Taxes on categories of things might be easier to implement, but you could do that on consumption (yachts, steaks, golf equipment) as easily as investments (cap gains, property).

Isn't that way electricians make more in SF than they do in Memphis Tennessee? Isn't that why engineers get paid more in California, but have to take a pay cut if they work remote from Ohio?

This makes me wonder how effective the progressive tax system is.

It's orders of magnitude harder to do it with consumption tax. The tax authorities essentially have to form an opinion on the "luxuriousness" of each good. That's a monumental administrative pain.

This is a feature, not a bug, if you come at it from the perspective of somebody creating or exploiting tax loopholes (I.e. you're bill gates).

Wouldn't you need to submit your every purchase to the government, banning cash and barter?

Didn't we already destroy the US boat and plane industries this way in the 80s/90s, without generating significant tax revenue? This WaPo article from 1993 seems to mirror my recollection:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1993/07/16/h...

Not saying that luxury taxes are bad, but luxuries tend to be optional and rich people can just not buy them. Or buy them abroad. I know people with 8 and 9 figure net worths and they have the same phones I do and drink (mostly) the same wine I do. Their houses are nice, but real estate taxes are already massively progressive given that they buy expensive homes in the first place.

If you really want to soak the rich you need to tax things like "luxury vacations abroad" - which has jurisdictional issues and also screws all us poor schmucks who have to save up for our travel.

I'm not seeing how this is easy.

You don’t want to overly tax the creation of new wealth. I think history has shown that to be counterproductive. It slows innovation down drastically since it disincentivizes innovation and investment and therefore the pie as a whole doesn’t grow as fast. See the growth in the US and China vs Europe.

If it was applied across the board to everything a high value item tax would be an absolutely terrible component to competitiveness however given that large capital outlays are how first world industry stays competitive and produces large real utility returns on investment. It would encourage more 'sweatshop' style production instead of a mechanized line let alone automated production lines.

We already do that in Canada. We also give payments back to low income people to offset their spending in categories that are taxed. Net-net, low income people in Canada pay very little in consumption taxes.

The tax refund part isn't really needed.

Consumption taxes force you to choose between simplicity and progressiveness. Now, That's a great feature of a tax system if you live to exploit the loopholes.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/16/crumbs-judg...

The nice thing about consumption taxes is you capture even black market money. And the wealthy will pay the overwhelming majority of the tax.

It could also be that an increase in consumption leads to a decrease in investment, but the conditions for this are more limited.

Overall, growth in consumption tends to go with growth in investment in modern free economies.

In other economies, for example, export led economies that practice forced savings, there is a general policy to tax consumption and subsidize investment. That may or may not work out. It often works out in the short term but not the long term. It works better for small economies that can export a surplus than for large economies that have a hard time exporting the surplus. It can also destabilize the rest of the world.

In the modern world, the most precious commodity is demand, not investment, and suppressing demand is generally foolish.

Savings is deferred consumption, as a basic identity it merely represents value that is not consumed. This is what would happen if someone put cash under the mattress (discounting inflation/deflation). However most people put savings in a bank account (which traditionally pays interest and was long ago transformed into a form of low-risk investment) and the savings multiply at the interest rate because the bank loans their deposits out and those deposits are paid back with interest.

I’m not sure what you mean by “investment creates savings.” What is being invested, if not value that has not been consumed (i.e. savings)?

> It could also be that an increase in consumption leads to a decrease in investment, but the conditions for this are more limited.

Consumption and investment/savings are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. There is a scarce amount of resources and each unit can be either consumed (in which case it disappears) or saved/invested.

> Overall, growth in consumption tends to go with growth in investment in modern free economies.

It seems we are using different definitions for these words. I am using standard economic definitions. What definitions are you using?

> In the modern world, the most precious commodity is demand, not investment, and suppressing demand is generally foolish.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Demand without means of exchanging for the object of the demand is a bad thing. Demand is only good when the person demanding can pay for the thing demanded, otherwise their demand is not met or they are the recipient of a charity or welfare.

No, this is false. Banks do not "loan out deposits". A deposit is an IOU from the bank. It is a liability of the bank. Like all IOUs, they are created out of "thin air". The only difference between a bank creating an IOU and you creating one is that the bank must meet strict regulatory requirements to do so. Those requirements are primarily that the asset on the other side of the deposit (your IOU) meets the lending criteria of the bank. Usually this involves some collateral and an ability to pay, together with some portion of risk capital held by the bank, which is usually a government bond equal to a percentage of the value of the loan not otherwise pledged for some other loan. Alternately capital can constitute a long term loan borrowed by the bank -- exactly what is considered capital and how much capital must be pledged by the bank is controlled by regulation. See, for example, Basel 2 regulations.

