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@mewmew
Wealth tax aren't all that bright either. Imagine inheriting some fancy mansion from your dead grandparents, but you don't actually make enough money to pay tax on it, and you don't want to sale it either, cause it has a high emotional value for you personally.
@mewmew
>money sitting in bank account
So you're disincentivising people being responsible and saving money away for bad times? You might as well be saying that people should get taxed if they get healthcare insurance.
>stock portfolio
Same thing basically. Not to mention that you can theoretically own millions in stock, but not get much (if any) dividends from them. How exactly would you calculate the tax, because you can again run into issues of taxing more than what a person actually gets from owning the stock.
And let's not even talk about the huge hit this could have on investments in general. Good luck trying to get investors to support the next Google/Amazon/Facebook idea you have.
If you want to discourage something, you tax it. Taxing sales doesn't make sense, since people buying and selling things is good. Taxing wealthy people for holding onto millions of dollars discourages them from doing so, allowing more money to flow through the economy.
@mewmew
1) Having different standards and taxing people differently based on wealth counts as discrimination and is generally a bad idea. Even progressive income tax are generally seen as not the brightest ideas, although I'm personally still open to it, depending of what kind of min-max percentages we're talking about.
2) Money in banks doesn't actually just stay there. That's a misconception. Banks give you an interest on it, because the banks use that money to make investments (usually through loans) and turn enough profit to share some with you. Money in bank accounts does flow through the economy, but just not in the way you're used to.
3) As for "if you want to discourage something, you tax it", what will mostly happen, with those that can afford it, you'll instead encourage them to look for loop-holes. The poor guy won't have enough money to hire a brilliant accountant to find the flaws in the system so he doesn't have to pay the tax. But the wealthy individual will, and it would be worth it to pay an accountant a few thousand dollars to save millions in tax.
Money in banks makes its way around as loans, trapping people in poverty and debt. It would be better off if people just had the money. And again, we're talking about people with hundreds of millions of dollars here.
And there's no "poor guy" under this system in the first place. The only people it affects are those with millions of dollars.
@mewmew
>t's not "discrimination".
Keep telling yourself that. But you can't escape the reality that you're taxing people who work harder more, and depending on how much more, you can end up desincentivising people working harder.
>trapping people in poverty and debt
I think you lack the understanding of how important loans are for starting up businesses and growing the economy.
And if you personally can't pay a loan you made, that's on you for not realizing you can't pay that thing when you made it.
>And there's no "poor guy" under this system in the first place. The only people it affects are those with millions of dollars.
Again, that's not how these things work in practice. You can't just put "but only people with over X amount of stuff get the wealth tax". For one, it's easy to loop-hole around. For second, it might get attacked in courts, yes as discrimination. I mean, you're basically asking for the same discriminatory class divide communists did. Might as well start chanting "fuck the rich".
> But you can't escape the reality that you're taxing people who work harder more, and depending on how much more, you can end up desincentivising people working harder.
This is just untrue. You will never lose money by making more. This is a very common misunderstanding of progressive taxes.
> You can't just put "but only people with over X amount of stuff get the wealth tax". For one, it's easy to loop-hole around.
No, it isn't. You can eliminate the loop-holes. "Why outlaw murder? You can just find loop-holes" loop-holes aren't some magical ephemeral thing, they're intentionally left unpatched by politicians bought by lobbyists.
> For second, it might get attacked in courts, yes as discrimination.
"discrimination" like this is not illegal.
> I mean, you're basically asking for the same discriminatory class divide communists did. Might as well start chanting "fuck the rich".
Nothing wrong with that.
@mewmew
It's not a matter of losing money, it's a matter that as you get taxed more and more, at some point you're not seeing the benefit anymore of working yourself harder and harder. It will get easier for what normally would be hard working people to settle for less.
You're breaking the 90/10 rule (90% of the wealth is made by 10% of people) , and not in the good way. Instead of getting 90% of people to be more productive and as such make more than 10% of wealth, you're gonna make the 10% of people settle for less.
>You can eliminate the loop-holes
Trust me, for every loop-hole you "fix", another 2 are made. Something my accounting teachers once said: if you study hard, someone will one day hire you to dodge paying taxes for him.
>unpatched by politicians bought by lobbyists.
Let's not get into conspiratorial territory.
>"discrimination" like this is not illegal.
Discrimination against black people wasn't illegal either at one time. What's your point? Just because it's not illegal yet, doesn't mean it's moral.
>Nothing wrong with that.
... damn commie blob cats...
Being serious again, even in my most left-leaning period I didn't understand actual hatred of the rich. Sure, I wanted to tax them more (I still do, although now I realize more that it's a lot harder to do it in practice without nuking your own economy in the process), but I never blindly hated them for their success and disconsidered them as people. This kind of "it's ok to discriminate against them cause they're rich" is so foreign to me.
> It's not a matter of losing money, it's a matter that as you get taxed more and more, at some point you're not seeing the benefit anymore of working yourself harder and harder.
People who earn hundreds of millions of dollars don't do it by "working harder".
> Let's not get into conspiratorial territory.
This is not a conspiracy theory. Why else do you think tax loopholes exist? Politicians aren't dumb.
> Discrimination against black people wasn't illegal either at one time. What's your point? Just because it's not illegal yet, doesn't mean it's moral.
I haven't seen you make a real argument as to why it's not moral? Everyone gets the same tax rates on the same amount of earned and held money.
@mewmew
>People who earn hundreds of millions of dollars don't do it by "working harder".
There's a lot of semantics to go through here as to what counts as work. And it's not something I want to do tbh.
> Why else do you think tax loopholes exist?
Tax loopholes exist for the same reasons all laws have flaws and loopholes (if you know where to look). They are made by dumb, imperfect politicians. (and yes, I am of the opinion that politicians are quite dumb in the grand scheme of things).
Taxing a person 10% of what they made is not the same as taxing the next person 20%.
I get what you're trying to say, but it's not much more than a semantics game to beautify the situation. Not even in accounting is it done like you're describing it.
@mewmew
Tax loopholes are unknown when laws are made. A lot of loopholes appear because of wording not being precise enough. And I've read tax law, it's already hard as fuck to follow because of how encumbered it becomes as they try to make it more precise.
I know progressive tax. There are even multiple types of progressive tax. But the end result still is you're tacking 10% from person A, and 20% from person B. Doesn't matter how much you fluff it, it still won't sit well with a lot of people (and no, not only what you'd consider wealthy), and the effects I was talking about, of encouraging people to settle for less, are still gonna happen.
> Tax loopholes exist for the same reasons all laws have flaws and loopholes (if you know where to look).
So you're arguing that tax loopholes are simply unknown to politicians? Your country's politicians must be amazingly pure then, because that is not the case in the USA at all.
> Taxing a person 10% of what they made is not the same as taxing the next person 20%.
That is not what progressive taxation is! You really do not understand this.