "stakeholdership"? Are people expected to say, please don't make me rich, because I'd have to pay 1% of it?
  - smallmancontrov 5mo ago
    Why do I get the feeling that you would never field the structurally identical complaint against disproportionately taxing labor and consumption, even though that's a much more prominent feature of our current tax policy? In any case, taxes do not go into a black hole, no matter how much the right likes to encourage this self-serving fiction. Taxes generally get spent down the economic ladder and move people up the economic ladder, increasing their marginal propensity to save. People must have money if you want them to save money. Even more concretely: reversing the policies which dissolved the middle class might reasonably be expected to restore the middle class, or at least slow their demise.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - notahacker 5mo ago
    Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets. But the point isn't to increase stakeholdership so much as to stop privileging stakeholders with very low effective tax bills relative to mere workers, which means that there's a lot less cause for concern about those workers not owning their means of production
    - gruez 5mo ago
      >Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets. Even assuming this is true, then what? Do you think the average joe is going to suddenly buy alphabet or meta stocks because bill ackman or ken griffin sold their shares to buy bigger yachts?
      - notahacker 5mo ago
        Perhaps you could direct this strawman upthread, to the person who implied that to enable the average joe to obtain a share in the means of wealth creation it would be necessary for the HNW individuals who currently own it to be able to maintain that ownership without paying tax on it... All I pointed out was that at the margin, HNW individuals needing to liquidate 1% of their portfolio every year (and also HNW individuals not being disincentived from realising their capital gains as under the current system) actually works in favour of people trying to buy shares in means of production (by increasing liquidity and lowering prices), as well as obviously against wealth concentration. There are arguments against wealth taxes that are actually credible, like those concerning capital flight, but this thread seems like a magnet for bad ones. Like, AMZN valuation dropping slightly at the margin from Bezos at al's forced divestment of portions of their stock actually being a bad thing for the economy as a whole is a defensible position; the utopian scenario involving delivery drivers ending up with a decent sized stake in Amazon somehow being impeded by wealth taxes isn't....
    - tengbretson 5mo ago
      > Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets. To whom are the selling? The buyers would be only those that can make efficient enough returns to offset this tax due to their existing systemic advantages, like economies of scale or regulatory lobbying. This would accelerate consolidation. > But the point isn't to increase stakeholdership so much as to stop privileging stakeholders with very low effective tax bills relative to mere workers At this point I think there is ample evidence that policy in this country does not move forward without the consent of these so-called privileged stakeholders. If you take that as a given, why would you support handing these people an economic machine gun to point at your future self?
zozbot234 5mo ago
> Productivity comes from labor AND assets though. You need the farmer and the tractor. Why would we create a tax system that encourages people to divorce themselves from having a stake in the means of production? This is exactly why economic models broadly show that taxing capital assets makes workers worse off in the long run. An abundance of capital means that workers will be more productive on the margin, so their wage will be higher. This extends to the capital-income taxation involved in income taxes: pure labor taxes or consumption taxes are inherently more efficient. There are countervailing effects (taxing capital income works as an effective way of indirectly taxing the unearned value of resource-like assets, or of idiosyncratic skills that happen to correlate with holding more capital-like assets) but they can only roughly justify the current income tax arrangement, not some extra tax on assets.
- smallmancontrov 5mo ago
  Oh good! I was worried that trickle down economics was self-serving nonsense pushed by think tank economists on behalf of their benefactors. Since it is economic fact rather than self-serving fiction, when I review its track record I will find that it caused an upward inflection in real wages, right? Right? https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ Oops!
  - zozbot234 5mo ago
    Total labor compensation has in fact grown. Unfortunately, much of the non-wage compensation involves services like healthcare that has become a lot more expensive over time due to burdensome overregulation and an overall lack of price transparency.
    - smallmancontrov 5mo ago
      [dead]
    - JuniperMesos 5mo ago
      Also the wages of the fairly-large number of people who work in the health care industry itself.
thrance 5mo ago
Regular people have less and less savings to buy "stakes in the means of production". Capital is getting more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands: the top 10% of the country owns almost 80% of it all. Wealth needs to be taxed and redistributed.

ryandrake 5mo ago

The current system without wealth taxes already largely divorces labor from equity stake. Unless you're one of the relatively few tech or office workers who get equity compensation or have a large savings rate, you currently don't have much of a stake in any means of production.

