I bet there are a lot of democratic socialists that would be for a tax on any net worth/estate greater than $0. Y’all think that’s fair?
They’re buying the votes, nothing more. Take from the few rich to give to the many below them, they don’t care about the rich, the poor, or the middle class, only themselves.
From what I’ve seen effective tax rates have remained relatively constant despite the high and low marginal rates
Two “ya’lls” in two posts, three strikes and you’re out, Sweep’s rules.
It’s not about “coming for” anybody. You keep yelling with your ears shut. This is about the fact that we’ve actually moved away from higher tax regimes we had when the US was growing at its fastest over the entire 1950’s to 1990’s era and the middle class was growing. It’s also about adjusting for shifting economic structure, you’re just yelling words and building red herring arguments instead of addressing any of those issues. Everyone wants us to stop being socialist and MAGA like the olden days when people pulled themselves up by their own boot straps, hated communists and the marginal tax rate was 95% on every dollar of income above $2.9M in today’s dollars. That system was removed and the structure of our economy broke down with it. I’m fine with people “coming for me next” if coming for me next means restoring a mobile, balanced economy for current and future generations.
of course not. i dont think you get it. its only fair if they take from the people richer than me!
Yes, duh. That’s the whole point about changing the structure of the economy. The effective rate was similar because shockingly, we didn’t have the massive wealth disparity that’s developed under the new regime. I.E. there were far fewer people paying that rate as per tax foundation’s own analysis. That’s not a condemnation of my point, it’s a reinforcement.
Think about it. you can only really make up to $2.9M a year partly because technology has changed scalability (economic structure) and partly because of the tax setup. What do you do? Do you launch a modern day WMT and try to drive every niche business out of business and swallow up small businesses? Do you underpay all of your mid level managers and squeeze out costs using your advantage over the labor market so you can make an extra dollar to pay 95% tax on it? No. You pay fair wages because a better labor force makes your business more stable for the long run and takes burden off of you. Because of these reasons small business proliferate, middle class thrives and businesses are built for stability, not next quarters profit because longevity of income streams matters more than magnitude. This is why tax policy is about more than just taking money, it’s about balancing incentives and economic structure.
I’m never going to be hit by a wealth tax or a more aggressive income tax at the top brackets, but given the choice, I’d much prefer higher income taxes for the simple reason that I wouldn’t trust congress to roll my trashcan to the curb for Thursday morning pickup let alone design a from scratch tax policy that doesn’t cripple the economy. Maybe I’m overthinking it but if the calculation allows the netting of assets and liabilities to get to your wealth number, it sure seems like you’re creating a lot of incentive for levering up. Aside from encouraging more risky behavior, I think there could be some upward pressure on the cost of capital, definitely GDP impacts and probably labor market impacts, depending on how things are structured.
Just seems far easier to expose more money to higher income taxes. The reason Warren and the other members of the eat the rich party won’t aggressively push for that is they don’t actually want to fix any problems. They want class warfare. They want a bogeyman they can point to to convince the baristacracy that their failings in life are the fault of everyone but themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a need for tax reform and a mechanism that takes a bigger piece of the .01%er’s pie is likely a good thing, but I think a wealth tax as it is currently being discussed would be a disaster economically.
Do you think the US would be competitive relative to other if they start trying to play god with economy and take from productive members and subsidize negative npv people? The US pulled away from the pack, biggest and baddest financial markets, military, most power. That didn’t happen because of wealth redistribution.
Lets say we start doing it, what are we going to use this money for… free college? Demand rises, prices go up even more for a bunch of idiots who shouldn’t be there in the first place gets to learn about some useless subjects they could learn at the library or on the internet on their own time for free? That’s the equivalent of flushing money down the toilet. At least if it’s with people who made it, they’d spend it on more productive means. And even if they didn’t, it’s their money, at least give them the chance.
Living wage? I believe in survival of the fittest for the most part. Why should we pay people who are unwilling to work?
alternative energy? Natural resources will tank and other countries will use it to their advantage to be more competitive than we are.
We can’t even agree to get a wall built for national security, what bs is the govt going to do with all this money? I say leave it in the hands of the people.
She is from Iran. An example of how immigration can make a country worse. No doubt her plight is due to discrimination?
