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Lets test the theory
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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The central problem of a wealth tax is defining wealth. Real estate is relatively simple and well-tried, there's an appraisal process. But securities can fluctuate a lot. A billionaire CEO might turn into a millionaire after a bad earnings report, and end up paying taxes on wealth he was never able to actually have.
Then there's the whole infinite banking, living off loans secured with investments thing.
Not saying it's impossible, just difficult and complicated.
I said in the thing, loans collateralized on capital assets are treated as income under this model
It's not a wealth tax, it's a tax on trying to avoid using that wealth through the bank shit.
So if you get a loan for 100k, and pay back 100k + interest, what are you taxed on?
The 100k loan
As income? It would have to be a much much lower rate than that. And how would you make sure this doesn't harm middle and lower class borrowers? Mortgages, car financing, home improvement, debt consolidation loans, etc? Normal people get loans too. It would make homeownership completely impossible for anyone not a multimillionaire.
I literally said in the thing that primary residence mortgages and primary vehicle car loans would be exempt.
Are you actually reading anything I posted here or are you just trying to sealion for the billionaires?
I'm trying to say that it would be very difficult to just have a ton of little carve-outs for specific loan types that primarily non rich people use. You'll have things like people getting a $100k loan secured by a way overvalued car. Ok so you introduce regulations to appraisals, that would require a massive new government bureaucracy. Now everything that secures a loan requires an appraisal, so that raises the cost. You have a carve out for credit cards, so rich people invent a "credit card" that only has a 3% interest rate that you can only get approved for if you have a certain amount of assets. So now you set more regulations for credit cards and unsecured debt. And on and on.
It would be even more byzantine and difficult than existing tax laws. Income is a relatively straightforward concept. Unrealized income (aka wealth) is not.
As soon as someone unironically suggests that loans should be considered income, under any circumstances, you can safely stop listening to their economics takes, lol.
Billionaires ruined it for everyone else by actually using it as their real income.
Blame them for playing games.
Billionaires do nothing different than anyone who takes out a HELOC on a house that appreciates in value at a rate higher than the LOC.
No one "ruined" anything or "played games", you're just ignorant of what's actually being done. If your collateral happens to be something that appreciates in value faster than your loan balance does, you can do the exact same thing.
Small business loans are also all basically predicated on the exact same premise: "loan me this upfront money I need, and I can use it to make enough money to pay you back and then some". The only difference is that I'm that case, the 'thing that becomes more valuable' is being created, it's not something that exists already that's growing in value.
Yeah no except they literally did ruin it for everyone else and play games. Billionaires use extremely low interest loans collateralized on capital assets as a means to get free money that allows them to throw their wealth around without ever having to either risk number go down or having to pay their due.
We cannot allow billionaires to keep getting away with dodging what they owe because some people who frankly probably shouldn't be in the small business gang anyways might have to gasp get a job!
ok
So you're agreeing that they are deriving income from capital collateralized loans and yet are still simping for their right to do that and short change the tax office.
Cool, very normal of you.
lol
A billionaire would potentially turn into a multi hundred millionaire. Very unlikely they would lose ~99% of their wealth to "only" become a millionaire.
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars.
Great but that doesn't change my point. Securities fluctuate, if you don't sell then how do you value them?
And why shouldn't they be forced to sell?
If there's a huge tax penalty to hording company shares, maybe, just maybe, they would be instead incentivised to profit share with their employees. To focus more on retention than to do waves of layoffs to give their massive holdings a bump.
But we can't have that. We need to incentivize narcissistic mega billionaires to have all the money in the world, and still clutch to every last penny while they work their peasants to death.
Great. But how do you value them. A stock that's worth $5 one day, $10 the next, and $3 the next. How much do you tax it? How often?
You're giving high minded speeches and stuff but I'm asking how it would practically work. Because I think it's way more complicated than you think it is.
Edit: See further down, it could be done by averaging amounts over time.
High minded speeches? Seriously? There are plenty of feasible options.
If it's a public company, you can take the median price for the quarter. If they're holding over $500,000 or whatever amount as calculated by the median share price, they're taxed. You can make it tiered, and tax the shit out of anyone holding over $500m or whatever. If they want to avoid that tax, they can sell, and pay the capital gain.
Or they could tie it to % over median employee shares granted per year. So if you have lopsided profit sharing, tax the fuck out of the greedy C level.
Private is harder since it's less obvious what the tangible value is. But you could use the % shares granted yearly again. Maybe have it tiered to a companies net worth or whatever other metric that would be most appropriate.
It's fucking ridiculous that we have articles like "Bezos lost $1 billion after shares took a dive this week" kind of articles. That's a single person hording billions and billions in shares while the workers doing the actual work get pennies.
Most stocks are in mutual funds and ETFs. So if I have a million dollars, but I only own like $500 worth of any one company...?
... is that seriously what you're talking about? You can't imagine being able to estimate the worth of traditional investments? That's already implemented.
You already pay capital gains on what you earn in a year. It would be very easy to factor those investments into a wealth tax. Like... trivial.
Explain then. Would you have to calculate your equivalent net worth throughout the year and pay monthly taxes on it?
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's very difficult.
Yearly would be fine, but it could be done quarterly to. The capital gains tax on stock profits is already done quarterly.
You know what, I've thought about it some more and you have a point. Securities valuation could be averaged out over a period of time and then treated as cash reserves for taxation purposes. That's actually not as difficult as I thought it might be. Minor additional burden on investment firms.