8 ms·

> On the other hand, almost a majority of people already pay no federal income tax anyways. That's an irrelevant diversion though, because the measure that mat

> On the other hand, almost a majority of people already pay no federal income tax anyways. That's an irrelevant diversion though, because the measure that matters when discussing the fairness of taxes is how much people are left with at the end after paying whatever taxes they pay, including sales tax, income tax, and any other kind of tax. And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very little, next to none, and for the people for whom a wealth tax would even apply the answer is unimaginable amounts.

credit_guy 5mo ago
That's not all that matters. The main reason to have taxes is to fund the government, not to make society a more just society. And thinking that billionaires will just take a wealth tax as served, and perhaps will ask "can I have some more" is one way to think about this, but probably not the best way. A better way to think is that action might be followed by reaction. There is no manifest destiny for California to be the epicenter of tech.
- mannanj 5mo ago
  Does the government not have the goal to make society a more just society? When did that stop being a priority of government? Even a teeny, tiny one?
  - credit_guy 5mo ago
    Sure, the government has that goal too. But the government has many tools, and using taxes for that is using the wrong tool. Or maybe you think that billionaires owe us not only to pay taxes, but also to play nice, and pay those taxes with a smile on their face?
    - ethbr1 5mo ago
      > pay those taxes with a smile on their face The government's monopoly on punitive violence isn't only intended for the peasantry...
    - breakyerself 5mo ago
      Billionares shouldn't exist. We shouldn't just tax them for the revenue. We should tax them to limit the undemocratic power that comes with excessive wealth.
      - mannanj 5mo ago
        Agreed. Humans evolved in a tribal, local community leadership system. To have as much wealth as millions of people that you never interact with should not exist as a person. It is against the system principles of humanity; either create a new species and turn the billionaires into them, or balance the system.
    - lovelearning 5mo ago
      What are those other tools?
    - well_ackshually 5mo ago
      >and pay those taxes with a smile on their face? Considering the alternative for them over the past millennia has been, inevitably that they get caught, hanged, quartered, beaten and other various violent methods: yes, they should smile, they're buying their lives with all that money :)
      - Nasrudith 5mo ago
        You clearly don't understand psychology at all. Rule by fear has a major downside that Machivelli warned about. If you keep people under threat all the time, as soon as the threat fails and you can no longer point a gun at your head they preemptively kill you and feel good about it. Threatening violence to get what you want always ends with you being out-violenced by a bigger thug.
        mannanj 5mo ago
        This is how alpha chimps function in their tribe. They resort to war and violence to prolong their rule, and it works for long enough, thats all they need for the cost-benefits to be worth it on their side. In humanity, being the alpha chimp, you can actually just run away from the tribe with all your wealth instead of outright die and form a new identity and start a life elsewhere and change your last name and go somewhere not well known, and if you and your family does this for enough generations you are forgotten. I think this might explain the rotten apples at the tip-top of our industrial/societal wealth classes. I think they are these people, played out over generations, having somehow survived the system that used to make it impossible to do this when at the chimp level (or even medieval maybe, maybe this new form of evasion only arose in the industrial age).
        BugsJustFindMe 5mo ago
        https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/alpha-male-alpha-chimpanzee-primatologist-frans-de-waal-a8421291.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/alpha-male-a...
        5mo ago
    - mannanj 5mo ago
      Funding the government, which has the goal to create a more just society, means taxes should support that. If you're not using your funding to support your goals, thats corruption.
      - credit_guy 5mo ago
