Re:The Oppression of the Supermajority
by pdonis on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @10:46AM
(#19319725)
> Where did it go?
It bought something, presumably. (That's if it didn't end up in the pocket of some politician or one of his cronies, or a lobbyist, or...)
> You can argue about where exactly the money should go but it all ends up back in the economy.
Yes, money circulates around indefinitely, but money isn't wealth.
> If I can't find some way to make money off of that $99 million before it gets chipped away to almost nothing at 1% a year then maybe it would be better for that money to be spread around instead of concentrated somewhere it isn't being efficiently used.
If the government actually did make more efficient use of money than individual taxpayers would, I might buy this. But very little of what the government does meets that test.
Also, if you're making money by creating wealth using your $99 million starting stake (say you start a business with it, for example), and paying the wealth tax out of that, then you're doing what I described before: you're paying the tax out of income, not wealth. More generally, if people keep on creating wealth faster than the government is taxing it, then yes, there's no problem (or at least, not the problem I was trying to describe). But that's the situation I was describing when I said the tax is really an income tax, not a wealth tax. (I agree that "income tax" vs. "wealth tax" is not the best terminology to use to describe this distinction, but it's what we have.)
It bought something, presumably. (That's if it didn't end up in the pocket of some politician or one of his cronies, or a lobbyist, or...)
> You can argue about where exactly the money should go but it all ends up back in the economy.
Yes, money circulates around indefinitely, but money isn't wealth.
> If I can't find some way to make money off of that $99 million before it gets chipped away to almost nothing at 1% a year then maybe it would be better for that money to be spread around instead of concentrated somewhere it isn't being efficiently used.
If the government actually did make more efficient use of money than individual taxpayers would, I might buy this. But very little of what the government does meets that test.
Also, if you're making money by creating wealth using your $99 million starting stake (say you start a business with it, for example), and paying the wealth tax out of that, then you're doing what I described before: you're paying the tax out of income, not wealth. More generally, if people keep on creating wealth faster than the government is taxing it, then yes, there's no problem (or at least, not the problem I was trying to describe). But that's the situation I was describing when I said the tax is really an income tax, not a wealth tax. (I agree that "income tax" vs. "wealth tax" is not the best terminology to use to describe this distinction, but it's what we have.)