Re:To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors
by flyinglizard on Sunday September 03, 2017 @06:32PM
(#15164354)
Once you start targeting public market holdings, it would just create an even stronger incentive for companies to remain private. Soon enough you'd have secondary markets for high rollers dealing in shares of private entities, which would be completely inaccessible to the average Joe - and congratulations, you've increased inequality. In fact, this is already the situation in technology investments to a large extent. Companies remain private for longer to avoid post IPO regulations and restrictions, and the only guys who can invest are the insiders who get the opportunity through their network. The companies are only pumped to the public when the ascent in value has pretty much diminished (SNAP, anyone?).
Re:To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors
by pjmorris on Sunday September 03, 2017 @01:46PM
(#15162729)
> you can hit probably 98% of wealth by just taxing the calculated value of owned land and buildings (which is already being appraised for property taxes in most states)
Henry George proposed this in the 1800's [0]
Re:To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors
by dredmorbius on Sunday September 03, 2017 @06:28PM
(#15164333)
And David Ricardo prior to him (George credits Ricardo lavishly, though I seldom see this mentioned).
Re:To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors
by conanbatt on Monday September 04, 2017 @12:27AM
(#15165722)
And Milton Friedman after both of those
Re:To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors
by sokoloff on Sunday September 03, 2017 @08:55PM
(#15164884)
> You would also want to wealth tax companies for total global cash-on-hand assets they have as well. Those are also required to be public record already.
I'm not familiar with this being a requirement for foreign, private companies. (Reading between the lines, I'd expect a marked increase in investments in foreign, private companies under such a taxation scheme.)
So we already invade your privacy to appraise the former, and the later has to be be public because companies need to know who owns what shares and the trading platforms need to associate users to shares they own. Both can be used by government to provide ownership details.
You would also want to wealth tax companies for total global cash-on-hand assets they have as well. Those are also required to be public record already. That way private business executives cannot tax haven their own stuff under an LLC, and companies like Google / FB are punished for hoarding hundreds of billions in offshore accounts they have no intent to spend or bring back into the states.
Of course, this is all saying "government should do X" which is just for entertainment, pretty much. The US is in no condition to act in the will of the people at all right now anyway, so its all speculation - you would have to fix the broken democracy first.