Or go a step further do what nobody has the balls to do: tax wealth
That's what all these schemes are really trying to do, albeit in roundabout and inefficient ways. Taxing wealth has it's own complexities (unrealized gains and non-cash assets are the big ones) but it'd be saner than a negative tax (i.e. entitlement) calculated off GDP.
From the perspective of the tax code as an incentive system, taxing wealth is a strange thing—it makes people feel less interest in becoming wealthy, and thereby causes fewer GDP-building things to happen! (This is also, for a similar reason, why economists don't like corporate taxes or trade tariffs: they disincentivize exactly the things that help the economy the most.)
Economists are usually more in favor of a land-value tax, because it punishes people for something that doesn't build GDP (investing their wealth into property and then sitting on it as it appreciates), and encourages them to instead do things that do build GDP (like investing their wealth into companies.) A land-value tax is still essentially a luxury tax, but it doesn't have the same problem of unilaterally discouraging GDP creation that taxing wealth does.
It's the same with work. If hard work is less likely to pay off, or if you'll have to work harder, or both, you'll be less likely to work harder. Some people will work harder anyways, and many will be discouraged.
Marginal effects matter. This is why dynamic analysis is important.
What does your world look like where you'd be too taxed to bother wanting to be financially independent?
That phrase means different things to different people. In some parts of the world, $50k could consider you to be financially independent. $500k in others, and in some parts, you'd need $5m - $50m.
What if I told you it cost $5/day to rent a luxury hotel room with cleaning, full board, and high speed broadband provided as standard?
What if I told you it cost $1500/month for a small studio apartment with no furnishings or anything else?
Both are true, both are real, both require different amounts of money in order to achieve financial independence.
I realise now that I haven't actually answered your question:
> What does your world look like where you'd be too taxed to bother wanting to be financially independent?
Rewriting that to be "What does your world look like where you'd be too taxed to bother generating more wealth?"
There comes a point of diminishing returns. If you work a 40 hour week already and make a decent living at 40-50%, and now get told that anything above that will get taxed at 75%, unless you're going to somehow generate more than double, you're going to spend that time doing more productive things (like spending it with your family).
Arguably, that's a net-positive for society as a whole, but may be a net-negative for the economy/GDP of the country you reside in.
Hold up -
1. Why is this about working more hours, instead of working harder / more effectively? There are 168 hours in a week; even if you don't sleep, you cannot maximize your income beyond about 4x just by working more. I am currently making about 15x the lowest hourly rate I ever worked for, and I'm still fairly early in my career and feel like there's a lot of room for my salary to increase as I become more skilled.
2. I'm reading the discussion was about a tax on wealth, not a tax on income (dwealth/dt). If you're making a decent living and want to make more money so you can spend it on things that are not investments (consumer goods like video games, services like vacation travel/hotels, charity, raising more children, sending them to college), a tax on wealth will not affect you, because your wealth stays right where it is. And doing all that is net-positive for the economy.
'majormajor is clearly talking about wealth in the sense of static assets, not change in assets over time: I'm worried about having a single medical emergency, not having one every year. Make enough for your (static) safety net, then stop making more money.
Because they are tightly linked for most people.
I've managed to increase my income ~5x from what it was when I started but to do that I have had to put in 2 hours/day of side study.
The 99th percentile ("top 1%") of wealth by household seems to have been be $8.4M in 2007, according to https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/measuring-the-..., the most recent calculation I could find from a quick Google before heading to work - I'd love to see these calculations done with the raw data at https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm . From the summary on that page, they surveyed some 116 million households in 2007.
Suppose you tax all holdings at the top 1% of wealth by 1%/year, which is significant but not enough to wipe you out - after 50 years that leaves you with 60% of your original savings, assuming you weren't investing it.
That yields as a minimum $97T in tax revenue per year ($8.4M * 1.16M * 1%), and almost certainly significantly more because there-s a short tail of people with much more than $8.4M net worth. But if you split even this much among the 5% of households with "very low food security", that's $16,800/year. That's a lot of food.
(An actual scheme would have some sort of progressive tax, also, not a discontinuity at a certain dollar value)
Total US GDP for 2016 was ~$18T.
It seems a bit unrealistic to me to think we can get 5x GDP in tax revenue each year.
So what is the catch?
I'm still interested in doing or seeing an analysis with the full Fed dataset.
The biggest potential cost of someone in the US, with employer-tied healthcare, seems like medical. You could hit the unlucky jackpot and have a seven-figure+ medical bill over the course of a few years or life. So let's set "able to handle that for yourself and your family" as the baseline for being considered independent, since that's probably bigger risk than, say, "owning but then losing a multimillion-dollar-home to a flood" or somesuch.
But I also don't think this term is generally understood as poorly as you suggest.
--------
Responding to context complaints aside, you're still talking income tax, not wealth tax. My question was what this hypothetical negative-use wealth tax looks like, since the further-upthread post had suggested taxing wealth instead of using income as one of (several) proxies.
But also, my hours have not increased with my compensation in the manner you suggest. I know that every additional dollar loses 40% or whatever of it, I still would rather have it than not have it. 5%, probably wouldn't care, but would I still want more autonomy and responsibility at work for the sake of more feeling in control? Maybe. Maybe not. There are both financial and non-financial sides there, but if income was the sole basis for choosing our roles, we'd be in a very different-looking world.
So that's why I'm skeptical that a wealth tax would make me give up having big dreams—the personal safety net and toys are still incredibly appealing.
Meanwhile, you're getting taxed on the estate you're trying to build as you build it.
Twice.
Every year.
As someone who's currently attempting to build his own personal empire, I'm incredibly glad I don't have a wealth tax to contend with. It's hard enough as it is, without knowing that if I start to draw close, it'll get harder and harder as I go. I might not have started trying if it didn't seem possible in the first place. Then again, I might have done it anyway. Where's a quantum theorist when you need one?
Over the course of your life, the government will get more of your wealth that you (or those you designate) will. (At 5% CAGR, the government is ahead by year 54. At 3% CAGR, they're ahead at year 56. At 8%, year 52.)
