A wealth tax sounds good in theory but no one has ever figured out a way to make it with effectively in practice. What do you do with illiquid assets such as patents or equity in private companies? Would owners have to pay for independent valuations every year as part of filing taxes? There's just no way to do it at scale. A wealth tax would also tend to cause people to hide their assets in non-productive things like physical precious metals instead of investing in businesses that grow the national economy.
A sufficiently high land value tax would filter through pretty much everything as a decent wealth tax, and would require no additional work since it’s already continuously appraised. Too low land value taxes incentivize hoarding.
Also, copyright should be reduced to 10 years, maybe 20 years at the longest.
Taxing wealth will make people not seek it. Why try so hard if it can evaporate in a couple of years anyway? Of course illiquid assets are also a major problem with the idea. But the main problem is that taxing wealth for no particular reason disincentivizes production.
Very hard to determine a fair value for those acres too. Everything outside of actual land purchase prices is hypothetical, and not every worthwhile purpose for land produces the same income. We already have high property taxes in some places anyway. Of course I think some kind of tax is necessary but the higher the tax the more this "ownership" resembles a lease.
The best wealth tax is a periodic tax on unrealized capital gains. The fact that Jeff Bezos will likely never pay and capital gains tax on his share of Amazon is insane.
No it's not insane. Unrealized gains are purely hypothetical and subject to manipulation. Imagine figuring out the value of an income-producing asset, such as a chicken, then taxing the eggs and the chicken itself. That's what people like you are essentially proposing.
I think the concept is that the ultra wealthy are (ala Pikkety) gathering all the chickens, and using the eggs to buy more chickens, and the government just “magicked” trillions more chickens and most of those ended up in the wealthiest peoples hen houses.
If we tax the chickens, the wealthiest will have to sell some of the chickens to pay the tax, and then chickens will circulate down through the economy as well as up - circulation not redistribution is the idea
The government can't magick anything. They get what they have by taking it from productive people. We already make productive people and businesses pay taxes. Those taxes need to be reasonable and not abusive measures that penalize businesses for essentially existing.
>>> They get what they have by taking it from productive people.
The insight of MMT is that governments get what they have by purchasing it from productive people - and purchasing it using money they just print out of thin air. (The point is not to print too much!)
Do governments make bad decisions - yes. Do they misuse tax incentives and muck up hugely. Yes. But to be fair you should see how bad it is inside fortune 500s and boy some of those start ups are an embarrassment.
Don’t call for the “private sector is great and should take over every branch of government” shtick. That’s the weather app theory of extracting public money for profit. Focus on how to make all organisations more effective
MMT is old wine in a new bottle, a tale as old as money itself. "Purchasing" stuff from people with worthless or arbitrarily debased units of currency is like stealing. The government threat of violence does not make these digital or paper "assets" any more real.
>The point is not to print too much!
It may be possible for this to continue an indefinite amount of time, just like counterfeiting. It is almost exactly state-sponsored counterfeiting.
>But to be fair you should see how bad it is inside fortune 500s and boy some of those start ups are an embarrassment.
This waste is greatly exacerbated by artificial credit bubbles created by MMT shysters. They even got academia thinking this is a good idea, probably by paying them off in freshly printed notes.
>Don’t call for the “private sector is great and should take over every branch of government” shtick.
I would never suggest such a thing. But letting the state spend theoretically unlimited money, and thus pick winners and losers in a "free market" is just bad policy.
I urge you to rethink the MMT debate - no one suggests it’s unlimited, or debased. Just one thought - if you think the US gov can only spend money it taxes away from people, where do those people get the dollars to pay the taxes? Just start from there.
When the asset can be marked to market, asking people to pay tax on the value once a decade is reasonable, especially if you offer tax credits for any decline that happens later.
"Marked to market" does not change the situation much. Tax credits won't make up for the basic reality that you're demanding cash that is not necessarily on hand, regardless of the company's situation, with a vague promise of tax credits in the future at a time when the company is likely facing losses anyway. "Once a decade" does not make this idea work either.
Taxes on marketable securities are, by definition, trivially payable, especially considering the tax-loophole use to literally get around paying capital gains tax is simply to borrow against them.
You're wrong again. Not everything is marketable, and even if it is you have no right to steal it. Why should a business owner have to gradually give up ownership of his creation just to satisfy some arbitrary tax invented to make poor people feel better about being poor, or feed some arbitrary government apparatus? That's what any wealth tax is, especially when applied to business. Wealth in and of itself should not be taxed, only transactions and fixed assets that need state protection. And the taxes should be carefully measured so as to not penalize people for being successful.
