Probably.
I don’t understand the question. The difference between wealth and income is not one of degree, so there is noine beyond which income becomes wealth.
Yes? And likewise, if you spend $100, your wealth has decreased by $100, whether you spent it on rent, on interest on your mortgage (obviously the portion of the payment that goes to principle is still yours), on food for your children, or at the slot machine.
Originally in preindustrial times land was taxed on the presumption that it was productive agricultural land, because the means to track income didn’t exist, and also on the theory that if you couldn’t or wouldn’t put the land to use and couldn’t pay the tax, it would be sold off to someone who could.
As for housing, there in fact have been measures to provide tax relief for people who have a house but little income; an elderly widow living in the house her husband worked for thirty years to pay off for example.
Maybe I’m mis-understanding. I thought you were taking exception to describing receiving an income as a wealth increase?
You need to accept that income and wealth are related but different things. If you earn $500K in income but spend it all on costs of living (expensive mortgage, tuition at a private school), then you have no wealth, you are not wealthy.
This matters because it informs the policy prescription. For high earners, a progressive income tax is a way to express the concept that spending all your money doesn’t get you off the hook for taxes.
And then, famously, there are other very wealthy people who are sitting on vast hoards of wealth, but can structure their finances such that they show little if any taxable income in some years. A wealth tax is a way to express the idea that even if you have no income because you’re already setting on a vast hoard of wealth, you still need to pay some tax. Moreover, your vast hoard shouldn’t be allowed to endlessly grow on paper without some kind of taxation event.
It’s not just a semantic distinction, wealth and income are real and different phenomena that have different implications for tax policy.
Edited: If this is your question, it’s accurate to say that income increases your wealth if you didn’t spend it. But taxing that situation is the province of an income tax, not a wealth tax. The wealth tax is the proposal for taxing what’s not income, what you already have (perhaps stocks that appreciated). It’s important for many reasons but the main one is that appreciating assets can increase one’s wealth quite a bit in ways that aren’t currently taxable via the income tax or other taxes.
I’m really not a fan of slogans that plainly mean one thing but here’s a dissertation about why they actually mean something totally different that makes sense if you squint.
This implies that there is any amount of wealth that is “excessive” enough to justify confiscatory taxation. I don’t think those are the criteria we should be operating by.
A person with more economic means can wield them to contribute more to society, and their wealth ends up reflecting that. That’s how you use wealth to build wealth. That’s the system working as intended, to an extent, until you get into anticompetitive practices.
…why?
…why?
Why not? When you account for the fact that some people have more economic means that they can wield to contribute to society, it is easy to see how they can end up contributing many times more.
And also, again, most of these are valuations of companies that are real, producing real things, employing real people. That contributed to society.
What are these grandiose declarations based on?
Elon Musk is not only not too big to fail, he does fail, all the time. The Twitter acquisition has been a monumental disaster for Musk.
There are definitely powers that Elon has that I have problems with, like his control over Twitter’s algorithm feed and his use of it to meddle in politics or his ability to shut off Starlink internet for Ukraine. I think that those are problems that can be addressed either through enforcing existing laws or through legislation. I don’t think that they can or should be addressed by banning billionaires.
You’ve declared so, but not made a case that’s convincing to anyone who isn’t already on board with class warfare. If I don’t already agree that billionaires are a problem, why should I consider them to be a symptom that our economic system needs some serious recalibration?
And Georgists would say we should never have stopped taxing this way!
On the other hand, wealth in a sense is purely hypothetical if it doesn’t actually do anything for you. That’s why people pay taxes on stock dividends and also a capital gains tax if they ever sell those stocks, but not just on pure ownership of the stock. It’s reminiscent of discussions we’ve had on buying and owning gold: while you own it, it’s just pieces of shiny metal that aren’t in themselves useful for anything.
There was in fact a kerfuffle when at one point the Supreme Court (in one of its more wtf decisions) ruled that taxing dividends on stock was an unconstitutional “direct tax”, which led to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment.
No, I took exception to you saying that someone’s income being five times higher means that their wealth increases five times faster. It could mean that, or it could be that both parties are increasing their wealth at the same rate, or it could be that the party that’s got five times the income is losing money every month while the party that makes five times less lives at their parents’ house rent free and increases their wealth by their entire income each month, having no expenses at all.
To be clear, spending your money on those things doesn’t prevent you from paying taxes, because taxes are based on INCOME, not “the rate at which wealth increases”.