Example: Say I'm worth 1M credits today and my wealth tax is 10K (1%), that means my income gets another 10K added to it. Real income is 50K, + 10K so I pay tax as if I earned 60K. 40% of that works out to 24K worth of taxes.
In a bad year I'd earn maybe 10K, add that 10K (I'm still worth that 1M), and that year would pay 40% of 20K, which works out to about 8K.
Progressive tax scales can further improve the situation in years with low income.
The markets don't have much to do with this, it's a fictive income, not what you actually made.
My only other quibble is that I haven't seen healthcare costs or insurance premiums scale to that 10x factor like housing prices do rural-vs-urban, otherwise I'd personally be perfectly happy with moving and retiring early. Get the right cancer or nasty chronic condition and you're gonna be out some serious bucks.
Always always consider the young.
Europe's fertility rates are a disaster (and post-2008 American fertility rates too were disastrous). In particular they are a disaster because so much of their economies depend on the tax base growing, which means that productivity growth has to be even higher than it would have to have been with a higher fertility rate. The causes of this surely include making the burdens unbearable on the young who might want to start families. Beating up the young because they have good health, is an unspeakable insanity.
Now to answer your question, consider say, a prospective engineering student. They could go to school and come out with $150k or more in debt. But if their post-tax income potential goes down (especially initially), thus their ability to pay off that debt goes down, thus making it more crushing than it already would be, why on Earth would they even consider bothering to go to school then?! Of course a lot of potential students would find something else to do! It's utterly obvious. Painfully obvious. So right there you'll have a decrease in the number of people pursuing certain careers -- hard work being avoided.
Even beyond the economic effect on students, there is just a basic personal calculus as well. You might choose to live with a lower income and more free time to enjoy as you wish (if with fewer luxuries than you might like) than work harder and harder for less and less reward. You only have so many prime years for enjoying the one life you have. Everything is a trade-off. You might work harder now if it means you'll be better able to enjoy some free time later, but if working harder will make little difference to your ability to enjoy free time in the future, why work harder?
And beyond that, we know what low incentives did to would-be hard workers' desire to work hard in the U.S.S.R. and such places. Spoilers: they certainly didn't work harder when they didn't have guns to their heads incentivizing them.
By the way, the same sorts who say that increasing income taxes (or otherwise putting a ceiling on incomes) wouldn't have an effect on how hard people work... also tend to argue that higher tobacco taxes will reduce tobacco use. We all know about the prodigious powers of doublethink in some quarters, but don't think for a minute that everyone accepts doublethink, let alone masters it. And sure, you yourself didn't just make that argument, but I bet you do when it comes to topics where that argument is convenient. I, on the other hand, accept that punitive/confiscatory taxes only serve to reduce the amount of activity being taxed regardless of whether it is an activity I appreciate. If you ever find yourself making that argument, please recognize it and choose consistency.
Has this effect been shown in the real world? That implies more interest in the odds than their target market demonstrates any interest in (hence the term, "for the math-impaired").
Some people will work harder, by moving to a different country, where the tax laws are saner and don't punish hard working prime movers for the very value they provide.
(I mean, I think this is obviously silly, but it seems to hold up by exactly the same argument.)
I don't think it has disincentivated anybody from becoming less wealthy and/or working less. It just incentivizes tax evasion, but even that is not significant.
On the other hand, a large number of social programs have been built around this new tax. Anybody in the country could get cancer and would get free decent healthcare.
If we're talking about how people feel about their tax system, I think we need to talk about how a huge portion of the US misunderstands "tax brackets", and seems to think that paying more taxes when they're "bumped to a higher tax bracket" is a thing, and that there's some strategy in avoiding getting paid marginally more than some threshold. (Since tax brackets apply to marginal income, this is incorrect; you're still taxed at the lower rate for your income up to the threshold.)
This is almost certainly causing people to behave in ways that are economically irrational for themselves far more than any tax on large wealth (let's say, for the purpose of argument, $100M or more) would be. Yet there is no campaign to fix people's understanding of tax brackets so that more people feel incentivized to make more money.
If we're talking about an actual rational response to the tax system, I would much rather have $102M in the bank and get taxed on half my savings over $100M than have $99M in the bank and get taxed on half my savings over $100M.
> and thereby causes fewer GDP-building things to happen!
Why does a tax on wealth cause fewer GDP-building things to happen? The rational thing to do given a tax on wealth is to spend your extra wealth on services you're interested in, donate it to charities you support, etc., all of which seems like it increases GDP more than investing it for yourself would: it produces additional revenue for organizations, which produces jobs, which grows the economy.
I'd believe this argument for a tax on income, since it disincentivizes people from making more money, which means they're not spending that money because they didn't make it, and also they're voluntarily refusing to do profitable work they otherwise would have done. (I don't think I agree with the argument, but at least I understand how it works.)
This is the best distillation of how marginal tax rates works I have ever read.
There still are taxes that don't work like this (usually in the form of benefits that cut off at a certain income range) so unfortunately we still have messed up stuff. The feeling isn't completely unfounded
Another rational thing to do is to create vehicles that store but temporarily impair the market value of that wealth as computed for wealth tax purposes. Put it into a private company and offer minority, non-controlling stakes in that private company to all comers and act surprised when only family members take you up on the offer. It's a minority stake without control rights; it's going to be worth less than the net asset value. Store the wealth there until you're ready to use it, then have the company directors make a distribution, or leave the transfer in place to your heirs, who will receive a controlling interest when their shares (that maybe they bought) are reunited with the shares that you will them upon death. Or invest in something illiquid and very hard to accurately value.
Technically, all of those things create GDP activity for lawyers and accountants as well, but it's hardly good public policy, IMO. (I'm not opposed to a reasonable wealth tax, say 0.25% annually on sums 10M-50M USD and 0.5% annually on sums above that. I don't think it's a tax without lossy consequences though.)
I know engineers that are guilty of the misunderstanding you describe. How does anyone graduate from a university in the United States without at some point having been exposed to the idea of marginal taxation?
