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A comment on California wants to tax companies for executive pay ratio. Parent comment

Re:California wants to tax companies for executive pay ratio by speedplane on Saturday January 18, 2020 @01:55AM (#22082843)
> Only if the only taxes are wealth taxes. You're in a discussion about income taxes.

wealth = income - consumption

In the U.S., we tax all three: general income tax, consumption tax (e.g., sales tax), and wealth tax (e.g., property tax). Taxing any one has an effect on the other, and a discussion about one is relevant to all others.

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Re:California wants to tax companies for executive pay ratio by dragonwriter on Saturday January 18, 2020 @01:58AM (#22082852)
> wealth = income - consumption

No, income - consumption is net increase in wealth. Those are all flows. Wealth is a stock. Wealth taxes are periodic taxes on the value of the stock, income taxes are taxes on the flow.

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Re:California wants to tax companies for executive pay ratio by speedplane on Saturday January 18, 2020 @02:19AM (#22082932)
> No, income - consumption is net increase in wealth. Those are all flows. Wealth is a stock. Wealth taxes are periodic taxes on the value of the stock, income taxes are taxes on the flow.

You're introducing periodicity, which I did not have in my simple model. Maybe a more complete model would be:

  Wealth_N = Sum {i=1 to N} ((Income_i - Consumption_i)*CapitalGrowth^(N-i))
Where N is some period like a year. Here, we can tax wealth, income, consumption, or capital growth. Regardless, it's silly to think of any one in a vacuum when considering tax policies.
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