My point was to bring a real world example of a wealth tax into discussion truly lacking in them.
Gates would not be $100 billion dollars poorer, he would still be $45 billion dollars richer. If I told Column E Bill Gates in 1984 that, at the end of his career in 2022, he would be worth $45 billion dollars… do you think he would have done anything differently than the real world Bill Gates which is worth $144 billion?
No, of course not. The very idea that a wealth tax stifles innovation and the work ethic is preposterous, and only palatable if you do not run the numbers.
Considering that he never owned more than 45% of Microsoft since 1986, and by 2014 wasn’t even it’s largest shareholder anymore, I’m not sure it matters.
Microsoft is a publicly traded corporation. Gates has not had actual control since the IPO, when he held 45% of the stock. His ownership of Microsoft shares has not exceeded single percentage points since the 1990s.
At this point, maybe we should consider a flat tax on all income: pay, capital gains (both long term and short term), passive income, etc. Start at 0% for everyone making $50,000** or less that rises linearly*** to 40% at $250,000 and any credits and deductions phase out as your income increases so at $250,000 you pay the full share of income tax.
** The limits are a place holder. Real numbers may be different. OK being honest, I chose them so the math would be easy.
*** For these numbers, your tax rate for over $50,000 in salary would be (as a percent) 0.0002 x (pay - 50000) so if you made $100,000 you would pay 10% or $10,000 in taxes.
We could consider it, but what is really wrong with this country is that those who have the money can pretty much control those who make the law…and sometimes are those that make the law. It would be like deciding to ask the cat to bell itself.
Another problem with the innovation argument: it reeks of “Great Man” history. The vast majority of innovations are not anything special to one person. The building blocks were laid out before, and someone just happened to use them. Heck, a lot of times, the first person who did so wasn’t even the person who got rich, due to random luck.
There’s no reason to assume that innovation wouldn’t happen if there was some sort of limit on how much money you’d make. It would just be better spread out. And maybe not held by people so greedy they need to keep pushing a number up far beyond any practical value for them.
Innovation tends to be a second mouse thing, rather than an early bird.
Someone else goes bankrupt showing that something is possible, then you come along, skip all the failed attempts and dead ends that they had to explore, and make something better without having nearly the sunk cost.
I don’t know that there needs to be a hard limit. But a progressive taxation system that strongly limits how easy it is to accumulate massive amounts of wealth would be very prudent.
If someone tells me that if I work hard at this, I could make a hundred million dollars, I’m going to work just as hard at it as if they told me I could make a billion or ten.
At a certain point, those numbers are no longer really about the resources one can bring to bear to innovate, but are rather just numbers in a game, numbers that get manipulated for the sole purpose of increasing those numbers, meanwhile, other people are trying to pay rent and buy food with those same numbers.
They’re not “special taxes”, they are taxes based on how much money you make. These people are fabulously rich, and they pay crap in taxes. There’s something very wrong with the system, and that’s because the rich people own the government. “By the people for the people” has become, “by the rich for the rich”. The elite in this country owns congress the way Capone’s mob used to own Chicago politicians and police.
That would be an income tax. We already have that. The proposal is a wealth tax, to be applied only to the wealthiest people. That is bad, and will lead to bad outcomes.
Why? Are you saying that being taxed will discourage people from wanting to be wealthy? Poppycock. I say that the distribution of wealth in this nation is way out of line.
CBO Chart, U.S. Holdings of Family Wealth 1989 to 2013. The top 10% of families held 76% of the wealth in 2013, while the bottom 50% of families held 1%. Inequality increased from 1989 to 2013.[1]
Wealth inequality in the United States , also known as the wealth gap ,[2] is the unequal distribution of assets among residents of the United States. Wealth commonly includes the values of any homes, automobiles, personal valuables, businesses, savings, and investments, as well as any associated debts.[3] As of Q3 2019, the top 10% of households in the United States held 70% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50% held 2%
I’m saying that creating special rules just to stick it to the rich whom we hate because they are rich will only increase the class warfare, hate, and injustice in this country. Any time we create “rules for those people” we are making the situation worse, whoever “those people” are. And that wealth tax will be a creeping thing to lower and lower definitions of ‘wealthy’ just as the income tax was.
We already have a taxation scheme: income tax. It just happens to have a bug that the wealthy are exploiting: namely some kinds of income aren’t taxed. Ok, fine. Tax those kinds of income. This is a single solution that applies to everybody. No need for a whole new kind of tax.
Dude, just wait till you see the rules we have in place here in America just because you are poor!
In addition, we’re talking about 89,000 people who have a net worth of $50 million or above here in the United States of America. 3 days ago Greg Abbott targeted 124000 trans people here in Texas. Why worry about special rules re: 89,000 who are worth $50 million and above, when we enact ‘special rules’ on all sorts of people, including those with ‘differing’ sexual orientations?
It’s a baseless argument. America enacts laws to punish groups of people all the time.
Especially conservatives. Forming out-groups to punish is the sine qua non of American conservativism. It’s what y’all do.
This is a distinction without a difference. It’s a change in the law specifically to create
We’ve had a certain set of rules for decades, and now we change the rules because
are too rich. It doesn’t really matter if the new rules are taxing wealth or taxing types of income we’ve never taxed before. Both rules segregate out certain people for a change in rules.
No. We change the rules because the rules are not being applied evenly. You don’t fix a broken rule with another broken rule. You fix the broken rule. Otherwise you just have more brokenness.
Then we are fine, as these are not “special rules just to the rich whom we hate because they are rich”. That would be a made up motivation.
Actually, this would be a matter of creeping up. Most middle class Americans already pay a wealth tax. They pay property taxes on what is, in many cases, their most valuable investment, their house.
the