I think this is false in practice, especially with a progressive wealth tax.
Most people don't want money, they want the things money can buy... long, healthy, and generally happier lives. People that keep striving past that point are people that seek to change the world, folks like Gates or Musk. A progressive wealth tax starting at $10M wouldn't really change the incentives at play.
Citation? I know it feels correct, but is it actually correct in practice? Is there any evidence that the rare person who generates enormous wealth was motivated substantially by wealth (and not a drive to build something substantial or change the world)?
At least in the case of Gates, I suspect he would have built Microsoft even with slightly more onerous (to the wealthy) tax policy.
Also land is hard to hide, and relatively easy to value. So it's really hard to evade the tax. If you are going to tax wealth, and want that to include assets like equity in private companies, you are going to have to value those assets.
But he starts from a different angle: he's interested in economic efficiency. So he wants a system that moves economic goods into the hands of people who value it most (and compensate the previous owner fairly at market prices).
He proposes a system where people declare the value of their various possessions with two incentives for accuracy:
- You have to sell to any comer at the declared price. Thus guarding against overvaluation. - You have to pay a small percentage of the declared annual price as an annual fee, thus guarding against undervaluation.
That concern about economically efficient allocation is mostly interesting for monopoly goods and rights, because anything else we can just produce more off.
In Georgism it's customary to name these after their most typical representative Land (sometimes with the capital L to emphasis the generalisation). It's not much of a stretch to include eg things like licences for magnetic spectrum.
I'd be wary about mixing things like insurance against theft in here. (It might be possible to give a unified system, but I am not sure it is. Look at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_sy... for some source of interesting ideas about legal systems.) My wariness comes mostly from the fact that insurance that pays the declared value encourages people to overdeclare. Better let the market sort that out. (However paying the taxes for a specific declared value for years on end is a pretty good argument to convincing any court or insurance arbiter that you really valued something at that price.)
In the system I sketched above, Hanson described some scenarios were some entrepreneurs might be on the lookout for undervalued properties, buy them, and then just try to resell them to the original owner (or someone else).
As a special case, that scheme is especially lucrative if you are looking to buy a eg a house in a specific area anyway and don't care too much about which one; then the risk of not being able to sell the property you just bought on is not a problem: you just keep it.
I'd be more wary of using such a system of wealth taxation for eg cash. If you have a working central bank with an inflation or nominal GDP target, an individual holding cash even under their mattress is essentially free for society: the central bank just prints more money to make up for the portion you are holding out of circulation. And once you bring it back into circulation, they just print less money for a while. So for society it's great if people are holding cash: they did something for the rest of society to get their hands on the cash, but didn't get anything in return (yet). Very nice of them.
(Even better would be a free banking system, where essentially the same nominal gdp stabilization happens automatically because of market forces. George Selgin has some good stuff on that, see eg https://www.alt-m.org/2017/09/14/did-free-banking-stabilize-... or https://mises.org/library/less-zero-case-falling-price-level... )
The 'you have to sell at the declared value' requirement is somewhat similar to your idea: if you don't declare eg your house, it means you implicitly declare it to be worth 0. Someone stealing something worth 0 from you, will get a slap on the wrist at most in any sane system---or they can even just force-buy it at that price from you!
The other thing to keep in mind is something called 'tax incidence'. It's the study of who actually has to bear the burden of a tax. That's often different from who has to fork over the money. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence . The other thing is deadweight losses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss).
But yeah, I like the basic idea of using a monopoly rent tax to fund a basic income. https://medium.com/basic-income/why-land-value-tax-and-unive... has a similar idea, and some worked numbers. (The author has at least one article for the UK and one for the US.)
Multiple incentives to be wealthy -- or worse, feedback loops to ensure the children of the wealthy maintain their advantage -- are just redundant.
Why? As a total layman, wouldn't it be incredibly inefficient? If we tax the wealth of, say, the top 100 richest Americans, wouldn't that cause some pretty terrible downsides? If we force them to sell their holdings, wouldn't that ripple through the economy?
Take Jeff Bezos--if you forced him to sell a significant portion of his stock, wouldn't that depress the Amazon stock price, which affects a significant number of other individuals and businesses?
If you are not aware of what happens in situations like this, I would like to take you to pre-1990s India. Some of the most brightest, brilliant, hard working and industrious people used to leave the country and never to return the moment they attained working age.
The people and money from whom you can take the wealth to fund your socialist schemes shrinks every year. To a point you will have a country full of entitled people, who think they were born with rights to free stuff. And will always be angry at people capable of working who don't spend away their life to make it happen for them.
Quote (by probably Winston Churchill )- Any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age 30 has no brain.
Please upvote.
(And I can understand the temptation of sarcasm, but it seldom feels as good to the reader as it did to the writer.)
Georgism would be great. I hope Singapore would show the world how to do it.
It's not taxing wealth so much as taxing the mechanisms that create undue inequality that would work: yes, I'm talking about taxing rental income. The number one driver preventing people from building savings is draining their income through rent.
The solution is sort of obvious, but hated by people who love the AirBnB model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14493769
Income is already taxable, including rental income. On top of that there are various taxes for owning/occupying a property. It varies with what state/country you live in.
Generally speaking, a property is a poor investment if you already have the money, they have poor returns and they don't grow in value outside of a few bubbles.
That being said, I agree that the pressure of rent is unbearable and growing for most of the population. The rebalance historically happened with wars. Properties ain't worth much when people die and buildings are bombed.
Real estate is a great investment for the risk averse (probably the best one too). Housing usually grows at the same rate as inflation if not a bit more and people will always need it. It doesnt drop 10% overnight unlike stocks. What other investments did you have in mind that you would recommend over real estate? (in the same risk spectrum)
You can tell that to the people in Houston who lost their home overnight. Home ownership is not risk free. ;)
I am not familiar with the entirety of the US territory. If you look at properties outside of the major cities, they should be relatively stable, renters have no jobs to sustain ever increasing rent. In the far country side, properties should be deflating because de industrialization.
