But then if you want to help people build wealth that don’t have it, you make it much harder.

I really feel like people need to look into land taxes a la Henry George: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George

Taxing things like capital gains differently or implementing a generic wealth tax can actually hurt those we want to help to build wealth as well as incentivize things like expatriation of wealth. Can’t expatriate land.

Taxes are not punishment. Taxes exist because a certain amount of wealth is required to maintain a state.

I understand that the financial/business world has been trying to convince people otherwise since the mid 1970s, but they are still as wrong today as they were then.

Tax “fairness” is therefore simple. He who earns the most should pay the most.

You cannot expatriate dollars. The currency is issued by the state and the state can seize it. Chinese factory? Great, tariff on iPhones at the dock. Baseline tax = difference in currency value between country of origin and country of destination on that day. HQ in Ireland? Super, you owe the US the difference between the tax you paid there and the equivalent rate here. Don’t like it? No security sales in US markets. Sell bonds and stock somewhere else.

These aren’t hard problems.

> Taxes are not punishment. Taxes exist because a certain amount of wealth is required to maintain a state.

Who is saying taxes shouldn’t exist here? I’m advocating for a specific form of wealth tax. I clearly believe taxes are necessary. As for them not being a punishment, this is clearly a silly semantic argument focused on trying to frame this emotionally. People respond to incentives and change their behavior when faced with incentives. Taxes change incentives. If a tax disincentives a behavior, this behavior will be done less. Get your moral policing out of here.

> Tax “fairness” is therefore simple. He who earns the most should pay the most.

Why earnings? Why should we tax people’s labor? Your definition of fairness is yours, not everyone else’s.

> You cannot expatriate dollars.

Jesus Christ, yes you can. It’s like you’ve never heard of offshore banks. Where does an idea like this even come up? Go see China’s issues with people expatriating capital and their middling success at preventing it with capital controls.

How someone can speak like this and not see the value of a wealth tax in the form of a land tax blows my mind. By the way, concerned with massive disparities in wealth? That’s all from housing which is of course built on what? Land. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...

Tax the shit out of land. The marginal value to a piece of land from the actions of its owner is minimal at best. People gaining wealth from land is the definition of rent seeking.

The point I’m getting at is taxes should be for raising revenue, period. The minute you step into trying to influence behavior via tax code, as the US has done, you are doing something wholly different from raising revenue.

> Jesus Christ, yes you can. It’s like you’ve never heard of offshore banks

I don’t think you appreciate how governments already monitor wire transfers, and how they are reversible within a certain timeframe if a legal authority chooses to intercept one.

Again, this is not a complex problem since the tools and authority already exist, it’s a political will problem, in that there are nearly zero elected officials willing to cross a billionaire.

> How someone can speak like this and not see the value of a wealth tax in the form of a land tax blows my mind.

Because I live in a state in the US without income taxes and with a high reliance on land taxes. It makes no difference, corporations bribe their way into temporary (as in decades) exclusions from land taxes, and individuals are left to pay what the chemical plant literally polluting their back yards is exempt from.

There is no logarithm or formula that fixes all of this. What fixes it is 10 years without parole at hard labor for any owner or officer of a business entity who gives anything of value to any employee of the state, whether that employee be elected, appointed, or hired. The same penalty will automatically be applied to the state official who has been paid.

Land taxes are actually better in those regards than income or capital gains taxes.

You can't hide land, and if you want the state to enforce your property rights, you can't alter your behavior in a way that lets you avoid paying the tax. That makes the land tax what economist call a "zero-deadweight" tax: it doesn't decrease economic activity or consumer wellbeing at all. There's also an economic theorem [1] that an LVT results in the optimal size of government: investment in public goods increases the value of land (and hence rent that can be charged for it), but also the tax on that land, so citizens have an incentive to vote in only those public works projects that increase rents more than their cost in taxes.

Whereas if you put a tariff on iPhones at the dock, Apple will pass that tariff along to consumers, prices will go up, and fewer people that want an iPhone will be able to afford one. The "HQ in Ireland" trick revolves around avoiding dollars at all: profits from a company's EUs operations are retained as Euros and then used to pay European employees or exchanged directly for RMBs to pay for Chinese goods.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem

"Tax “fairness” is therefore simple. He who earns the most should pay the most." - I don't like the idea of tax fairness as what is fair to you may not be fair to other person. I would only concur with your second statement on the absolute value (numbers) and not on percentage basis.

Why not all? Tax land, capital gains, and wealth. Adjust brackets prudently.

