By investing in infrastructure, paying off the national debt, providing health care to citizens to allow them to be productive tax payers etc. The point is that including the opportunity cost of investment on one side of the equation and entirely ignoring it on the other side, is highly misleading.
Too clever by half; it wafted right past me like a stealthy skunk.
Stranger
The shares Gates sells to pay his taxes don’t vanish into the ether. They continue to exist and generate income for their new owners.
I was wrong; he doesn’t even need his disciples to make absurd claims about how he is doing all of this for humanity at great personal sacrifice:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/14/tech/musk-twitter-offer-explanation/index.html
“This is not a way to make money,” Musk told TED chief Chris Anderson. “My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”
Seriously?
Stranger
“It’s not about making money” will certainly endear him to Twitter’s stockholders. Maybe his first act will be to remove all advertising and user tracking, in order to restore the public’s trust in this open and inclusive platform.
Elon sounds like he’s just read Foundation and thinks he’s Hari Seldon selflessly plotting out the future of humanity for thousands of years for its own good.
More likely Atlas Shrugged.
Nah, Elon has neither the patience nor attention span to read the 1000+ page magnum bunco of Ayn Rand. He read some fourteen year old’s book review of it on reddit and based his “philosophy” of life on that.
Stranger
Remember Musk started PayPal with along with super-duper-duper libertarian Peter Thiel.
Those two were all about Ayn Rand. Musk just hides it better these days.
I’m not sure that looking at property taxes in that way is quite correct. For one thing, property taxes are almost exclusively state and local taxes, not Federal ones. And anyone who owns land pays property tax based on that land’s valuation. So I’m sure that any wealthy person whose holdings are largely in real estate is paying a lot of property tax already.
I think the point was that our country has wealth taxes, but they target the kind of wealth that middle class people have. Not the kind of wealth that truly rich people have.
Not necessarily. Many states and local governments provide tax credits and deferments in order to get a business to locate there.
So, sure, they may be paying property tax on their $20 million mansion, but they are paying a much lower rate on their $2 billion factory, where their true wealth is invested and made.
Also, real estate investment groups, a large driver of the current increase in housing prices, often gets breaks on its property taxes.
So, the wealthier you are, generally, the less you pay proportionally in property taxes as well.
I’m not arguing that it doesn’t tax assets, but rather that it’s not really germane to most arguments for wealth taxes, because it’s fundamentally from different entities.
I mean, if a city has a property tax, what in the world does that have to do with Federal income taxes and proposed wealth taxes? They’re wholly different things, and you can’t really combine/compare them like that.
When discussing how one level of government might generate public funding from taxing wealth, it is very germane how another level already does so. Looking at how well (or poorly) taxing one type of wealth gives us an idea how taxing another type of wealth might go. Looking at the distribution of wealth gives us an idea about which level of government might tax it most effectively. Ultimately, our society as a whole has to figure out how to pay for our society as a whole, so issues of fairness and the distribution of costs and benefits needs to be addressed across all levels.
Personally, I’m in favor of a federal property tax as well.
Meh… not going to wade into these waters. It’s just not cut & dry like calculating gains from shares over time. One could easily make the argument a certain $10M is given was a foreign country with no direct economic benefit to the US at all.
I’ve read that golf courses get significant breaks on their property taxes, like getting valued based on their current use rather than on the fair market value of the land.
No, but it’s also not cut and dry like just being $10 million stashed in a mattress somewhere. The point is that it is complicated, and over time, the value of that $10 million will go up, even in govt hands.
Much of what the government does is infrastructure, building roads and the like, which allows other people to create more wealth.
That would be a pretty weak argument, as foreign aid makes up less than 1% of the budget. And one could very easily make the argument that indirect economic benefit is still an economic benefit. If spending a couple million in mitigating famine prevents spending billions in fighting wars started by starving people, then that is quite the benefit. (Other than to military industrial contractors, who benefit more from war than peace.)
My understanding is that this is true.
And here’s a cite to back it up.
What I was trying to convey is that this sort of economic benefit from $10M given to the gov’t is difficult to calculate, and by picking economic multipliers > 1 to spend it on, yes it will have a an increased worth. But the gov’t also spends plenty of money on economic multipliers of less than 1, which one could pick if they wanted to show how in Gate’s hands it’s worth more. I’m just not interested in having that kind of wishy washy debate.