Agreed that it is great for a diversified portfolio. Especially the primary home, it's self sustaining because you'd have to pay rent anyway. A second home is safe, it can host your child now or yourself after retirement, then it's lower returns.
There are a lot of index funds with various risk profiles. There is no general strategy. It depends on your personal situation, how much there is, where your live, and you family.
Now, that might sound stupid. If you own your home and have some savings, you can basically retire. There aren't much expenses outside of the rent.
And yet how many Houston like situations have happened overnight? Or over the years?
Real estate is easily one of the best savings vehicles you can have.
I don't know what you do for a living, but I have two graduate degrees in accounting and economics, as well a decade and a half researching and studying this very problem. The solution I outline would work... if the goal is to empower people with "equity" as Sam's article suggests he wants to.
However, what could happen is that the rental income after tax is lower and not enough anymore to cover the mortgage or the maintenance costs, then the property has to be sold.
More supply of rental property? Rents go down so that landlords aren't stuck with vacancies. More demand for rental property? Rents go up so landlords can maximize their profits.
FYI: Selling a property doesn't take it off the market. It's just owned by a new owner, who's gonna either live in or rent it just like before.
There may be an offsetting overall reduction in the value of all real property, but it seems like reducing or eliminating these deductions[0] would be harmful to renters, not helpful.
[0] - Deductions like this, by the way, are available to all sorts of other profit seeking businesses for the equipment and supplies they use in the conduct of their business and I see no reason why a house should be different from a factory machine or laptop computer or airliner nor a minor repair to a house be different from a pad of paper or other consumable with regards to whether ordinary and necessary business expenses ought to be deductible against gross revenue when computing profit.
Just to clarify, nobody in the US is doing this, but it's not unheard of elsewhere. For example, Norway has a wealth tax of about 0.85% and there are some other examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax#Current_examples .
EDIT: Can't comment ("You're posting too fast, blah blah blah"). Here are some replies to the comments bellow:
> It's encouraging people to make their money be productive instead of stashing it under a mattress.
When you have money in the bank, you're effectively lending most of it to other people. Your money is "productive", which is encouraged by the interest.
> Everything distorts markets. The question is how to distort markets into providing the best outcome.
Neutral tax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_tax) doesn't. But of course, market distortion is not the only or primary factor in policy decision-making.
Everything distorts markets. The question is how to distort markets into providing the best outcome.
from [0]: "Harvard targets an annual endowment payout rate of 5.0 to 5.5 percent of market value. The University's actual payout rate has fluctuated over the past 10 years, from a low of 4.2 percent in fiscal year 2006 to a high of 6.1 percent in fiscal year 2010."
[0] https://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance/endowme...
[1] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundation...
And we know now that the ultra-rich folks tend to take the money,windfall from lower tax, and hide it in Virgin-Island, Panama,Cayman Island and other offshore tax havens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Critici...
"Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: 'If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.'"
It feels more honest that way.
It's a relatively well known fact that eg it doesn't really matter too much whether officially the employer or the employee is required to pay the employees income tax---the money comes out of the same pot.
Similar things happen for other taxes. Eg VAT in European countries seems to be paid for by the shops, but it wouldn't make a difference (apart from convenience in collection) if you'd levied it directly on the shoppers.
Any discussions about 'trickle-down economics' is incomplete without tax-incidence.
Much better to tax consumption.
But that would run counter to the neo-liberal narrative... After all, the rule of law serves to protect investments, not the peasant forced off his land.
Where was the rule of law to protect said peasants? Perhaps the rule of law isn't actually necessary for industrialization - as long as capital is protected, everything is all well and good. Unless you're a peasant.
I agree that the rule of law didn't protect peasants who were forced off their hereditary lands. You'll note that it wasn't the peasants who led the industrial revolution.
Like several major sectors of the US economy at the time (and later), Britain's "revolution" was utterly dependent on coerced labor, viciously enforced by the power of the government. But some people still like to think of those times as the good old days of "laissez-faire" and government "staying out of the market".
Now, you can argue that this was a "rule of law", just a brutally repressive one which systematically granted special rights to certain classes of people, but then you're on much shakier ground.
As a practical matter, consumption taxes can be made progressive by combining them with a low-income tax credit or a universal basic income.
Not necessarily.
"Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), Cisco Systems (CSCO) and Oracle (ORCL) are sitting on $504 billion, or 30%, of the $1.7 trillion in cash and cash equivalents held by U.S. non-financial companies in 2015, according to an analysis released Friday by ratings agency Moody's Investors Service. That's even more cash concentration than in previous years, as these five companies held 27% of cash in 2014 and 25% in 2013. Apple alone is holding more cash and investments than eight of the 10 entire industry sectors." [1]
Also, the top 1 percent owns 90 percent of wealth in the US [2].
"First, economic inequality has worsened significantly in the United States and some other countries. The richest 1 percent in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Oxfam estimates that the richest 85 people in the world own as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity.
The situation might be tolerable if a rising tide were lifting all boats. But it’s lifting mostly the yachts. In 2010, 93 percent of the additional income created in America went to the top 1 percent."
> As a practical matter, consumption taxes can be made progressive by combining them with a low-income tax credit or a universal basic income.
I agree that a consumption tax can be combined with other policy to prevent the regressive nature of a consumption tax alone. This requires wealth be taxed in various forms (ownership of investments, land, etc).
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/05/20/thir...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/opinion/nicholas-kristof-...
Nobody has a Scrooge McDuck cash vault, not Apple, Microsoft, nor anyone else. It's all invested - even money in a checking account isn't actually there, it's loaned out to someone who spends it.
> the top 1 percent owns 90 percent of wealth in the US
No, the government owns/controls most of it.
Here's even more: http://business.time.com/2013/02/05/the-federal-governments-...
As for how banks work, pretty much any book on how the banking business works will tell you that. Or you could watch that old movie "It's a Wonderful Life" where they give an accurate description at the end how banks work. And frankly, it's just common sense. Why would banks offer free checking? They're not charities. They need the money so they can turn around and loan it out. It's fundamentally how banking works.