tengbretson 5mo ago
I'm not disputing the claim that few people are able to save and invest into having a stake in the means of production. However, if your goal is to increase stakeholdership, how would a policy that explicitly disincentivizes that behavior fix anything?
- svachalek 5mo ago
  How does it disincentivize "stakeholdership"? Are people expected to say, please don't make me rich, because I'd have to pay 1% of it?
- smallmancontrov 5mo ago
  Why do I get the feeling that you would never field the structurally identical complaint against disproportionately taxing labor and consumption, even though that's a much more prominent feature of our current tax policy? In any case, taxes do not go into a black hole, no matter how much the right likes to encourage this self-serving fiction. Taxes generally get spent down the economic ladder and move people up the economic ladder, increasing their marginal propensity to save. People must have money if you want them to save money. Even more concretely: reversing the policies which dissolved the middle class might reasonably be expected to restore the middle class, or at least slow their demise.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- notahacker 5mo ago
  Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets. But the point isn't to increase stakeholdership so much as to stop privileging stakeholders with very low effective tax bills relative to mere workers, which means that there's a lot less cause for concern about those workers not owning their means of production
  - gruez 5mo ago
    >Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets. Even assuming this is true, then what? Do you think the average joe is going to suddenly buy alphabet or meta stocks because bill ackman or ken griffin sold their shares to buy bigger yachts?
    - notahacker 5mo ago
      Perhaps you could direct this strawman upthread, to the person who implied that to enable the average joe to obtain a share in the means of wealth creation it would be necessary for the HNW individuals who currently own it to be able to maintain that ownership without paying tax on it... All I pointed out was that at the margin, HNW individuals needing to liquidate 1% of their portfolio every year (and also HNW individuals not being disincentived from realising their capital gains as under the current system) actually works in favour of people trying to buy shares in means of production (by increasing liquidity and lowering prices), as well as obviously against wealth concentration. There are arguments against wealth taxes that are actually credible, like those concerning capital flight, but this thread seems like a magnet for bad ones. Like, AMZN valuation dropping slightly at the margin from Bezos at al's forced divestment of portions of their stock actually being a bad thing for the economy as a whole is a defensible position; the utopian scenario involving delivery drivers ending up with a decent sized stake in Amazon somehow being impeded by wealth taxes isn't....
  - tengbretson 5mo ago
    > Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets. To whom are the selling? The buyers would be only those that can make efficient enough returns to offset this tax due to their existing systemic advantages, like economies of scale or regulatory lobbying. This would accelerate consolidation. > But the point isn't to increase stakeholdership so much as to stop privileging stakeholders with very low effective tax bills relative to mere workers At this point I think there is ample evidence that policy in this country does not move forward without the consent of these so-called privileged stakeholders. If you take that as a given, why would you support handing these people an economic machine gun to point at your future self?

zozbot234 5mo ago

> Productivity comes from labor AND assets though. You need the farmer and the tractor. Why would we create a tax system that encourages people to divorce themselves from having a stake in the means of production? This is exactly why economic models broadly show that taxing capital assets makes workers worse off in the long run. An abundance of capital means that workers will be more productive on the margin, so their wage will be higher. This extends to the capital-income taxation involved in income taxes: pure labor taxes or consumption taxes are inherently more efficient. There are countervailing effects (taxing capital income works as an effective way of indirectly taxing the unearned value of resource-like assets, or of idiosyncratic skills that happen to correlate with holding more capital-like assets) but they can only roughly justify the current income tax arrangement, not some extra tax on assets.

smallmancontrov 5mo ago
Oh good! I was worried that trickle down economics was self-serving nonsense pushed by think tank economists on behalf of their benefactors. Since it is economic fact rather than self-serving fiction, when I review its track record I will find that it caused an upward inflection in real wages, right? Right? https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ Oops!
- zozbot234 5mo ago
  Total labor compensation has in fact grown. Unfortunately, much of the non-wage compensation involves services like healthcare that has become a lot more expensive over time due to burdensome overregulation and an overall lack of price transparency.
  - smallmancontrov 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - JuniperMesos 5mo ago
    Also the wages of the fairly-large number of people who work in the health care industry itself.

thrance 5mo ago

Regular people have less and less savings to buy "stakes in the means of production". Capital is getting more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands: the top 10% of the country owns almost 80% of it all. Wealth needs to be taxed and redistributed.