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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.