I've never heard of a Scrooge McDuck cash vault outside of a comic book. Have you? (There is Fort Knox, but that's the feds, and it's not cash.)
https://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/banking/ban...
But the foreign assets issue is a peculiarly US problem, resulting from the US being almost unique in the world in the extent to which it imposes taxes on income earned in other countries. (The other such country is Eritrea, and the US voted in favour of a UN security council resolution condemning the Eritrean tax regime.)
I'm unwilling to wait until the end of civilization while citizens of the richest country in the world go hungry [1], go without shelter [2], and die due to not being able to put $50 together for their insulin [3].
[1] https://www.worldhunger.org/hunger-in-america-2016-united-st...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...
[3] https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/ezwwze/the-high-price-o...
If you can build wealth around being active rather than just reaping the benefit of interest of interests then that should be encouraged rather than just grabbing and keeping.
They would still make money if they kept them it would just be less beneficial than it is now. No long term capital gains as an example.
People with little money consume everything they have already, they have no choice, no retirements no nothing.
>> You would force people to consume?
That's a complete misreading of the comment
Only in the most inefficient way possible. The 'problem' is banks are limited in what they can do with this money which ends up creating investment bubbles and other market distortions which hurt the economy overall. If you slowly transitioned banks so they could not invest this money over say 100 years the net result would not be harmful.
In the end money is not actual wealth, it's simply a representation of wealth. Anything that turns money into more money needs an intermediary where some cash flow is generated. And those intermediary's are often harmful see in excess like pay day loans.
Um, no. The type of investing you suggest includes the risk of losing the money. This doesn't work with commercial banks because they are insured by the federal government, i.e. the taxpayer. When people put money in the bank they expect it to stay safe. That's why the concept of a bank exists in the first place. If there was the risk of it evaporating due to bad investments, that would basically be more of "privatized gains, socialized losses."
I am saying if your raise that percentage to 11% cash on hand not much changes. Then next year that becomes 12% cash on hand... until banks can no longer lend money.
At no point in this process is physical wealth destroyed only shifting how loans are created.
Of the deposit account, they keep 10% in the vault/Fed, and loan out 90%. Of that 90%, they keep 10% in the vault (9%), and re-loan 90% of it (81%). Of that 81%, they keep 10% in the vault (8.1%) and re-loan 90% of it (72.9%). Sum the series, and the effect on the money supply from loans and the reserve requirement is to divide the vault cash by the reserve requirement to get the bank account totals.
Raise the requirement from 10% to 11% and the circulating money supply drops from 10 x vault cash to 9.1 x vault cash. Raise it again to 12% and that drops to 8.3 x vault cash. To keep things steady, you have to print extra money for the express purpose of putting it into reserves.
The de jure impact of the reserve requirement on the money supply isn't "not much"; it's actually huge. But that is only down to the point where it goes below the de facto requirement imposed by normal bank operations. You drop the requirement to 0%, and banks will still keep cash on hand to cover their own needs. It is certainly possible to raise it all the way to 100% (or even higher, by requiring that banks freeze some of their own cash when accepting a deposit). But that would have to be done very slowly and cautiously.
Further, the velocity of money is important which reduce the multiplier in practice.
However, if your taking this seriously yes you need a curve which is why I said 100 years, but only listed 90 years worth of changes.
A world where people don't need loans seems like a pretty good world, honestly. I've been fortunate enough that my parents were able to finance my college education out of their savings, and I rent my apartment because I don't want a big mortgage, and my life is I think better compared to people I know with student loans and mortgages. A world where everyone has the same access to resources that I had is a worthy goal, and if we can fund that by banning loans, seems fine.
(I asked another question here but decided I'm having a hard time reading or composing standard written English today so, some other time!)
I simply feel banks have conflicting goals as they need to be 'good at' customer service and making loans. This creates a lot of poor incentives and economic distortions.
The difference is people fronting money for loans would need to take on real risks without FDIC protection or have safe deposits but need to pay for bank services.
Often the capital for many bank issued credit cards does not come from depositors at all.
On the other hand, all the financing needs will be covered by other means. These “non-banks” will have to obtain capital as equity and debt, maybe even loans from other non-banks, but certainly not as deposits.
What was the problem that we where trying to fix anyway?
Risk of financial collapse. Banks are risky because they have a lot of leverage, people more directly loaning money may take a 20% hit after a housing collapse, but that's not such a big deal.
And one of the reasons for the crisis was “shadow banking”, because many home loans were not really given by banks (some were directly created by other institutions, some were first created by banks but then packaged and sold). The subprime crisis would not have happened, at least to the same extent, if loans had been kept in the balance sheets of banks.
Including the United States' largest savings and loan association, until its collapse in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_failures_in_the_U...
I suspect, but can't prove companies that need to demonstrate comptitence in lending to gain access to capital would be better at making loans than companies who gain capital by doing other things and then suddenly have access to a lot of capital and need to find a use for it.
Consider tech companies like Apple/Google/Microsoft have access to vast amounts of Capital yet does not really effectively use it for much.
We could also take the route of the Federal Reserve purchasing up equities (The Bank Of Japan does this [1]), issuing deposit accounts to citizens directly (trivial for the Federal Reserve to support this [disclaimer: I work in the financial services industry, and feel qualified to make this statement]), and providing UBI to those accounts using the Federal Reserve as an intermediary/conduit (lookout Blackrock and Vanguard! there's a new index fund manager on the block!).
Voilà, Citizen's Dividend.
EDIT: The Federal Reserve operates independently of the US government, and does not require Congressional or Presidential approval to perform this "monetary policy". [2]
"Although an instrument of the U.S. Government, the Federal Reserve System considers itself "an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms."
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-18/boj-s-etf...
Are you proposing their equity also be taxed "at rest"? How would that work?
Same way property is taxed. A taxing authority sends you a bill (based on duration of ownership), with the tax rate set by legislation. In this case, the custodian of your equity would send you your bill, with a copy sent to the IRS. I don't believe who accepts the payment needs to be defined at this time (although sending payments directly to the IRS or through your custodian are both trivial matters).