So if you wanted to create a bank, all you would need is some capital, say a million bucks, and you are good to go to start making loans. That million bucks could support 100 million in real estate loans, for example. You don't need to wait for anyone to deposit anything, and the amount people deposit does not go into the decision of whether you as the bank can make a loan. This doesn't mean the bank has no lending standards, but checking on how many deposits are in the bank simply is not done as part of the decision tree to make a loan or not, because it is irrelevant.

As long as the bank believes the the risk adjusted return on your stream of payments will exceed the obligation of their IOU, and as long as they have a sufficient amount of capital pledge to cover a percentage of the loan (usually a few percent, again depending on the riskiness of the loan. A non-collateralized business loans requires more of a capital pledge than a collateralized loan) they will go ahead and issue the IOU and create a deposit in your name at the bank for the amount of the loan. Then you can use that deposit at the same bank to pay for the investment you want. Banks create money out of thin air (but not willy-nilly). The amount of money banks create is not constrained by how many deposits they have -- rather the lending of money creates deposits.

Fun Fact: Government borrowing also creates deposits -- enough deposits to buy the bonds the government sells when it borrows. This is why governments can (operationally) always borrow (although it may not be a wise policy for them to do so).

So again, you are reversing causality. Loans create deposits, not the other way around. Deposits, in and of themselves, create no loans.

Money deposited in a bank is "dead money" if not spent by you, and does not fund any investment and thus does not create any aggregate savings. You are merely depriving someone else in the economy of income. The investment happens elsewhere, and hopefully the amount invested is enough to cover everyone's savings demands (see below).

> "I’m not sure what you mean by “investment creates savings.”"

The sum total that an economy spends on investment is equal to the sum total that ends up being saved, regardless of how much people in the economy wanted to save. You, as an individual, can of course choose to put a portion of your income in the bank instead of buying some good, but that decision deprives the seller of the good of their income. So while individuals can choose how much of their income to save, their individual decisions in aggregate also determine how much income they earn. If too many people try to save at the same time, total income is reduced and they fail to save. So whether or not the individuals in an economy succeed in reaching their savings targets depends on whether a sufficient amount of investment occurs or not. So you better hope that there is enough investment happening in the economy to meet everyone's savings goals otherwise some people will fail to meet their targets. (Laid off people tend not to achieve their savings targets.)

Thus it is investment that determines savings, not the other way around. This is what I mean by "Investment creates savings."

> "I am using standard economic definitions. What definitions are you using?"

I am using standard economic definitions. I don't think you are using standard definitions (see below).

> "Demand without means of exchanging for the object of the demand is a bad thing. Demand is only good when the person demanding can pay for the thing demanded"

Demand is defined as the willingness and the ability to pay. Just wanting something in a store window you can't afford is not demand. That is a wish.

The ability to pay is determined by your income, which falls if everyone tries to save at the same time. Therefore the spending of money, whether by directly making investments in the sense of purchasing real capital goods, or directly purchasing newly produced consumption, is a key part of determining income and thus setting demand. Merely abstaining from spending money and letting your financial savings sit idle in a bank deposit does not cause anyone to purchase an investment good, because banks don't lend deposits and deposits don't create loans (see above).

It's just a very odd belief and I can't understand why econ texts don't describe this correctly. Yes, the full answer is a bit more complex, but surely econ textbooks can spend a few pages explaining this stuff. It's not that complicated.

But then again, economists historically have not done well with understanding the financial system -- it seems to be a blind spot, as evidenced by their performance in the great financial crisis. There are alt economists like von Mises and the Austrian school that really harped on loans create deposits, but mainstream economists tend to ignore how the financial system works.

For literature, I'd take a look at this educational primer published by the Bank of England. In general you need to turn to literature published by the banking industry. Here's a link:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

Here is a quote:

"In the modern economy, most money takes the form of bank deposits. But how those bank deposits are created is often misunderstood: the principal way is through commercial banks making loans. Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.

The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks:

* Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.

* In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits.

Although commercial banks create money through lending, they cannot do so freely without limit. Banks are limited in how much they can lend if they are to remain profitable in a competitive banking system. Prudential regulation also acts as a constraint on banks’ activities in order to maintain the resilience of the financial system. And the households and companies who receive the money created by new lending may take actions that affect the stock of money — they could quickly ‘destroy’ money by using it to repay their existing debt, for instance."

See [0] for an explanation why this is false.