I’m not going to respond to a tendentious response that sees “Elon Musk’s businesses are too big to fail” and interprets it as “he has made some bad business decisions.”
And I’d dispute in the strongest possible terms that the Twitter acquisition has been any kind of disaster for Musk. While it’s true that in his bid to control it, he ended up paying maybe 5x what it was worth on the open market, but he now controls one of the central pillars of the public square and uses it to bend public discourse to his own needs. That kind of thing is all but impossible to put a direct dollar figure on, but he’s secured himself a quite valuable form of power indeed.
Here’s a very simple question: Why are the gross abuses you mentioned happening with impunity? Why aren’t the existing laws being enforced? Because Musk’s power has allowed him to skirt accountability. He literally had a million-dollar vote raffle in 2024 in Pennsylvania to sway the election in his favor. The election came out his way, so he faced no penalties for doing it, nor the prospect of any legislation that would prevent him from doing so in the future. He’s trying it now in Texas.
THAT is why nobody should be allowed to have that kind of power. It allows them to pull up the ladder behind them and entrench it even further. At that level of wealth, it’s no longer about having more, it’s about the unelected and unaccountable influence over society that it gives you.
If wealthy people are screaming about having their wealth taxed, then it would seem that it’s not as hypothetical as it may seem.
I don’t understand why we get into all of this hair-splitting about potential vs. real value. We already have property taxes and other value-added taxes. You don’t actually have that money in your pocket, yet we straightforwardly managed to assess a value and tax people on it. We could do the same with someone who has, say, half a billion dollars worth of Tesla stock (and the value there is not hypothetical by the way, it affords someone partial control of a major corporation, which very much is a valuable thing).
…you said that Elon Musk’s businesses are too big to fail; I pointed out one of his businesses that has indeed been failing; your response is that I am “tendentious”. Alright.
Losing a massive chunk of the userbase is an interesting way to demonstrate success in this arena. And I’ll note that Elon Musk’s control of Twitter’s algorithm is one of the specific examples I used of places where government intervention is appropriate, so it’s a bit tendentious to imply that I don’t think it’s a problem to be addressed. I just don’t think that making it so that nobody can afford to buy Twitter is the way to prevent nefarious control of algorithms; whatever person or body ends up controlling social media after we eat all the billionaires or whatever is going to be just as capable of nefariously influencing the public through social media manipulation. Instead, let’s ban algorithms driving feeds, or at least make it opt in.
Yep. You are failing to engage with what would happen if SpaceX or Tesla entirely failed in order to focus on a lesser edge case. That is the textbook definition of “tendentious”, one hundred percent.
You agree this situation isn’t right. Yet it has existed for over 3 years without any government intervention to address it. And there is no apparent government intervention afoot to address it. No legislative or regulatory remedy appears to be in place, or appears likely to emerge.
You’ve illustrated the problem beautifully here, yet you fail to see it. He has enough power over the government and economy that everyone’s afraid to touch him. He’s spending money right and left to bias the election in his favor to ensure that he won’t be touchable. In 2024 he came out on top. It looks like 2026 may be a temporary setback, but it’s not at all clear that any of this will be enough to bring him in check.
This situation shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Nobody should be able to do that.
Twitter/X’s userbase is bigger than it’s ever been. Conservative Musk-supporting users came onboard, and the liberal users that left have either been replaced by the conservatives, or they begrudgingly came back after the likes of Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky failed produce a single dominant successor. Yeah Musk paid more for it than he wanted, and yes it saw a big shift in the user base and a lot of technical problems, but that’s all just an historical blip at this point.
I’m not failing to engage with that, it would just be a poor example of Elon Musk having failed without the sky falling since he hasn’t failed with either of those companies. You seem certain that the entire economy would collapse if they did, and that it’s so self evidently true that you are upset that I am questioning it, but I don’t really understand why. If Tesla or SpaceX failed, a lot of people would lose their jobs, and a lot of other stocks would be impacted, but it wouldn’t collapse the American economy or anything like that.
Gee, I wonder if it’s because Twitter’s owner is best buds with the notoriously corrupt President Trump? Yeah, Trump is bad, I agree; that doesn’t mean I want to abolish capitalism.
I don’t agree at all that “no legislative or regulatory remedy appears likely to emerge”. We’ve seen a number of legislative and regulatory challenges to Twitter in Europe and Australia, I suspect we will continue to see more, and I fully expect that when Democrats take over again, they will follow suite.