4
the survival of the fittest concept mean that you are for letting old sickly people die. cuz honestly thats like 60% of our budget with medicare and social security. the very definition of net negative npv are these unproductive people past their prime or people with a lot of healthcare issues and dont pay what they cost.
anyways hte issue is productive people now vs producitve people in the future. we are running a mother fucking trillion deficit. essentially the poor people now are being funded by the productive people of the future. i believe that future smart people are smarter than current smart people so we shouldnt be running a deficit. so either we cut the benefits for poor people and watch them die or tax the rich unfairly so poor people can live.
most old people need social security to survive yet provide little to not benefits to society besides the fact that they vote a lot and have a lot of stories. anyways my question. would it be patriotic to die for your country if your negative npv? just curious.
chidlren are also net negative npv. especially since the majority of them will prolly be poor as well. but technically children are better investments than old people! sick people are prolly a flip of a coin! but imo if ur sickly now, ur prolly sickly forever. but im no doctor! YEP!
an interesting concept! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwD7f5ZWhAk
So, the problem here is you went full librul and lumped the limited argument into the broader socialist narrative the way they lump wall people in with the Charlottesville crowd.
I’m talking about a specific policy and you go off about socialism and slippery slopes, the point is it doesn’t matter where the money goes honestly, Keynsian in that regard. But fixing the existing budget hole or aging infrastructure would be a start, fund the giant defense build out that’s in the works. Build walls all around the country for all I care, maybe add a roof, remodel Florida.
If the top 1 percent pays the same taxes now as they did before (plus or minus 500bps), exactly how is that structurally different?
Because simple math and I spelled it out above.
But here, from tax foundation citing WSJ:
I alluded to this directly earlier. Now it’s structurally different because as they point out, you had less than 10k households with >$2M in todays dollars in annual income. So the effective tax rate was similar because the economy it was layered on was structurally different in its distribution. This is not rocket surgery, this is common sense gravity exists type stuff. So tax policies don’t exist independently of the economy they are layered on, it’s like a linear transformation layered as a matrix, the output reflects the basis. Now, combining what I just said with my earlier point, these two things are not independent, taxes as we’ve been discussing since the first post, commonsensically impact economic structure through incentives (hence my structurally different comment). You removed the punitive tax bracket and now, with the added tailwind of scalable tech, you have a distribution that’s running completely unchecked and the rich paying the same tax rates but now the tails have exploded. This has literally been my point from post one, the taxes need to be moved back to a similar absolute structure to contain the distribution.
BS gettin loose on a Friday night breaking out the bullet points.
Partyin’ with my bros
I’m late to this party. Haven’t read the whole article, nor have I read all the posts. But nonetheless…
How do you measure wealth? And I’m not talking in the “I’m wealthy because I have a good marriage” sense. I mean–how do you actually place a monetary value on some of these assets? Many of my clients have mineral interests–some of which are producing, and some of which are not. Some people have large ranches. Some have privately-held businesses. How do you measure that? We do it now for estate tax purposes, but that’s only done once-in-a-lifetime. It seems like this will force the super-wealthy to do it every year. The costs of compliance will be astronomical.
How do you collect the tax? If I’m worth $10b, then my 3% tax is $300m. I would imagine that most of the super-wealthy don’t have that kind of cash available–not even for a one-time tax. And that’s going to be an ongoing requirement. I’ve got to come up with $300m every single year–assuming my wealth stays the same. The only way to come up with the cash to pay the tax is to start selling assets–which will be costly and ultimately destructive in nature.
That said, I think there is approximately a 0% chance of this ever becoming the law of the land. I think this is just her way of pandering to the socialist left and trying to secure herself as the Democratic Party’s nominee for President.
These problems are not that astronomical.
The wealth tax from my perspective would be something that occurs infrequently. Honestly, even a more punitive estate tax would do the trick in my mind and may actually be the best solution by far. I’m fine with once in a lifetime. In between, income taxes with higher marginal brackets would handle the rest.
As far as collecting the tax, I think it makes a lot of sense to structure the payments so they accommodate the degree of liquidity of the wealth, seems sensible, not that tricky. I mean if it’s an estate tax, you just give then a 5 year bond. Either they pay it off with cash/debt over 5 years or they sell a stake to cover it and market it to market in the process.
Wow. I had no idea that Amazon didn’t pay for fuel tax at the pump, postage, or property taxes. How did they get such a sweet deal?
FTFY
“UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman says in a new paper that inequality has tripled since the 1980s — with just 400 Americans possessing more wealth than the 150 million people who account for the bottom 60% of earners. Things now look a lot like the pre-Depression 1920s,writes The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham. “That shift is eroding security from families in the lower and middle classes, who rely on their small stores of wealth to finance their retirement and to smooth over economic shocks like the loss of a job,” Ingraham writes.”
bill gates says BS is da man@@