Re:With corporate tax off table, U.S. Democrats turn to bill...
by AnimalMuppet on Monday October 25, 2021 @04:26PM
(#28992705)
Don't they have to spend it for a VAT to take effect? The idea of this tax was that the billionaires would get taxed even on unrealized gains (maybe not the exact correct term). That is, they couldn't just sit on the money. With a VAT, they can.
But Pelosi shows that this runs into the usual problem of big-spending plans - they run out of other people to take the money from. Eventually, they have to take the money from you, no matter how much they promised the wouldn't...
Re:With corporate tax off table, U.S. Democrats turn to bill...
by legitster on Monday October 25, 2021 @06:23PM
(#28993928)
If the problem is that billionaires are taking out loans against their unrealized gains, at least with a VAT you are taxing them on everything they are buying with the loan.
Re:With corporate tax off table, U.S. Democrats turn to bill...
by AnimalMuppet on Monday October 25, 2021 @06:51PM
(#28994176)
No, I don't think that's the problem[1]. It's the unrealized gains, whether or not they take out loans. And I suspect (with no data) that by far, most unrealized gains have no loans against them.
[1] There are two versions of what "the problem" is. The first is that people can accumulate assets, completely untaxed, in the form of unrealized capital gains. The other problem is "we [Congress] don't have enough money". For either problem, VAT doesn't really address it.
Re:With corporate tax off table, U.S. Democrats turn to bill...
by candiodari on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @02:01PM
(#29003839)
This is so easy to game it's not even funny. Anyone could simply choose to donate the money instead, hell, they could take a tax cut for that.
They could donate it to their own foundations. After all, money doesn't matter directly, control of money matters.
They could split the money beforehand and "not be billionnaires".
> They could also take deductions for any annual loss in value of those assets.
> House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Sunday the plan has plenty of appeal but that it may only bring in $200 billion to $250 billion, requiring fellow Democrats to rely on other revenue raisers to fully pay for their plan.
> "The billionaires tax ... has an appeal, but it doesn't produce that much money," she told CNN.
This whole idea is thoroughly underbaked. In an economic downturn, the government could end up losing money in this scheme. And it would take less money from the wealthy than a garden variety VAT would.