I don’t think wealth tax is necessarily appropriate. I think capital gains is where tax is needed most. That’s where all the loopholes are.
However income tax is the biggest load of bullshit. You’re already giving up your time to generate an income, in service of a business which itself is in service of society, so why should you have to give up even more? Income up to some relatively high amount should be tax free. We should be taxing people for using money to make more money without actually doing things themselves.
Income tax, as far as I know, came as a replacement for basic “per-person federal tax”. It has the nice effect of not extracting money from anyone not making money, and also makes it harder to circumvent basic lump end-of-year taxation.
Taxing capital gains better wouldn’t tax people not making money, either, however it has the advantage of not taxing people who are already giving up the most valuable thing in service: time.
I don’t think wealth tax is necessarily appropriate. I think capital gains is where tax is needed most.
These two are not that different. But capital gains tax is only paid when the gain is realised (minus any loopholes), a wealth tax is based on the current value of the capital.
Yeah but the issue is you’re constantly paying tax on something. If you have money in the bank, then that’s going to devalue anyway through inflation, yet it will devalue even more with this. There would need to be a very high threshold for the tax to start to prevent it from being unfair. There’s also the issue that the value of wealth can be somewhat subjective - how much would you tax someone for owning an expensive piece of art, how would you measure the value in between sales?
Wealth tax is arguably better than income tax, as encouraging spending is generally a good thing (you won’t get taxed on wealth if you don’t hang onto it) but the main focus of tax should be on capital gains when the value is actually realised. I think it would be far better to close all the loopholes and simplify the capital gains tax system than to introduce a new wealth tax. That, and addressing money being moved overseas, which is where a lot of wealth will end up hidden if wealth tax becomes the target.
I don’t think wealth tax is necessarily appropriate. I think capital gains is where tax is needed most. That’s where all the loopholes are.
However income tax is the biggest load of bullshit. You’re already giving up your time to generate an income, in service of a business which itself is in service of society, so why should you have to give up even more? Income up to some relatively high amount should be tax free. We should be taxing people for using money to make more money without actually doing things themselves.
Income tax, as far as I know, came as a replacement for basic “per-person federal tax”. It has the nice effect of not extracting money from anyone not making money, and also makes it harder to circumvent basic lump end-of-year taxation.
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Taxing capital gains better wouldn’t tax people not making money, either, however it has the advantage of not taxing people who are already giving up the most valuable thing in service: time.
These two are not that different. But capital gains tax is only paid when the gain is realised (minus any loopholes), a wealth tax is based on the current value of the capital.
Yeah but the issue is you’re constantly paying tax on something. If you have money in the bank, then that’s going to devalue anyway through inflation, yet it will devalue even more with this. There would need to be a very high threshold for the tax to start to prevent it from being unfair. There’s also the issue that the value of wealth can be somewhat subjective - how much would you tax someone for owning an expensive piece of art, how would you measure the value in between sales?
Wealth tax is arguably better than income tax, as encouraging spending is generally a good thing (you won’t get taxed on wealth if you don’t hang onto it) but the main focus of tax should be on capital gains when the value is actually realised. I think it would be far better to close all the loopholes and simplify the capital gains tax system than to introduce a new wealth tax. That, and addressing money being moved overseas, which is where a lot of wealth will end up hidden if wealth tax becomes the target.