When you have trillions you just need a bigger mattress, like Ireland, for instance.
It is, because storing money under a mattress is equivalent of investing in money itself. As OP said too, it is like you lent your money to all the other investors in the economy (because you taking that money out of the economy reduces the prices of capital goods, which means they can now acquire it for cheaper). This results in wealth creation, which you benefit from when you take the money out from under the mattress.
This of course, can only work as an active investment strategy if you have a fixed or predictable money supply. For an inflationary currency such as any fiat currency, you will just get screwed.
This works great for cryptocurrencies for instance, people keep talking about how nobody has any incentive to invest in Bitcoin projects if just holding it will make it go up. Well, when bitcoin holders hold bitcoin, bitcoin economy still grows, and the purchasing power of their bitcoin goes up.
If the central bank wants banks to have more reserves for loans, it buys assets from banks in exchange for newly created reserves. Money markets are a command economy.
Of course, someone still has to decide whether to consume now or invest. Or whether to invest in economically efficient ways, or in ways that are only economically efficient because of weird tax arrangements (but are actually less productive).
Taxing wealth encourages investment because you have to turn a yearly return in excess of the wealth tax to not have your wealth shrink.
The incentives to be wealthy will never disappear. Taxing wealth just makes it harder and makes sure that those who are wealthy work for it.
IOW you should explain why “market distortions” are inherently a bad thing.
Even our current methods of evaluating quantities and distribution of wealth are vague estimates, and that's without people incentivized by taxation to hide or minimize it.
A wealth tax that turns into anything but a buildings-and-cars tax is a fantasy from an enforcement perspective, and significant property taxes have issues of their own.
>Knock Knock Its the United States
With huge boats, with guns, gunboats.
>Open your banks' records, stop having them be closed
and theres not much they can do about.
So they sign a treaty making sure their banks' records are not closed.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Inspired by this, both historically and in delivery https://youtu.be/Mh5LY4Mz15o?t=4m46s
Is it not a thing for startups to be based out of Delaware for a tax advantage? Would the ships even have to leave the harbor to do this?
Very different from tax avoidance schemes that companies use to pay lower taxes by incorporating in low tax jurisdictions or funneling the money through multiple countries.
And I was under the impression that startups use Delaware because it has a boatload of case law that favors investors.
The problem with many "wealth" taxes is that they end up missing the top 1% and hurting the people who are building a business.
Eg inheritance tax does a fantastic job of just screwing over family businesses that on paper are worth say $7mm+ because on paper the kids who inherit the business now owe taxes on maybe $2mm (I think the first $5mm is tax free w/ inheritance), but selling any of the business to pay the taxes would often destroy the business.
And I'm not talking about massive businesses like Walmart - I mean businesses like a large-ish family farm where just the land, equipment, animals, etc are all worth $7mm+ on paper, even if the farm doesn't produce massive profits.
https://americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing-bo...
Investments in real estate, equities, commodities etc all increase in notional value to factor in the devalued currency.
Edit: Thinking about it a bit more. Inflation would also tend to drive up the numerical profits of companies, which will tend to buffer a stock price for example. So I'm not sure how this inflation independently contributes much of a specific tax on the wealth.
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...
It's right there in plain English: Inflation exists as a policy to screw "workers" out of the value of their wages.
Workers is a nicer way to say lower classes. It doesn't include investors, financial sector, etc, who strongly benefit from inflation.
So yes salaries go up, but not in concert with people's costs nor with the value that is generated by people's labor.
Massive rent-seeking, enclosures, network effects, and benefiting by public infrastructure and institutions, without paying back full costs, or by imposing dislocations on other economic sectors, as well.
Aviation accounts for 6% of transportation fuel use. For a small portion of passenger and minuscule fraction of cargo movement.
Obliterate the tax shelters, obliterate the tax havens, bring the money back home under threat of criminal law.
I'm not saying you can't be a fat cat. But at a certain point (fluid and blurry, but distinctly present), it's just morbid obesity that is squishing other citizens.
Assuming (perhaps incorrectly) you are in the US, you are also reading Hacker News, so you are probably the top 1% of the worlds wealthiest. Again, just a thought experiment, but would you be fine with your government saying that as a 1 percenter in world wealth you can no longer earn anymore, you have hit that certain point, are a fat cat and can grow no more wealth, under threat of criminal law?
Media has done a good job of raising awareness of the problems of wealth disparity, and a lot of people nod along.
But no matter how wealthy someone is, they can always point to the more-rich and say those people are the problem and should be taxed, not themselves.
This is obviously untrue. There isn't an infinite number of people wealthier than Gates or the Waltons or the Rothschilds. At some point there is no one further up the economic ladder in whatever location you're talking about.
Elections matter.
The details will be difficult: how do you assess wealth with any semblance of accuracy, especially in the face of an increased incentive to hide it? I'd love to hear anybody's clever ideas to tax wealth in a way that catches cheaters. The biggest issue is what you do with wealth held overseas.
But even if the cost of catching cheaters is many billions of dollars of enforcement apparatus, it seems worth it. Of course, you create a new problem: avoiding corruption in a large enforcement apparatus chasing after people with the resources to easily bribe them. (But this problem is not unique to wealth taxes, and I don't think bribing the IRS is actually much of a problem—people just bribe Congress.)
There's another problem: wealth taxes would probably need a constitutional amendment in the U.S. From Article I, Section 2:
"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers..."
There's already an amendment to clarify that federal income taxes are OK. But wealth taxes will need their own amendment.
Conceptually, though, I totally agree: if the problem is unequal wealth, just redistribute the wealth directly to move toward a less catastrophe-prone distribution.
Heard of this before. Have there been any attempts of that before and how did it fare?
It would seem to be as soon as wealth is taxed, wealth will morph or change shape to avoid being taxed. We'd end up with some new arcane tax scheme where wealth is held in a tropical island nation and the owner of the wealth gets a stipend or I don't know, rents all their possessions from that entity.
Edit: sorry, wasn't aware of the exact definition of this. Having everyone pass this sort of thing is a great idea imo.