        This is wishful thinking. Billionaires can vote with their feet, or can pay expensive lawyers and accountants to find all the possible loopholes to not pay those taxes. California wants to tax Elon Musk for his trillion dollars. But how much of that trillion dollars was generated in California? He has a very valid claim that a lot of it was generated in Texas, and he'll go all the way to the Supreme Court with that. People can vote that a new tax should be levied on billionaires, but can't vote how those billionaires will react to the tax. Moving out of state is one option (see Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc). Hiring armies of lawyers to challenge any wealth assessment is another. Litigating to the Supreme Court yet another. I'm not a billionaire and never will be, but if I can think of these few ideas, they can think of 100 times more.
        mannanj 5mo ago
        It's wishful to ask the system designed for a goal, to do the goal?
        credit_guy 5mo ago
        Exactly. You can ask many things, like you can ask for world peace, and you can ask for universal brotherly love. If the ask has no chance to result in the outcome you desire, it's purely wishful thinking. It feels to me you are asking "why can't we just eliminate billionaires". Well, they have a vote in that decision.
- m11a 5mo ago
  California already has very high taxes. I think marginal tax rates are higher in California than for UK tax residents, certainly for CGT, and roughly similar for income tax. I'd say the fact that California remains the epicenter of tech despite its high taxes suggests concentration of talent matters far more than tax rates.
  - disgruntledphd2 5mo ago
    Yeah, the marginal rates for California are approximately the same as I pay in Ireland. The capital gains taxes are way lower though.
- georgemcbay 5mo ago
  > The main reason to have taxes is to fund the government, not to make society a more just society. Both are important reasons for taxes. "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." (often attributed to Louis Brandeis, though he probably never said exactly the quote) Taxation is one of the primary tools for avoiding destructive levels of wealth concentration. Of course, the wealthy decry this as unfair wealth redistribution but all governments engage in constant wealth redistribution. In the US we happen to have decided (since the Reagan era) that through increasingly regressive taxes the redistribution will almost always function upwards, ultimately resulting in the oligarchical dismantling of our government that we find ourselves in today.
roenxi 5mo ago
There is no consensus on what is "fair" to tax, you can find people arguing from 0% to 100%. And if we're talking about measures of fairness. A much better measure is something like trying to maximise the median living standard without sacrificing any one demographic. > And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very little, next to none... So... where are the real resources coming from then? Because if these people aren't using them to support their living standards they must be doing something else. If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something. Because I agree that the taxes aren't going to come out of the wealthy's living standards, but the implications of that in practice are not good.
- ethbr1 5mo ago
  > If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something. Yes, and that "somewhere else" is others' excess profit. That excess profit comes from (a) inventing or investing capital with a return or (b) paying less for goods / labor than they can be sold for. Capitalist profit has always been equal parts ingenuity and fucking other people over, and as most often implemented makes no discrimination between the two. The bargain by which this has traditionally been squared is "the person who made the profit gets to keep some of it" + "they pay the rest in taxes to support the society they're successful in and depend on." Unfortunately over the years this has continually been eroded by capital's invasion into democracy, with the express purpose of neutering the latter part of that bargain. Those who would be hit with a wealth tax are incensed by it precisely because it would be less avoidable than the myriad of loopholes that have been engineered into income taxes.
  - roenxi 5mo ago
    And in terms of real resources - who do you expect to have less and what do you expect them to have less of? Because "excess profit" is an economic concept, not a real thing.
    - 5mo ago