> As long as the bank believes the the risk adjusted return on your stream of payments will exceed the obligation of their IOU, and as long as they have a sufficient amount of capital pledge to cover a percentage of the loan (usually a few percent, again depending on the riskiness of the loan. A non-collateralized business loans requires more of a capital pledge than a collateralized loan) they will go ahead and issue the IOU and create a deposit in your name at the bank for the amount of the loan. Then you can use that deposit at the same bank to pay for the investment you want. Banks create money out of thin air (but not willy-nilly). The amount of money banks create is not constrained by how many deposits they have -- rather the lending of money creates deposits.

This is false, the amount is constrained by regulation and the the regulation requires that loans are made up to a limit of a multiple of deposits on hand.

> The sum total that an economy spends on investment is equal to the sum total that ends up being saved, regardless of how much people in the economy wanted to save. You, as an individual, can of course choose to put a portion of your income in the bank instead of buying some good, but that decision deprives the seller of the good of their income. So while individuals can choose how much of their income to save, their individual decisions in aggregate also determine how much income they earn. If too many people try to save at the same time, total income is reduced and they fail to save. So whether or not the individuals in an economy succeed in reaching their savings targets depends on whether a sufficient amount of investment occurs or not. So you better hope that there is enough investment happening in the economy to meet everyone's savings goals otherwise some people will fail to meet their targets. (Laid off people tend not to achieve their savings targets.)

None of this contradicts what I was saying.

> The ability to pay is determined by your income, which falls if everyone tries to save at the same time.

Only when measured from a baseline where there is no savings.

> Merely abstaining from spending money and letting your financial savings sit idle in a bank deposit does not cause anyone to purchase an investment good, because banks don't lend deposits and deposits don't create loans (see above).

You keep repeating this falsehood but even in a fiat system where money is created out of thin air the amount loaned is tied to the amount deposited by regulation. Other things you have said are quibbles and do not address my points. Savings is defined as deferred consumption and is necessary in order that there be surplus value available to invest. This is basic economics and is true as a matter of identity (if you consume everything there is nothing left to be invested).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

Please read the BoE explainer, then go back and ready my original post, then go back and read the BoE primer until you understand how this stuff works.

Merely refusing to understand and repeating the misconceptions that the BoE (and anyone who understands this stuff) repeatedly says are false -- is not a good look and does not further the debate. You need to reassess your understanding of how banks work, or just stop digging in this thread.

Also, knock off with the "basic economics" when declaring things that are obviously false.

Also, the mutual exclusivity of savings and consumption is basic economics and easily verifiable in an undergrad textbook.

I’m not interested in debating matters of fact when the references are clear and you persist in advocating clearly false characterizations.

Value lost how? If I spend $50k in cash on a car, I give up the $50k in cash in return for a $50k car. And that $50k payment go to the car company to pay employees and invest in future R&D.

> If I spend $50k in cash on a car, I give up the $50k in cash in return for a $50k car. And that $50k payment go to the car company to pay employees and invest in future R&D.

If you use that car to make money (e.g. commute to a job) then it was an investment and it contributes to your income (return on investment). If you drive the car on the track exclusively as recreation, you enjoy the experience (consumption) but the car experiences mechanical wear and eventually breaks down into components.

These are economic identities, if you get a return on your investment then it was a wise investment, if you do not then it was consumption.

From the perspective of the car manufacturer the factory/raw material/etc. was an investment and the $50k you spent on the car is their return. They wouldn’t get that return if they had not invested in a factory because they preferred to consume those resources.

So, transformed.

A bit like how capital is transformed into capital investments.

Yes, it is consumed when it is transformed into waste heat or other things that are not of value. It is invested when it is transformed into the means of production.

> A bit like how capital is transformed into capital investments.

if a thing of value is transformed into capital investment, then that is investment and therefore not consumption. If it is not transformed into the means of producing more things of value, then it can be saved (not consumed) or consumed (consumption).

No it isn't. Almost by definition consumption means value has been exchanged not lost.

>savings and investment cause value to multiply.

Equally fallacious. There's no way payday loans are multiplying value, for instancr. They're simply extracting it.

Consumption is value that is lost by definition, there is no “almost” about it. Value is either consumed or not. If it is not consumed, it can be saved or invested in capital. Investment in capital (when successful) multiplies value because the capital makes labor more productive, meaning more value is created.

> Equally fallacious. There's no way payday loans are multiplying value, for instancr. They're simply extracting it.

Payday loans are extractive and this does not contradict anything I have said.

Deflation and increased rates of saving (opposed to consumption) is the hobgoblin of the mainstream economy. It makes the money lie dormant, doing nothing.

Read about the multiplication effect if you forgot the idea. Money must circulate as fast as possible to help produce most value. This absolutely needs constant consumption.