"Nobody?" Other countries manage it.
Hmm just checked the Wikipedia and it says that Donald Trump proposed it for the US as well.
And whence the money for the share? Taxes. So this is just a UBI.
This, like all UBI proposals, seems like a way to dress up a massive tax hike: "but you'll be getting your share of GDP!". The only way to get me to like a UBI is to have UBI replace absolutely all (and I do mean all) welfare programs so that we can just haggle at every election over one headline UBI number + necessary taxes. And the initial UBI and tax rates would have to be no more burdensome than the current total of welfare it would replace, and preferably significantly less burdensome than that. Many UBI proponents, of course, would not mind this because they'll aim to ratchet up the UBI and taxes for it in a way that becomes culturally irreversible -- and that's a reason to be against UBI.
And incidentally, all instances of "soak the rich" in American history have actually been "soak those who aren't rich but have high incomes". The truly wealthy have no income as such -- instead they have capital. And why don't we just tax capital? Well, because every time it's been tried anywhere it's been a disaster for the overall economy: capital (and wealthy people) flees.
I'm ready for the downvotes, by the way.
Anyway, talk of UBI in the US is pretty silly when you look at how many people would rather not have the government do things like help people access health care.
Trust capitalism, but not capitalists.
They've been repealed in countries like Sweden and Austria, not because they were disasters, but because exceedingly wealthy people have a lot of influence. That's the only story.
As such your claim that no such taxes exist is wrong; and your claim that they've been a disaster is also fallacious.
p.s. your "ready for downvotes" nonsense is such immature nonsense. You said an untrue thing that HN audiences wish were true, and then pretended you're being brave. You're a joke.
Near as I can tell Europe has lagged way behind the U.S. in economic growth since the 1980s. I remember back in the 90s when catching up to the U.S. was stated goal of the incipient EU. How did that go? How does that relate to overall tax rates, public spending as a proportion of GDP? Are fertility rates artificially lowered by a high tax burden? Are they improved by the welfare state? Or is something else the matter with Europe?
I think "disaster" is an appropriate adjective for wealth taxes.
Two hours before saying that, you said:
> ...every time it's been tried anywhere it's been a disaster for the overall economy: capital (and wealthy people) flees.
Another difference, aside from wording/marketing, is that the UBI is implemented as a progressive redistribution of future wealth generation as opposed to a tax on existing wealth ("as the economy grows...")
"Universal Basic Income" is already a radically capitalist idea. It's often discussed using terminology borrowed from Marxism and socialism, but it couldn't be any more capitalist of a construct. We're just not used to hearing it discussed with that language.
Everyone gets $10k. Obviously not everyone is going to pay $10k in taxes otherwise the system would be pointless and we could instead just eliminate taxes altogether. Those at the bottom would benefit, those at the top would pay more in taxes, and somewhere between is a break even point.
There's only a limited amount of stuff at any one time. Rarity and usage can make its worth different than other things. So it makes sense to track these things. Ideally, recycling allows recoup of most or all the material, which returning should provide the credits back.
It really then matters how much credits people get and thus how much resources and where. But then again, socialism and communism never talked about personal effects - but instead it talked of the machinery to create.
What the UBI enables is a migration that everyone gets the spoils of the machines of creation. The Story of Manna by Marshall Brain discusses more of how this might be possible.
That said, it addresses it structurally, but I still think the result would still be a disastrous political explosion if that ever did happen. UBI seems to be fundamentally predicated on the idea that growth and improvement are inevitable, the only possible way that things will develop going into the future, including any structural or societal changes that may develop as a result of UBI or GDP-sharing itself, and therefore there's no need to ask who starts swinging from trees the first time that UBI or GDP-sharing has to be cut back, and what disastrous decisions will be made on the basis of not wanting to be the one swinging from trees.
If the situation lasts long enough, the standard of living falls.
Money exists to move goods around. If all the money is in one place, goods cannot move.
Money is not limited. It is an information measure of, variously, debts, or bidding rights to production. What it can bid on is limited, and how currency-denominated asset valuations change as money supply and circulation do, can also change.
But the problem in the case of a national disaster isn't that money cannot be produced. It's that those who would rely on money to address immediate needs (water, food, shelter, medical care, transport) have no bidding rights (currency, credit, grants) to transact purchases. You're balancing the interests of those outside the disaster zone (assuming there is an outside) with those in it. (Though this generally is the case.)
If the disaster is big enough, and rescue or infrastructure needs sufficiently high, those may affect national accounts and economic activity for a time, but it would take an absolutely massive shock for the impairment of raw productive capacity alone to impact the economy. Far more likely that buying power is lacking amongst a segment of the population.
And for that, money is precisely the cure.
You are either not arguing in anything remotely resembling good faith or are not tall enough for this ride. You may have the reply to this unopposed; I'm done here.
The ad hominem shot is surprising, given the straightforwardness of my position. I don’t understand why you are cross. Ah well.
the one common response they all have when their plans are revealed for what they are and comparisons made to what others have done is always the same , we will do it right this time.
it is easy to prey on the greed of anyone by simply remaking it into the person having their stuff taken as being the real greedy one.
I don't understand why this is something people believe needs "solved". Did you build Microsoft?
Everyone, from the CEO to the custodian has an interest in people feeling there is some truth to "The American Dream." Which is not that you might get rich but that you can at least get ahead.
In reality, all the laborers at Microsoft built it into what it is today. And it (like most companies) are at a scale of complexity that is far beyond the fiction that workers are acting out CEO’s “visions.”
It offends my sense of "people should enjoy freedom" to see so, so many people who are very much not free because of the economic system that offers them no way out of poverty.
(And I don't believe that poor people are all choosing poverty. I've been poor, and no one wakes up to that and says "this is what I choose.")
And it offends my sense of language when people use phrases like "build Microsoft" as though it was a doghouse that someone assembled in an afternoon and sold for the cost of materials plus $50 profit. Gates no more "built" microsoft than George Washington built America, or whatever. Lots of people were involved, and even if they were compensated well, maybe they weren't compensated fairly. Profits being the unpaid wages of the working class and all...