Why should we disincentivize saving? It's clear why we should tax land, the value of land is not driven in almost any way by ownership of land so the returns to land are unjustly gained AND it's economically efficient to tax land as it's fixed in supply. However, taxing savings (capital gains, wealth) is unclear in value. What would, for example, be the benefit of shifting investment to consumption? In other news, I could be highly in favor of a consumption tax instead but again, that's very difficult to implement well.

A hefty estate tax is something I can get behind. It's definitely distortionary and has a huge amount of difficulty in implementation but I see almost no societal value to generational wealth.

I'm not advocating any specific plan and I find Georgism to be worth a new look and calls for a LVT to be compelling, I'm just saying that I think those who focus solely on it, some of whom advocate abolishing all taxes and only using an LVT, to be impractically utopian.

That said, I see no reason as to why we shouldn't at least experiment with other alternate tax regimen as well, and that may include tax savings at least for the highest earners. To echo others' statements, why shouldn't those at the absolute highest levels of savings endure a little redistribution? It wouldn't matter much to Bezos.

Should social security and medicare taxes apply to capital gains? Should these taxes apply beyond the current caps, which are a bit over $100k? If not, there would be very little impact since most investment income is earned by people who also have six figures of wage income. And if so, then we'd have to levy these 'taxes' (they're not quite taxes, to the extent that these are paid in exchange for later services/payments that the taxpayer receive) on all wage income.

Why do taxes besides social security and medicare have very little impact? Taxing capital gains like income would have a significant impact.

Federal income tax caps out 37% and california income tax caps out out 13%.

Because the amount you pay into social security and Medicare are quite large in terms of percent of income, if you make less than $100k. Of course, you later get paid SS or receive Medicare services, which makes it less clear that these items should be considered taxes.

Sorry, but I genuinely am missing the point you are making. I agree that SS and medicare are large taxes for those making less than 100K. Are you saying that this is a reason we should not increase capital gains and should instead increase SS and MC?

I was pointing out that you would have to increase CG rates by a lot if you wanted them to be higher than OI rates (and you count SS and Medicare in the OI tax rate).

If you do that, you would want to increase the rate on OI as well, otherwise people would play games because of the rate differential (take money out of a business as salary instead of CG, for example).

And lurking in the background you have the timing/inflation issue, which is that OI is taxed every year and CG is taxed in nominal terms upon sale. So you end up potentially paying lots of tax on nominal increases in value that are actually just inflation. The fact that CG is not inflation-adjusted is one of the rationale for having a lower CG rate.

Thanks for clarification. People already play tons of games substituting CG for OI, so so bringing them closer to parity could reduce this.

I hadn’t considered the inflation issue, which is interesting but seems solvable.

I completely agree with this in theory, we ought to just make capital gains be taxed at the same progressive tax brackets as income.

That being said, how do we prevent people from just selling small amounts of capital every year, so as to stay below bracket thresholds?

Why do we want to prevent people from doing that?

Because it defeats the purpose of a progressive capital gains tax?

If the concern is that someone is paying less in tax off $250,000 in capital gains when they realize their wealth than someone who is paid a wage of $250,000, the policy prescription (with which I agree), is to tax $250,000 capital gains like income, I.e. at the top marginal tax rate.

What happens if I liquidate $50,000 at a time over the course of 5 years, and continue to pay a net effective tax of around ~20%, which is what the long term capital gains tax is, today?

I guess that's a question of what the purpose actually is. If you only take out $50k, then you're living on $50k that year and you pay the same amount of tax as if you had worked a regular job for the same amount. If you want to live a more extravagant lifestyle, you take more out and are taxed more.

This could mean that they have $1 million of unrealized gains that year. You're not really able to tax unrealized gains most of the time because they could disappear or go negative. That would go untaxed until they sell, but it would eventually be taxed.

At the same time, they're not going to be able to enjoy their wealth only taking out a small amount every year, so I'm not entirely convinced that this behavior of living frugally to pay less tax is something we need to 'prevent'.

> You're not really able to tax unrealized gains most of the time because they could disappear or go negative

Very fair point.

> I'm not entirely convinced that this behavior of living frugally to pay less tax is something we need to 'prevent'.

I think I buy this argument. Another commenter had the suggestioin of dividing the actual realized gain by the number of years the asset was held and assess taxes as if the person made that quotient in income for each of those years. I can't think of anything wrong with this approach.

I don't think it makes sense to tax the appreciation of an asset over twenty years as if it were a single year of outsized income. if you want to treat it similarly to income, you should divide the realized gain by the number of years the asset was held and assess taxes as if the person made that quotient in income for each of those years (under the rules/brackets for each year, possibly with some adjustments for inflation). this would make it harder for average joe to estimate his tax liability when he sells, but it prevents the tax optimization you mentioned and is (imo) pretty fair.

That has not worked, capital has moved elsewhere to low tax domiciles.