credit_guy 5mo ago

That's not all that matters. The main reason to have taxes is to fund the government, not to make society a more just society. And thinking that billionaires will just take a wealth tax as served, and perhaps will ask "can I have some more" is one way to think about this, but probably not the best way. A better way to think is that action might be followed by reaction. There is no manifest destiny for California to be the epicenter of tech.

mannanj 5mo ago
Does the government not have the goal to make society a more just society? When did that stop being a priority of government? Even a teeny, tiny one?
- credit_guy 5mo ago
  Sure, the government has that goal too. But the government has many tools, and using taxes for that is using the wrong tool. Or maybe you think that billionaires owe us not only to pay taxes, but also to play nice, and pay those taxes with a smile on their face?
  - ethbr1 5mo ago
    > pay those taxes with a smile on their face The government's monopoly on punitive violence isn't only intended for the peasantry...
  - breakyerself 5mo ago
    Billionares shouldn't exist. We shouldn't just tax them for the revenue. We should tax them to limit the undemocratic power that comes with excessive wealth.
    - mannanj 5mo ago
      Agreed. Humans evolved in a tribal, local community leadership system. To have as much wealth as millions of people that you never interact with should not exist as a person. It is against the system principles of humanity; either create a new species and turn the billionaires into them, or balance the system.
  - lovelearning 5mo ago
    What are those other tools?
  - well_ackshually 5mo ago
    >and pay those taxes with a smile on their face? Considering the alternative for them over the past millennia has been, inevitably that they get caught, hanged, quartered, beaten and other various violent methods: yes, they should smile, they're buying their lives with all that money :)
    - Nasrudith 5mo ago
      You clearly don't understand psychology at all. Rule by fear has a major downside that Machivelli warned about. If you keep people under threat all the time, as soon as the threat fails and you can no longer point a gun at your head they preemptively kill you and feel good about it. Threatening violence to get what you want always ends with you being out-violenced by a bigger thug.
      - mannanj 5mo ago
        This is how alpha chimps function in their tribe. They resort to war and violence to prolong their rule, and it works for long enough, thats all they need for the cost-benefits to be worth it on their side. In humanity, being the alpha chimp, you can actually just run away from the tribe with all your wealth instead of outright die and form a new identity and start a life elsewhere and change your last name and go somewhere not well known, and if you and your family does this for enough generations you are forgotten. I think this might explain the rotten apples at the tip-top of our industrial/societal wealth classes. I think they are these people, played out over generations, having somehow survived the system that used to make it impossible to do this when at the chimp level (or even medieval maybe, maybe this new form of evasion only arose in the industrial age).
        BugsJustFindMe 5mo ago
        https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/alpha-male-alpha-chimpanzee-primatologist-frans-de-waal-a8421291.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/alpha-male-a...
        5mo ago
  - mannanj 5mo ago
    Funding the government, which has the goal to create a more just society, means taxes should support that. If you're not using your funding to support your goals, thats corruption.
    - credit_guy 5mo ago
      This is wishful thinking. Billionaires can vote with their feet, or can pay expensive lawyers and accountants to find all the possible loopholes to not pay those taxes. California wants to tax Elon Musk for his trillion dollars. But how much of that trillion dollars was generated in California? He has a very valid claim that a lot of it was generated in Texas, and he'll go all the way to the Supreme Court with that. People can vote that a new tax should be levied on billionaires, but can't vote how those billionaires will react to the tax. Moving out of state is one option (see Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc). Hiring armies of lawyers to challenge any wealth assessment is another. Litigating to the Supreme Court yet another. I'm not a billionaire and never will be, but if I can think of these few ideas, they can think of 100 times more.
      - mannanj 5mo ago
        It's wishful to ask the system designed for a goal, to do the goal?
        credit_guy 5mo ago
        Exactly. You can ask many things, like you can ask for world peace, and you can ask for universal brotherly love. If the ask has no chance to result in the outcome you desire, it's purely wishful thinking. It feels to me you are asking "why can't we just eliminate billionaires". Well, they have a vote in that decision.
m11a 5mo ago
California already has very high taxes. I think marginal tax rates are higher in California than for UK tax residents, certainly for CGT, and roughly similar for income tax. I'd say the fact that California remains the epicenter of tech despite its high taxes suggests concentration of talent matters far more than tax rates.
- disgruntledphd2 5mo ago
  Yeah, the marginal rates for California are approximately the same as I pay in Ireland. The capital gains taxes are way lower though.
georgemcbay 5mo ago
> The main reason to have taxes is to fund the government, not to make society a more just society. Both are important reasons for taxes. "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." (often attributed to Louis Brandeis, though he probably never said exactly the quote) Taxation is one of the primary tools for avoiding destructive levels of wealth concentration. Of course, the wealthy decry this as unfair wealth redistribution but all governments engage in constant wealth redistribution. In the US we happen to have decided (since the Reagan era) that through increasingly regressive taxes the redistribution will almost always function upwards, ultimately resulting in the oligarchical dismantling of our government that we find ourselves in today.

roenxi 5mo ago

There is no consensus on what is "fair" to tax, you can find people arguing from 0% to 100%. And if we're talking about measures of fairness. A much better measure is something like trying to maximise the median living standard without sacrificing any one demographic. > And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very little, next to none... So... where are the real resources coming from then? Because if these people aren't using them to support their living standards they must be doing something else. If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something. Because I agree that the taxes aren't going to come out of the wealthy's living standards, but the implications of that in practice are not good.

ethbr1 5mo ago
> If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something. Yes, and that "somewhere else" is others' excess profit. That excess profit comes from (a) inventing or investing capital with a return or (b) paying less for goods / labor than they can be sold for. Capitalist profit has always been equal parts ingenuity and fucking other people over, and as most often implemented makes no discrimination between the two. The bargain by which this has traditionally been squared is "the person who made the profit gets to keep some of it" + "they pay the rest in taxes to support the society they're successful in and depend on." Unfortunately over the years this has continually been eroded by capital's invasion into democracy, with the express purpose of neutering the latter part of that bargain. Those who would be hit with a wealth tax are incensed by it precisely because it would be less avoidable than the myriad of loopholes that have been engineered into income taxes.
- roenxi 5mo ago
  And in terms of real resources - who do you expect to have less and what do you expect them to have less of? Because "excess profit" is an economic concept, not a real thing.
  - 5mo ago