Yes. I purchased several of their products, thereby increasing the capitalization of Microsoft.
I expect you intended the answer to be "No," implying that Bill Gates (and a few others) built Microsoft. However, that rests on a specific understanding of ownership and causality that not everyone shares.
And, really, have you never bought something in small part because you liked the seller? That's the sentiment behind the exhortation to "buy local" or to buy Girl Scout cookies or from a local school's fundraiser. I suppose you could say a purchase is a contribution to the extent that the price exceeds the cost of production.
First, it assumes that Bill Gates did in fact work hard. Please define exactly what you mean by "work" and "hard", since I'm not sure there's an obvious thing that he could have done more of, even if he were so inclined.
Second, it assumes there exists some direct relationship between Bill Gates's personal work ethic and Microsoft's outsized success. Maybe all Microsoft needed was a good idea at the right time and would have succeeded about equally well with any minimally competent execution. Maybe they would have done even better had Bill Gates founded the company and then retired at 30.
Finally, it assumes that Bill Gates work ethic had some direct relationship with his financial compensation level. It is quite possible that he would have been more than happy to still give his best possible effort in return for being, say, a mere hundred millionaire. Moreover, plenty of people do hard work for all sorts of other reasons, from duty to boredom to artistic vision. Why do we assume that Bill Gates's internal motivation is predominantly financial in the first place?
None of those premises appear obviously and indisputably true to me. Maybe they are, but it'd be nice to see the case actually made (and made about real humans in the real world, not about perfectly rational actors in an idealized market).
Gates could have sold out to IBM or Apple or whoever and retired as a multimillionaire without taking the chance Microsoft would end up like Wang or Altair or hundreds of other companies.
“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”
[1]https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/
The guy who sells tables and chairs is likely to make more money than the guy who sells nails and hammers.
Which is "no". Buying and building are two different things. So I guess you were right about what I intended.
Consider the way Kickstarter projects describe their "backers". On the "Why Kickstarter?" page they say backers are "helping to create something new". Yet, one could easily consider Kickstarter simply a website for pre-orders, no different from buying in any other method.
The line between a buyer and a backer/builder isn't so clear.
It is pretty clear, if you are funding someone'e kickstart project then you did help them build it but if you pay for a product which was built using the creator's(or some other investor's) money then you did not build it.
It's even more fuzzy when you consider beta customers for a software company. Heck, how about when I contribute information to Google Maps? Or give feedback and make feature requests for my accounting software?
(Whether this will actually happen is a separate topic; but there's a reason why Sam Altman doesn't just propose your tax-the-rich scheme.)
"Most"? According to [1] only around 50% of the US citizens do get a paycheck (155 of 322 mio). The others probably mostly are kids, senior people and housewives, but they make up a significant portion.
Did you know the richest 2.7% of all earners pay > 50% of all receipts collected by the government(1)?
Or that -- when asked explicitly whether the rich should pay more -- most (3/4) people, like you, say "yes", but when asked what the tax rate should be for top earners, precisely 3/4 of respondents said it should be 30% or below(2). Again, the top rate is 43% right now.
(1) http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/13/high-income-...
That's comparing a question people likely answered with a total effective income tax rate with the current nominal marginal income tax rate.
Of course, this is reinforced by the fact that people don't even generally understand marginal tax rates all that well, but that's secondary.
You could argue that when people say the rich should pay "more", they're talking about effective rates, but a lower marginal income tax rate would be a funny way to raise top earners' effective tax rates.
Yeah but the value of that share doesn't increase when GDP goes up. That's the difference.
> raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end
I believe that is what Sam is suggesting. With the caveat the amount of tax collected is again tied to GDP.
> Of course in the current political climate this will not happen
Which is why he is proposing a potentially more palatable variation.
Be more constructive and less defeatist please.
The only thing you will end up achieving is stop the next Microsoft from happening, not the next Bill Gates from happening. The next Bill Gates will happen else where.
The footnote proposes to tax capital the same as labor.
An interesting thing about Bill Gates is what a tiny sliver of GDP he managed to capture over almost 40 years. Something like $0.1 trillion out of several hundred trillion dollars.
Let's say the total GDP over the last 40 years was 300 trillion dollars. Also, let's say Bill Gates's wealth is 100 billion dollars (for ease of calculation).
100B / 300T = 0.003 = .3% of 40 years of GDP
Let's say that the average population of the US during that 40 year period was 170M[0].
170M * 40 years = 6.8B person-years of work (PYoW).
Bill gates contributed 40 PYoW to the GDP, which is 0.000000059% of the GDP.
However, he captured .3% of the GDP as current wealth (not including wealth spent during that 40 years)
That means his wealth capture is 5 million times the "average".
That 'tiny sliver' is anything but.
But that was the point of my post, to compare the captured wealth to consumption. People always talk about how the wealthy are screwing the rest of us over and everything would be great if they weren't taking so much, but it turns out that consumption is also a huge portion of the economy. Total wealth in the US is on the order of $100 trillion (this includes all housing and so on). Consumption of several trillion dollars a year adds up to that pretty quick and seizing it all and turning it into circuses isn't going to go very far.
Which isn't to say I am against programs that result in wealth transfer, it just pays to try to look at things clearly.
I addressed the comment you made, not the comment you didn't make.
I mean, I didn't painstakingly lay out my meaning, but there you go.
I'm not strongly tied to the language I used, I just find the comparison interesting.
GDP is the national income.
Going back to Adam Smith, "Wealth is the annual produce and labour of the nation". Elsewhere he argues that "the sole use of money is to circulate consumable goods". As a man not given to short sentences, I recommend paying attention when he uses them.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_II...
Defining, and measuring, and allocating wealth has been a bit of a conundrum for the past 240+ years. And a while before by some reports.
Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end of the scale. That will have a lot more effect than some fiction where you get to do a bunch of make-believe bookkeeping.
Of course in the current political climate this will not happen, in fact the reverse will happen, tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the poor and the middle class.