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The rich pick up assets during g every crash, widening inequality. We need a wealth tax to start reversing some of those gains
There’s also the option of additional tax brackets for those wealthy whose income still counts as income. Why do the tax brackets stop? Massachusetts has one set $1M that’s doing pretty well
Because most of the 1% wealth isnt in the form of wages (hence why people say working class vs wealthy sometimes).
Sure you could increase the income brackets, but I think (would need to double check) that wealth tax would make a larger impact.
Sure, but we know income taxes work, we have a mechanism for collecting them, and we already have a ladder of brackets that are completely logical to extend.
While I’m also for some sort of wealth tax, I think that will be much harder to even define, much less implement. There are a lot of loopholes that need to be plugged, an entire industry for the purpose of finding those loopholes, and no objective way to even quantize unrealized gains
The Netherlands has had one forever, and it is not in economic collapse AFAIK.
Yes, absolutely. Coming out of the great depression we clawed back so much, but that's been slowly dismantled and we're back in the roaring 20s now
Things are more complicated now, but there's certainly ways to do this if we have politicians who will fight to carry out our will
I mean... Fuck economic theory, the entire field is a mess of myths and narratives. There's good work to be sure, but governments and organizations just find models that support what they want to do, no matter how much it conflicts with observations
There's historical examples in this country, there's modern examples like the Scandinavian model... Wealth was redistributed, there's
I have no idea what you're asking for. What even is a wealth tax "working" to you?
I mean I could pull up some economists who go over numbers and adamantly advocate for wealth redistribution, but I feel like nothing I give you is going to actually change your mind
Tax companies revenue first. It would be at a lower rate then profit but also doesn't allow them to hide the profit.
I never said anything about income tax... But again, these are real things that we used to have and they have elsewhere:
Tax brackets to to 90%+ on business profits - incentivize companies to reinvest in r&d while disincentiving investment
Tax inheritance and crack down on forever trusts
Progressively tax money moving in and out of the country, and close up tax loopholes (killing the tax filing industry would be a necessary prerequisite)
You could even revamp capital gains and certain types of loan to somehow figure into a progressive income tax
And most importantly - this has been done before. It has been done, you can pick apart suggested methods and come up with excuses for why it's impossible... But it's so clearly not. Everything else is an engineering problem
If you want to hear economists talk about it, Garys economics on YouTube popped into my feed a few days ago. He's far from the only one, even Warren Buffett has gone through a plan where he says the full tax burden could be put on businesses
And if you want to know why I don't respect economics... It's not because I'm not read up on it, it's because: how can you read up on it and still think taxing the wealthy is impossible? This has been written about by economists for decades, but it doesn't matter because there's more convenient economic theories to push far and wide
And there we go... I must not know anything about economics because you've been fed convenient models that justify the decision to cut taxes, and I'm not quoting them back to you
And FYI, I even added a side note about this - want to know some tax avoidance strategies that I like? R&D. Higher wages and benefits to compete over talent. Fancy offices and better equipment. Swag and giveaways to capture customer loyalty
This is why fuck "fuck economics". I tell you it worked, we had a less inequal society, and you come back with "well, cutting this raised tax revenues".
Of course it did - it let the wealthy open up a spigot from companies to their portfolios, and the government gets a portion.
It incentivized slashing corporate spending, but corporate spending is good - it's money flowing back into the economy. Even if they keep it in a slush fund, at least that fund will offset loans needed to expand or weather a storm - loans that also funnel money upwards and essentially force companies to pay a tax to the rich to continue to exist
But please, keep dismissing everything I say as "they just don't understand economics". No, I understand it well enough to know that what I was being taught didn't add up
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
I don't know that I agree with the conclusions of the video. But TLDR just did a video outlining some history in UK and concluded ones off wealth taxes have worked and listed two examples
Do a fucking Google. It's a news channel on YouTube. If you're concerned about credibility, they just interviewed Keir Starmer and have been around for a few years.
4th on the list. Yes, you could have found it. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=youtube+wealth+tax+tldr&t=ofa&ia=web
We need a tax on unrealized gains over a certain amount (as to not screw the 99%).
The 99% don't have any unrealized gains to begin with. Even people near the top end of that scale who do have investments have all or most of them in retirement accounts where the gains eventually get taxed as income (traditional) or not at all (Roth) instead.
Nearly every homeowner has unrealized gains in their house value.
Edit: Also, all these unrealized gains of the very rich would also be taxed when transacted, like the retirement funds, but there are loopholes. They can leverage that wealth without "realizing" the value.
Unrealized gains means that the investment vehicle has increased in value since it was purchased, but hasn't been sold at that value. Every type of investment is going to have either unrealized gains or losses until it's sold.
Wealth tax over $10M or even 100M would still do massive good. If we can hit billionaires and reinvest that in the working class, the economy is going to go crazy
My dream policy would be a wealth tax that includes company ownership that could be paid with company shares. Any shares paid this way would go to an escrow that is controlled by the employees of the company, eventually trending companies towards becoming worker coops.