There are multiple state governments that are going after Musk, so no, not everyone is afraid to touch him. Currently he has allies in office in the federal government, which is why they aren’t going after him; it’s not fear. And he did not buy the election in 2024. You are giving him far too much credit. Trump won in 2024 mostly because of the economy and because the mid race switch from Biden to Kamala was a giant mess.
I agree that nobody should be able to politically influence social media users through feeds determined by manipulative algorithms. Not Elon Musk, not Mark Zuckerberg, and CERTAINLY not some politician’s cousin who bought chunks of Twitter on auction after the government ripped it to shreds like in post-Communist Russia or some Ministry of Truth established to run propaganda in lieu of Elon.
The problem with the Twitter algorithm manipulating people IS THAT THE TWITTER ALGORITHM MANIPULATES PEOPLE. It is not with the number of significant figures in Elon Musk’s net worth.
You are simply factually incorrect about that. Twitter has about 388 million daily users, down from a peak of 586 million daily users.
My own view, while highly confiscatory, is not an objection to the existence of billionaires per se. Political influence can theoretically be limited by tightening the rules, again theoretically to the point of even amending the Constitution. Like for instance sharply limited publicly funded political campaigns with all personal contributions banned. Theoretically.
My little bugbear is to the existence of inherited billions. As fascinating as I find them historically, I philosophically despise dynasties in the modern world. If you want to be Warren Buffet go for it, though I’m not inherently adverse to some sort of expanded taxation/loophole closing with the uber-wealthy. But I am for confiscatory death taxes and severely curtailing extreme generational wealth. Want to leave millions, maybe even a couple tens of millions to your heirs? Fine. Want to leave hundreds of millions? Not fine.
But in actual fact none of this is going to happen. Extreme wealth and wealth inequality will not be substantially curtailed in this country, nor will the outsized and corrosive affects of wealth on the political sphere. I think that is realism, not cynicism.
So you do understand the problem, you just choose not to engage with it. Noted.
So you do see very clearly that the only countries that appear interested in challenging Musk are the countries where he doesn’t have any power over the government. Noted.
So you understand that you need to rely on a false-choice argument rather than engaging with the implications of a wealth tax are the only way that your position stays afloat. Noted.
You have very clearly laid out the case above that Musk can’t be touched in the US because he has too many friends in the government, which directly proceeds from his wealth and power. So what you’ve posted in the above para shows an unwillingness or inability to follow your own arguments to their own logical conclusion: nobody can fix Musk’s hold over a propaganda outlet because the man is too damned wealthy and powerful.
It’s simply beyond parody that you can invoke the spectre of Orwellian propaganda or central dictatorship in the same post where you’re defending Musk’s unalloyed and unchallenged ability to be in the position to make that happen.
I assure you that asking Musk to cough up a few billion dollars in wealth taxes isn’t going to result in a Ministry of Truth. If Twitter is the money-losing pig that you seem to think it is, then it’s not worth much to Musk, and he’ll put it up for a public offering. He could do this right now if he really felt it was a losing deal. But Musk will never willingly part with Twitter, because he knows that control of a major propaganda effort is worth more to him than he could ever realize on the open market. Twitter gives him enormously outsized influence and power. He knows it, I know it, you know it too.
What power do you think that Musk has over the US government that he doesn’t have over the government of any other country he does business in?
You haven’t addressed any of the implications of a wealth tax, you’ve just insisted that Elon Musk delenda est. I would love to discuss the disastrous implications of a wealth tax, but that doesn’t seem to interest you.
If we tell Elon Musk he isn’t allowed to be a multi billionaire anymore, and assuming you acknowledge that he doesn’t have his billions as gold coins in a vault that we can just toss out the window to orphaned children, what happens to Twitter when we force Musk to sell it? Who owns it? Who controls the algorithm? How do we ensure they don’t use it the same way that Elon did?
Musk can be touched, but the people in charge right now aren’t choosing to do so because he backed the Republicans who won. When the Democrats are in power again, he absolutely can be touched. And I expect he will be.
Except that I’m not? I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t think he should be allowed to do what he’s done with the algorithm.
No, but declaring that you can’t have billionaires anymore would mean seizing Twitter from him, wouldn’t it? After all, it’s worth more than a billion, so he can’t be allowed to keep it. Who gets it afterwards?